The poem begins with a pen, not a person. It sat and "hired ships to go to war" in a neat, pretty hand, which makes something terrible sound polite and bureaucratic. The title, "Following orders," suggests the writer of those orders was just doing a job, and the elegant handwriting makes the violence feel distant and clean.
Then the pen goes quiet, "very discrete," and the speaker adds "more than me," as if the tool has kept its secrets better than he has. The speaker describes himself as "a man that history missed," someone who stood near big events without being counted in them. The last lines are the strangest: his "victory over doubt" was "killed and taken." I read that as a sense that his certainty, or his peace of mind, was destroyed and carried off by others. The mood is dry, uneasy and quietly guilty, with a hint of shame at being both complicit and overlooked.