Six short lines are enough for Dave Bonta to take a man from his front door to the battlefield and then back into his own bed, where the war is already waiting. The poem never describes a battle. It is about what combat leaves behind, and its central idea is that war doesn't end when the soldier does. He expects to come home, but what comes home with him is the thing that won't let him rest.
The opening couplet is startlingly fast. "left my wife / and off to war" has no subject, and the second line has no verb. The speaker is reduced to motion, as if he were already half erased. Past tense ("left") and a present-tense fragment ("off to war") run together, so leaving home and arriving at war feel like a single step. His wife gets three words and then disappears from the poem for good. The shared "w" of "wife" and "war" links the two, as though one has been traded for the other.
The second couplet changes register: "I shall return with visions." "Shall" sounds formal and vow-like, the kind of promise made on a station platform. A returning soldier might be expected to bring back medals, stories, or just himself. This one returns "with visions." The word is deliberately slippery. It usually suggests prophecy or revelation, but here it seems closer to images that can't be unseen. The speaker sounds oddly certain about it, as though he can already see what the war will give him. Then comes the verb that does the most damage: the visions "nest in the night." A nest belongs to home, warmth and young life, yet here it describes something unwelcome that settles in, makes itself comfortable and perhaps multiplies. The soft, humming "n" sounds in "nest in the night" give the line a lulling quality, which makes it more unsettling.
The bird imagery continues in the final couplet, since "calling" can be a birdcall in the dark. But "calling me up" is also military language, a call-up, a summons to duty. The reading the text suggests is that every night the war conscripts him again. The line break after "from" leaves him suspended for a moment, like someone lifted out of sleep, before the landing: "a horrible dark bed." "Horrible" is the poem's one openly emotional word, plain and almost childlike, and it refuses to dress the fear up in finer language. The stresses pile up at the end ("dark bed" falls as two heavy beats), so the poem stops with a thud. It is also worth noticing that the bed is "a" bed, not "my" or "our." The place where he once lay beside his wife has become impersonal and hostile, and the poem seems to have forgotten her entirely.
Formally the poem is three unrhymed couplets, with no punctuation and no capital letters except the pronoun "I." Its lines run from three to seven syllables, and the rhythm is that of speech rather than regular verse. Without a final full stop, the calling never quite ends. The structure matches the idea, because the poem is built from gaps. A whole war passes between the first couplet and the second, and the reader has to fill it in, much as the speaker's visions fill the dark.
The title, "Shooter," does a surprising amount of work. The poem never mentions a gun or a shot, so the title names what the man does and the three couplets show what it costs him. It reduces him to a function, and the poem then shows that function following him into private life. The word might also hint at someone who captures images, which would fit "visions," though the poem doesn't confirm that.
The poem's significance lies in this restraint. It gives the reader no violence, only its echo, and it shows how war can invade the most ordinary places: a marriage, a bedroom, a night's sleep. Because the horror is never shown, the reader feels something of what the speaker's nights must be like.