The first thing to notice in Dave Bonta's «Following orders» is who gets the verb. "The pen sat hiring ships to go to war." No clerk, officer or minister appears, only a pen, sitting quietly and arranging a catastrophe. The title points to the old excuse of the person who only did what he was told, and the opening line shows how that excuse works in language: strip the human being out of the sentence and the responsibility goes with him. The pen even writes "in a pretty hand," a phrase that sets the elegance of good penmanship against the thing being written. War is commissioned the way a banquet might be, politely and legibly. The verb "hiring" adds to the chill. It belongs to commerce, so the ships are chartered like any other service.
The poem is a drift from that evasion toward admission. In the second couplet the pen "is now very discrete / more than me." The spelling is worth pausing on. "Discrete" means separate, while "discreet" means tactful and silent, and the poem seems to want both. Judging by the context, the pen has been set apart from its deed, filed away and quiet, and the speaker says he is less successful at that than the pen is. The comparison is oddly funny and quietly damning. A pen can be innocent because it is an object, and a man cannot. The word "more" echoes the "war" that ended line one, a small sound-link that ties the discretion to the violence it hides.
Then the "I" arrives, and he is deflating himself. "I am among other things a man / that history missed." The phrase "among other things" shrugs, as if the speaker were a list of attributes. "That" instead of "who" turns him into something closer to an object, a detail. "Missed" can mean that history overlooked him, so that he left no record and faces no judgment. It can also mean that history aimed at him and failed, the way a shot misses. Both readings fit a person who took part in events but slipped past their reckoning, and the line leaves unclear whether he feels relieved, overlooked, or guilty about escaping.
The final couplet turns on hunting language. "My victory over doubt / was killed and taken." Following orders requires winning against doubt, and the speaker calls that a victory, which is chilling in itself. But the victory is then treated like game, "killed and taken," bagged and carried off. The phrase can be read several ways. The certainty that allowed obedience may now be dead, or it may have been captured and used by someone else. The poem refuses to settle this, and the ambiguity is the point. Whatever the speaker's doubt once was, he no longer owns it.
Formally, the poem is spare. It has four couplets, all lowercase, with no punctuation at all, so it never gets a full stop to stand behind. There is no regular rhyme or meter, but the sounds still tie it together. "War" chimes with "more," "hand" with "man," and the long "ee" runs through "discrete," "me," "history," and "victory." The first line is the longest and most fluent, like an easy official sentence. The lines then shorten and grow plainer, ending on three flat verbs, "was killed and taken." The enjambment helps too. By breaking after "go to war," the poem lets "in a pretty hand" arrive as a cool afterthought, so the reader feels the contrast between the neat handwriting and the damage it does.
The poem is also notable for what it leaves out. It names no war, no date, no side, and no specific act, so the reader cannot dismiss it as belonging to a particular historical case. The mechanism it describes, delegating blame to tools, paperwork and "history," could apply to many situations. The poem's achievement is to fit that large moral problem into eight short lines and to implicate the speaker rather than preach. He does not claim innocence, and he does not give a full confession either. What he offers is the uncomfortable middle ground of a man who admits he is not as discreet as his pen.