a Kind of Refugee / 06.06.2023

One rainy evening in Kyiv, Irtsia and I are on a stroll. “What do you do during the air raid alarms?” has become a common question. You can’t interrupt your sleep to spend hours in the bomb shelter every night. How would you be able to work the next day? Or have the energy to go out for coffee or dinner with your friends? The absurdity of normal civilian pastimes intercut with real explosions, senseless death, damaged buildings makes us laugh. It’s not a simple emotion. We laugh and laugh, asserting our vitality, and keep walking along the wet pavement.

The body likes routine and after a few consecutive days of air raids, a quiet night feels suspicious. Seeing the air raid alert on my phone as I crawl into bed brings a certain sense of relief. After the first couple rounds of familiar sounds I can drift off and sleep through the rest.

We are at war. And Kyiv’s urban life stubbornly persists. There is an ambivalence to that persistence. How do you acknowledge the war enough to participate, to keep fighting, while not succumbing to its damning destructive force?

***

I spent a week translating for an American instructor training the Ukrainian military. Before we’ve even reached the base I learn how unimpressed he is with the Ukrainian Armed Forces. It hits me like a bucket of cold water: sitting in civilian Kyiv for the past half year I’d begun to romanticize them without even realizing it.

“I love you guys,” he says later to the whole class, “but some of your commanders are fucking stupid.” After 10 months training some 150 Ukrainian military units (around 10,000 soldiers) this retired Marine & combat medic’s patience is wearing thin. “The only reason you’re winning this war is luck and because your enemy is really fucking stupid.”

How many instances of friendly fire did I see in tactical exercises over 6 days? Of course they don’t use real bullets to train. Some guys never fire an automatic rifle until they’re in combat at the front.

While Magdy’s 2-3 day course with fresh recruits covers the basics of Tactical Combat Casualty Care, it is really about getting the soldiers to start thinking on their feet with awareness to what’s going on around them, what resources they have at hand, and what they can do with them. Tactical medicine is a way of thinking. You’re not providing medical treatment but doing everything you can to stabilize the patient to prolong their life until they can be evacuated to a hospital. Everything depends on TIME and SITUATION. Все залежить від ЧАСУ та СИТУАЦІЇ.

We start with the basics: When the enemy opens fire you drop completely to the ground, get out of the way and seek cover.

“THEY’RE SHOOTING AT YOU! And you’re standing right in their line of fire on your fucking knee?!”

I spent a week listening to these dear, sweet Ukrainian soldiers making excuses for their mistakes and spending lots of energy explaining why something is shitty or stupid instead of starting to do something to fix it. It’s mind-boggling, heart-wrenching and undeniable that Ukrainians, along with many of those helping them, are fighting a war without realizing what that demands of you.

It takes a couple days to differentiate individuals from the sea of faces with bodies dressed in some kind of camo, bulletproof vests, automatic rifles dangling awkwardly from their shoulders. Their questions, the way they pay attention or move during tactical exercises make them appear and take shape as distinct people.

I’m learning with them. After a week I can name parts of an AK-74 in English and Ukrainian but I can hardly handle one with competence, let alone ease. Many of the new soldiers in the group know about as much about tactics and tactical medicine as I do. Only I will go home, google the terms or concepts I didn’t quite get to be better prepared for next time, while these guys may be in Bakhmut in a few weeks.

***

There are so many ways to build a psychic fortress to protect yourself from the war or feeling bad or seeing what is really happening. Justification, wishing and looking for a quick fix. Where’s the expert? Somebody else could do it better.

But as long as you are alive, this is it. For as soon as you are not, all your excuses, dreams, internal emotional turmoil DO NOT MATTER. What you did / said counts and that’s it. That made the world.

How the hell did this US military medic from California end up in Ukraine last spring? “When I saw the war crimes, atrocities being committed against the Ukrainian people by Russia or the Russian soldiers I had to come.” A couple days later he was training soldiers in Ukraine.

***

At the blues dance on Saturday a black voice from an old recording croons “Do I move you?” as the couples delicately shift their feet on the floor, moving in soft embraces. At “move” I hear the instructor’s voice: “When I move — you move.” It’s an exercise where one soldier is patrolling with his automatic rifle and the instructor stands at a distance in the role of the enemy, ready to shoot. “When I move — you move.” It usually takes a few tries before the soldier even grasps what’s going on, that it is his job—and that his life depends on it—to shoot the enemy before he gets shot.

