Bluffing

We are huddled beneath a leafy bluff, a few miles southeast of Velykomykhailivka, close to the point where Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, and Donetsk Oblast meet.

Artillery shells explode in the distance. A group of camouflaged men sit and listen to an officer as he dictates instructions. He is explaining the platoon’s planned movements for the rest of the day.

After a few minutes of talk about convoys, rotations, and something else that wasn’t made clear to me, he picks up an AT4 from a wooden crate sitting nearby. He plants his legs shoulder-width apart and aims the missile out across the field, bending and then straightening his knees ever so slightly, emphasizing his posture to demonstrate how the weapon is used. “Balance, boys. You won’t hit anything if you aren’t balanced!” The demo reminds me of my middle school basketball coach modeling the triple-threat position. My fixer — a tall, shabby-looking Ukrainian man of approximately 50 — is nodding along as the officer speaks, translating the foreign directives into English.

The officer is interrupted. Very suddenly, the peal of engines fills the air, and a fighter jet shoots across the sky behind him. It is traveling a few hundred feet above the ground. I look uneasy, as do one or two of the other men, but most don’t. The officer turns around to catch a fleeting glimpse of the machine before it vanishes into the distance.

They make so much noise. They go so fast. If the guy in the cockpit wanted us dead, we would be dead…

I think back to the powder blue wall in Kyiv where I had been the previous week.

The powder blue wall that runs along the cobblestone road, partitioning St. Michael's Monastery from the rest of the city, is plastered from top to bottom with the portraits of dead Ukrainians.

It is hard to ignore the birth years creeping up as you move eastward along Trohsvyatitelska Street. 

All of the men at the start of the wall — those who were killed when the war first broke out in 2014 — were born before me. I was 17 back then. That was nearly a decade ago. Moving along the wall, they get younger and younger, until half of them are younger than me. The newest additions are 05s.

The wall is very long, and if you walk at a reasonable pace, it’s difficult to notice the individual pictures rather than the overall gestalt. There are thousands of them stacked row over row.

And yet, the most disturbing part of walking along Trohsvyatitelska is not passing by this colossal grid and reflecting on the magnitude of loss. No, the most disturbing part is arriving at the present section, June of 2023, looking at the slain of recent weeks, and then gazing down at the long, empty facade that extends into the distance. There is so much more space on the wall, just as there are so many more Ukrainian men and boys who could fill it. 

The officer is no longer giving instructions. The men talk amongst themselves under the bluff. It is a hot day. Many in the group have shed their kevlar.

I have my fixer ask one of the soldiers if the plane is “ours or theirs” — terminology that I feel I shouldn’t use, but that I use anyway.

“Who knows?” one of them responds.

“It doesn’t matter,” another adds. “That’s why we wear camo.”

They are wearing camo.

I am not.

They have guns.

My hands are empty.

They tell me that they are willing to become faces on the wall.

And I know that some of them will.

And I wonder about the infantryman who, earlier in the day, had shown me pictures of his daughter and lamented how infrequently he sees her. Will he end up on the wall?

And what will people say to his daughter if he does? What justification will be served to her, flatly and untiringly, by people who wouldn’t dream of sending their sons to a place like this?

Your dad died for freedom and democracy!!!! ANDPEACEANDSECURITYANDHAPPINESSANDJUSTICE!!!

YES,SWEETCHILD,HELOSTHISLIFEFORGOOD…AGAINSTTHEFORCESOFEVIL!!!!!!!

If her dad dies, I wonder how many years will pass before solace of that sort starts to wear thin.