Beginning with the ritual treatment of the returning warrior in ancient and classical cultures, this essay moves to the early modern era, where increasingly, the combatant’s immersion into mass killing and wounding becomes for most individuals an aberration, an out of life experience. It then considers modern, industrialized, mass-destruction warfare, turning to the notable literary and popular culture depictions of the American soldier of the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II. It concludes with the literary and popular culture representations of the Vietnam War, and the Desert Wars of Afghanistan and Iraq, when the condition broadly diagnosed as “PTSD” – "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” – comes to be associated with the late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century returning combatant as the signature malady of our times.