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The sudden outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and the very acute transition from an affluent and peaceful environment to conditions of full-scale war called for a rapid reorganization of psychiatric services to cope with the many cases of acute war neurosis and mental breakdown in combat. Large teams of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, most of them civilians until the moment of war, began to work within a military framework. Exposed to unusual war stresses and clinical demands, these clinicians had to cope with their own responses while at the same time having to modify previously widely-accepted methods of treatment or to improvise and create new ones. Two clinical teams are described in the paper. They showed complex psychosocial reactions to acutely changing conditions, thereby bringing into existence divergent types of therapeutic milieus. One of these favored pharmacological means of support and abreaction. The other milieu accentuated the psychodynamic aspects of group interactions. Soldiers with combat breakdown who joined these milieus readily adopted the sets of expectations and treatment aims inherent in these clinical environments. The divergent courses of psychodynamic and clinical developments in two groups of soldiers attached to these two different therapeutic milieus are compared through analysis of the group processes during short-term, intensive, and dynamically oriented group therapy. Long-term outcomes are not compared. Some conclusions are drawn pertaining to the organization of psychiatric teams and group treatments in future times of war stress. Civilian systems of delivery of mental health services may derive benefit from the observations described here.