Read quickly, the first line sounds like a shrug: "the war ended some other me." But the grammar won't settle. Without punctuation, "ended" can be a verb with the war as its subject, so the war put an end to a version of the speaker. It can also mark a point in time, so the war was over and a different person was left standing. The casual "some other me" makes it stranger still. The lost self is treated like a distant acquaintance, someone half remembered. The poem sets a huge loss in the most offhand tone it can find, and that understatement is where its force comes from.
The title adds the second layer. The Purple Heart is a US military decoration given to those wounded or killed in service, and "Purple hearted" turns that medal into an adjective, a condition the speaker carries rather than an object he owns. Judging by the imagery, there may also be a hint of bruising in the colour, though the poem never says so. Either way, the title raises an uncomfortable question. If the medal honours a wound, which of the two selves is it pinned to, the one who ended or the one who survived?
The middle stanza tries to bring those selves together: "we were as one / in the assignment of heart." The "we" is open. It could be the self before and the self after, or it could be a unit of comrades. The little word "as" matters here, because the speaker says "as one," not "one," so the unity is only a likeness. "Assignment" is the most interesting word in the poem. It belongs to military life, where soldiers are assigned to posts, but it also suggests schoolwork, and in legal language it means handing a right over to someone else. Set beside "heart," it makes feeling sound like paperwork, something allotted and transferred rather than freely given. The bureaucratic word sits awkwardly against the tender one, and the awkwardness seems intended.
The final stanza turns to writing: "having seen the way to write / letters home." The phrase "having seen" has no clear subject attached, so it floats loose, much like the selves in the first line. "The way" is also telling. It implies there is one correct manner of writing home, perhaps a reassuring formula that leaves out what happened. The line break does quiet work too. "Write" hangs at the end of the line, and then "letters home" arrives, with "home" as the poem's last word. Home is the one place the speaker is no longer sure he can reach, since the person who left it may be the one who "ended." The poem suggests, though it never states, that every letter is addressed to people who knew the other man.
The sound of the poem supports this. There are no rhymes and no capitals, and the stanzas run one line, then two, then two. The lines are short, roughly seven or eight syllables at their longest, and they drop to even briefer ones like "we were as one" and "letters home." A thread of w-sounds runs through the poem: war, we, were, way, write. "War" and "were" are almost echoes of each other, so the first word of conflict seems to linger inside the supposedly peaceful "we were." Likewise, "heart" and "home" are tied by their opening breath of h, linking the middle and final stanzas. The poem never closes with a rhyme or a full stop, and it feels unfinished in a way that suits its subject.
What makes the poem notable is how much it leaves out. There is no battlefield, no wound, no enemy, only the single word "war" in the opening line. Everything else is felt through institutional language: a decoration, an assignment, a letter. The poem suggests that the damage of war may show up less in dramatic scenes than in the way a person talks about himself, with one self relegated to the past tense and another left to keep writing home. One could even read the poem as one of those letters, brief and careful and slightly evasive, sent by whoever came back.