Focusing on a further human cost of the 2001 attacks, this chapter identifies the threat to democracy posed by the returning warrior – a danger recognized by its founders – and notes how the damage to both the polity and the returnee has been both generated and exacerbated by a nostalgic mode of mourning committed to an imaginary past. It argues that by situating returning soldiers within the same nostalgic narrative of heroism and sacrifice that it employs with its returning dead, the polity effectively mourns its living returnees in a way that denies their experiences, excludes their actions, and silences their voices on key issues of democratic politics. Engaging with the recent attempts to employ tragic theater as a tool for social and political reintegration of returning veterans, it identifies the nostalgic commitment to restoration and the politics of recognition that underpins even this veteran-centric approach. By contrast, it outlines a more complex response predicated upon a tragic understanding of loss, an understanding of return as an ongoing process of reconstitution rather than a simple matter of restoration. Such tragic mourning, it argues, offers a politics of acknowledgment and democratic futurity that might be embraced by the polity as a whole.