Karleton Armstrong wanted to fly,
wanted to bring the war home
by dropping bombs from the air, the way
U.S. soldiers were dropping them
on the Vietnamese. He wanted to re-create
in a small way what was going on over there.
But the bombs he dropped on the Badger
Army Ammunition plant failed to detonate.

Plan B was to blow up the Army Math Research Center
in Sterling Hall on the UW Madison campus.
Parts of the van/bomb he used were found
atop an eight-story building three blocks away.

Then in the morning news: Robert Fassnacht
had been working late. He was killed in the explosion.
Robert Fassnacht had a face, a family.

But so did the 1.1 million Asian victims
of napalm, land mines and carpet bombing
carried out by American pilots.

U.S. soldiers never knew the names of those they killed.
Many didn’t even consider them human.
It was part of the training, the conditioning.

Did their anonymity make those lives less valuable?
Did Karleton consider Robert’s death collateral damage?

What is one life worth?
What are a million?

Ed Werstein, is a regional VP of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, and he represents the WFOP on the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission. In 2018 he received the Council for Wisconsin Writers Lorine Niedecker award for poetry. Find out more at edwerstein.com, or email him at wersted@gmail.com