Vietnam veteran protests war in Dunn’s Woods

Tim Bagwell plucked “Can a Poem be a War?” from a stack of his anti-war poems and stapled it to a tree.

“What’s going on here?” a woman from University Capital Planning and Facilities asked.

“These are my poems,” Bagwell said. “They’re anti-war, and I’m posting them. I’m a combat veteran. I feel like I have legitimacy in doing this.”

“I don’t know about legitimacy in stapling trees,” she said.

“Well, I’m trying to stop war,” he said.

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Bagwell spent Veterans Day protesting war with a staple gun and copies of his anti-war poems.

His poetry, based on his combat experience as a Marine in the Vietnam War, was posted on trees in Dunn’s Woods on Friday. He said he hoped they would stay up long enough to be destroyed by inclement weather.

“From the tips of my hair to the tips of my toenails, I relive Vietnam daily,” Bagwell said. “It’s the only thing I can really talk about. But not enough people are talking about it, so I have to.”

Bagwell, now a staff member at IU Student Ethics and Anti-Harassment Programs, enlisted in June 1968 as a 17-year-old looking for “a shortcut to being a man,” he said.

After graduating from high school the following year, he began his 13-month tour in Vietnam.

“I bought into the symbolism. I bought into the myth, and I bought into the look of the uniform,” he said. “And within a relatively short time, I knew that I had made a mistake.”

Forty years later, he said he has suffered from post-traumatic stress since about a year after his return.

“Nobody in serious combat comes out like they went in,” he said. “It is a life-changing experience, and the tragedy is we send people into it without wanting to know the pain that we’re causing them.”

A member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War since 1970, Bagwell was honorably discharged as a conscientious objector in 1971.

Last Veterans Day, he posted his poems on the courthouse lawn without permission during the re-dedication of the Vietnam War Memorial in downtown Bloomington.

Police confronted him but ultimately didn’t arrest him. They didn’t ask him to take down the poems, either.

“I would’ve gone to jail first,” he said.

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Bagwell was only about halfway through posting the first of three stacks of poems.
“I am all for peace but not for defacing the trees,” a passerby shouted his way. “That actually harms the trees.”

“The trees being stapled is bothering a lot of us,” said another.

Bagwell kept stapling.

“Many of the faculty and staff here are very liberal,” Bagwell said. “One of the problems with being politically liberal is you care very much about your immediate surroundings, at least verbally, but to take a controversial position that’s out of your environment, people are much more reticent about.”

Part of Bagwell’s display was to express his discontent about the College of Arts and Sciences’s 2011 Themester, “Making War, Making Peace.”

He said the College wasn’t serious about discussing the element of peace.

His critiques of the Themester were posted alongside his poetry.

“There’s no Gandhi,” he said. “There’s no Martin Luther King. There’s no Vietnam War, no civil disobedience, and all of those are instrumental to understanding how to make peace.”

Bagwell began posting his poems at 12:15 p.m., and by about 1 p.m., the poems had been stripped down by passers-by.

IU Police Department officers arrived at Dunn’s Woods to detain him as they awaited further instructions about whether or not to arrest him for damaging University property.

Fifteen minutes after they arrived, IUPD officers received word not to arrest Bagwell, and he was released.

Bagwell said he will continue his anti-war work.

“This is what I live for,” he said. “It really is.”