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What If I Had Assassinated Him Like Obama Did bin Laden? (poem)

By Tim Bagwell

I didn't—40 years ago.
I had the opportunity no one else had.
I might today were the situation bodily déjà vu'd.
He was the highest ranking officer in the US military.

His jacket thick with Navy stars and stripes,
gold and braid, tuniced over a roly-poly paunch
stuffed with Southern fried chicken and right-wing politics
—a veritable Prussian fashionista who hadn't smelled cordite

or shit over a barrel of diesel fuel since World War II.
I was his orderly, meeting his limousine every morning
in the Pentagon's dark drive-through basement,
a devil's lair of well-meaning murderers.

(The five-sided building lies across the Potomac
from Lincoln's back—it's location an unconscious irony:
a sniper's shot north is Arlington National Cemetery,
another holy shrine to America's torrid love affair with war.)
I would escort him—this Admiral Golden Braid
—into the building and out,
carrying his black attaché case filled—perhaps—
with secret plans for killing more.
I did not own or carry a weapon—not then, not now

—no gun, no knife, no club. No mortar. No tank.
No vest wired to high explosives and rusty bolts of industry.
I have no idea if he was armed, beyond the two given at birth.
His chauffeur was:

Handguns holstered at each ankle,
one in the hollow of his back,
a fourth on his hip,
a fifth strapped chest high.

After my six month's "admiral time"—
but before the Defense Intelligence Agency investigated me
and kicked me out of the Pentagon as a security threat—
some 6,000 more Americans awaited, still to die,
in the American war in Vietnam,
and another half-a-million Vietnamese,
all caught on the American roulette of
death-by-war-as-foreign-policy.

What if one day in 1970, on a quiet Pentagon elevator
—just him and me — (we never spoke)—
I had placed behind his ear a cheap, short muzzled .38
and pulled the trigger? Wishing him an eternal good-night

—softly, tenderly, gently—blessing him with a death
totally opposite death in combat.
Would I have saved all those lives?
It never, then, occurred to me to kill him,

even though my combat was fresh
and raw and wildly, raggedly breathing fire.
Oh, Oh, Oh! What a chance I had.
Alas, it never occurred to my Sunday-school-teaching self

to ask whether my executing him would have saved those lives.
Now they are but wasted offering and haunting ancestors:
purified blood, sacred meat, officiously odious offal, unfortunate road-kill
on the blacktop highway of a diseased American culture.

—Tim Bagwell

Tim Bagwell served in the Marine Corps from July 1968 to May 1971. He was in combat with 3rd Marine Division out of Camp Vandergrift. His first operation was Dewey Canyon in the A Shau Valley and his last was Dewey Canyon III in Washington, D.C., where he returned his combat medals to the US government while he was still on active duty. He was discharged as a conscientious objector in May 1970. He has been writing anti-war poetry since 2008—mostly to ease PTSD. He lives, with his third wife, in Bloomington, Indiana.