"If you are able, save them a place inside you,
And save one backward glance when you are leaving,
for the places they can no longer go.
 
Be not ashamed to say you loved them,
though you may, or may not have always.
Take what they have left, and what they have
taught you with their dying, and keep it as your own.
 
And in that time that when men decide, and feel safe,
to call the war insane, take one moment,
to embrace these gentle heroes you left behind."
 
By Major Michael Davis O’Donnell
Written on January 1, 1970 at Dak To, Vietnam.
He died in a helicopter crash in Cambodia in the following March.