A whole war is folded into six short lines here, and the speaker never gives us one detail of it. It is "the war," with no name, place or battle, as if the definite article were enough. What the poem gives us is the aftermath: a man whose sense of his own moral worth has been destroyed and who cannot find his way back to ordinary life. Its central idea is that war's worst injury may be invisible. What the speaker mourns is not a limb or a comrade but his honor.
That is the surprise of the opening line, "In the war, my honor died." Honor is usually a word for medals and speeches. Here it is a casualty, and the only death the poem mentions. The line is built from plain, mostly one-syllable words, with no adjectives and no explanation. The comma after "war" works like a breath before a confession. Nobody is named as the killer, and the passive feel of "died" leaves open whether honor was taken from him or whether he let it go.
The next question is the hardest to pin down: "Why give to those people / and deny to others?" The verb "give" has no object. Give what? Mercy, protection, trust, dignity? Judging by the wording, the speaker is troubled by a choice about who deserved what, and by his part in it. "Those people" has a cold, distancing ring, the language of someone who learned to sort human beings into groups. The line break falls right after "people," so the white space itself separates one group from "others." Because the poem never fills in the blanks, the speaker's mind feels like a place where he circles a memory he cannot say aloud.
Then comes the one hopeful note, and it is broken: "If I could come home to my wife…" The conditional never finishes. We get a wish but no result, and the ellipsis admits that he cannot imagine what would follow. The phrase "come home" is also ambiguous. He may be writing from the war, longing for return, or he may be physically back and still not arrived. It is the longest line in the poem, as though the wish stretches out before trailing off. It also quietly completes a pattern of sound. Honor, home and hurt all begin with the same breathy *h*, and together they trace his path from what he lost, to what he wants, to what he is left with.
The stanza break brings a shift in tense and in energy. "I sat with my hurt" is what we do beside a sick friend or a mourner, and here the speaker becomes his own company, treating the hurt as someone at the table. "Hurt" is a small, almost childlike word, chosen over "pain" or "trauma," and the smallness makes the damage feel more private and harder to treat. Then the last line: "all out of Sundays." The phrase echoes idioms like "out of luck" or "out of patience." Sunday suggests rest, church and family, and perhaps the weekly chance to begin again. I read this as a man who has used up his chances at forgiveness or ordinary peace, though the poem leaves it open. The plural is telling, since there are many Sundays and he has run through all of them.
The form supports this restraint. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, just short lines of plain speech. The last two lines are five syllables each, so the poem shrinks as it closes. A long *i* sound runs through it, in *my*, *died*, *why*, *I*, *wife*, *my* and *I* again, a steady first-person drone that keeps the speaker locked inside himself.
What makes the poem significant is how thoroughly it refuses the vocabulary of heroism. The title, "Veteran," is a public label, but the poem never uses it of the speaker. It gives us instead the man behind the label: unforgiven by himself, unfinished in his sentences, short of Sundays. Its power lies in what it declines to say, and in how much the reader feels obliged to supply.