It’s to demonstrate that all these little things—how he’s got the rifle strap wrapped around his body, the safety on, the gun positioned at an angle toward the ground—all these things take time to overcome when you need to react instantly to the threat. Even as the soldiers get quicker with repetition, they always end up “dead.”

Guys who’ve spent decades training with assault teams to perform dangerous missions move beautifully. Their attention—broadly stretching in all directions while attuned to minute details—is palpable. I too have spent decades training my attention and awareness of my body in space and time in relation to the things around it. Only for very different purposes.

Still there is something akin to the danger and reality of patrolling in a war zone and being onstage. That is, if you take the stage seriously. Most people don’t. Why is it so hard to grasp the urgency of real life without shells exploding overhead?

Military people and performers know that your life (the authenticity of your art) depends on what you do and pay attention to. Your specific actions will define the unpredictable situation you are in. You don’t sit there wishing everything were different. You look and assess, you step in, send out different kinds of signs and see what the response is. And YOU decide whether or not to engage and how and when to shift your approach. It’s very alive.

That I should be learning so much about life and caring about your fellows from people whose job it is to kill people (“it’s not normal for human beings to kill other human beings, but it’s necessary”) is strange, but not surprising. When you’re so close to death, rolling around in it, producing it, how can you not appreciate and value every moment that you are alive?

***

“I can’t do this for four months,” I tell Magdy, who is preparing for his upcoming teaching engagements. One American volunteer in Ukraine looks at another American volunteer in Ukraine with understanding and says, “Thank you for donating your time to the cause.”

It’s not even about money, really. I have other things on my plate—writing, plans to launch a new journal, Feldenkrais lessons for soldiers and civilians.

And yet. What about the soldiers? That guy, this other one, even the one who signed up on February 24 voluntarily—can they tell the draft officer or their commander, “Sorry, I’ve got other things on my plate”?! Can they spend four months on the front without a break? Six? More? Who the fuck cares what they can or cannot do? Certainly not the enemy.

When you share a country, somebody is doing the fighting for you, in your name. Yes there is something to be said for each person standing up and fighting for what they believe in. It makes a society clearer, firmer, more resilient. But somebody has to kill the bad guy. If it’s not you, then it will be somebody else. You need not prostrate yourself before them or put them on a pedestal, but you must respect and honor the different things that people do to make your country function. Your country is not a natural environment that exists without your participation. It is neither your master nor your caregiver. It is the way that you and your fellow citizens have chosen to live together.

***

Two weeks back, on a bright warm Saturday afternoon Kyiv is teeming with people. The cafe courtyard is crowded. We’ve come for a beer and stumbled upon a poetry reading with live music. A woman by the door is collecting donations for a vehicle for the poet’s brother’s unit of the UAF. Cash and cards accepted.

We take a table indoors, further back from the stage. As we sip our beers, a young woman onstage begins singing the Ukrainian national anthem. The sound and significance of the song ripples back toward us. People rise from their seats, more with subtle respect than demonstrative pride. I begin to sing out loud, quietly, with certainty, and see people at other tables doing the same.

This is different from those displays of patriotism that punctuated my youth in the North American Ukrainian diaspora — the stiff suits and formal embroidered blouses of our elders, their musty onion-stained breath and stuffy discipline.

There is neither nostalgia nor hope for the future in this spontaneous singing of the Ukrainian national anthem together in a hipster cafe in the center of Kyiv in May 2023. These are people who, under attack from a ruthless neighbor, through great loss and hardship, have realized who they are. This is an affirmation: we are here and we are Ukrainian and we are neither too afraid nor too cool to express it.

PS Magdy Zakhary’s courses training Ukrainian soldiers to think tactically under pressure will benefit his students beyond the battlefield. In addition to teaching, his US-based organization Helping Hands Healing Heroes has collaborated with many individuals and organizations to provide several tons of medical supplies to Ukraine. You can help them continue their mission: https://4h-americas.org/gallery/ukraine/