​Editor's Note: I asked Dick if he had a poem for Veterans Day.  This is what he said:  "Yes, actually, I have what I think may become one of my most important poems, trying to catch that greatly divisive time in our lives and written in the persona of a young man during the Vietnam War.  Feel free to reprint it in V-V should you think it fitting.  I like to think it’s fair to both “sides” in those days that so changed America."

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Veterans Day

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You were the soldier shouting at the rain
Who walked the college campus with a puzzled look,
Brought back, without parade, from Vietnam.

Once I hated you, your uniform, your name,
The way you hunched with buddies in an open truck.
You were the soldier shouting at the rain.

I was the marcher with a cause to claim,
Jailed so many times I thought I’d crack.
We wanted no more deaths in Vietnam.

But the helicopter war went on. . . and on— 
A country ravaged when green locusts struck;
You could hear them coming through the rain.

A child could kill you, or a crippled man.
You trusted nothing; you got high for luck
And stared through burning eyes at Vietnam.

I burned my draftcard with a lighter flame.
I marched on Washington.  You marched the jungle muck.
Necessity?  Or madness.  Who can stop the rain?
We were young men in the days of Vietnam.

                                       
-from Flight and Pursuit, Louisiana State University Press