At the Front, Part One
Haim Shweky returns
When we last left our foreign correspondent Haim Shweky, he was frustrated that his service in the foreign legion aiding Ukraine’s fight against Russia had left him so far from the action. Now, in his latest installment, we find him at the front, running reconnaissance missions in partnership with the Ukrainian military. I’ll leave it to Haim to describe what happened there. If you need to catch up on his exploits, you can find everything that he’s written for this Substack here, including his exchange with Nikita Petrov about the ethics of volunteering to fight in Ukraine.
-Glenn
TGS Regiment:
I titled the initial batch of letters I sent to you “A Few Rows Back from the Front.” In this dispatch, those few rows are placed behind us. Here is the turning-over of the album on the record player. These notes contain a marked increase in tempo, a “Giant Steps” key change—this is the peripeteia, the coup de théâtre, the Dark Lady sonnet, of this story.
My last account described life in the barracks; this one emerges from underground into the open field. Let’s hope for better music than the symphony of crashes and booms currently echoing in the occupied theater of Ukraine.
Slava Ukraini
Among the few articles I took with me for the mission described below was a blue leather Moleskine pocket notebook the size of a balled-up fist, convenient for taking reconnaissance notes and jotting quick, personal impressions. These took the form of one-word descriptions, paratactic sentences, semi-masticated phrases, even symbols meant as mnemonic devices. Looking over the pages now, some of it is illegible even to me. My notebook serves more as in-the-field artwork than reportage. Besides reassembling what I could from my rubble of notes and mortaring in the rest with memories all too clear and indelible, I reprint the record below without bothering with too much polish.
I detail the missions in which I took part and which almost took a part of me. Transcribed from the flesh to the page, war naturally loses some of its rigor.
Operation: Catwalk
It will be best to call the members of the recon team by their country of origin or heritage: Mexico, Australia, Korea, and England. (It is illegal, in many of those countries, to serve a foreign power.) Our motto, as emblazoned on our team patch, was “Brave, but Retarded” (inexpertly translated), which, while facetious, was perhaps less of a joke than intended. The work of a recon team, that of crossing our front line toward the boundary of the enemy’s, was viewed by Ukrainian conscripts with a mix of admiration and pity. To enter no man's land is to risk encirclement, to risk encirclement is to risk capture. One does not wish to be last seen trussed up in the back of a lorry headed to Russia and an inevitable war crimes trial. The job held a singular attraction to “crazy foreigners,” or volunteers in pursuit of a war experience (or restive, self-willed, traveling American-Israeli journalists).
What appeared to be an enemy observation post appeared on the drone footage. Team A—consisting of me, Korea, and our Ukrainian head scout—was to advance as near the enemy line as concealment would allow. Team B, positioned over a hundred meters behind, would provide emergency cover-fire if needed.
Russian patrols may comprise as many as ten men. If a soldier or two broke off from the group to defecate or take a private call, my team would attempt to capture them. To that end, I memorized three terms:
Стоп [Stop]
Руки верх! [Hands up!]
Иди сюда [Come here]
At the speaker’s discretion, "...сука" [bitch] could be appended to any of these greetings.
If the opportunity to bring in a hostage didn't arise, we reserved the option to effect a guerrilla-style assault on their patrol. Otherwise, we had the usual work of intel-gathering: noting the source of enemy missile fire and the accuracy of our own, minuting enemy patrol times, attempting to derive a sense of his mental disposition, his attitude, level of readiness, etc.
We named the mission “Catwalk” for the concrete canal bed that cut across the dead field between our front line and the enemy’s. What possessed until now the texture of a dream—benign, intangible, harmless—began to take on realistic contours as the hour approached for its realization.
Two thoughts troubled my conscience. First, family: Should anything befall me, an unspeakable suffering would mark the life of she who gave me my own. One is accustomed to think of personal freedom as the ability to live one's life as one chooses. A truer personal sovereignty inheres in the ability to dispose of one's life as one chooses. And yet I felt that I owed my safety to another. I felt free to do as I pleased with my life, but I did not feel quite free to give it up. It is queer to be vicariously fearful for one’s own safety through another.
The second source of anxiety had a visual form: piled-up manuscripts, open books with a mark indicating where the reader last left off, a notebook bursting with unorganized ideas, an uncapped pen—the writer’s unfinished work. I thought of the heaping scores of music composed, left unrecorded; the essays written, yet unpublished—all the fine lyrics unsung.
These two doubts together formed, in their way, the age-old obligations to work and family, obligations to God and one's fellow man, both of whom I consider myself serving here. Still, I had long wished to get out of that damned bunker and run at least one mission before my time in Ukraine expired. I would have my Persephonian spring break from the underworld.
We sat around the circular table of the rec room, cleaning our rifles. Like playing an instrument, cleaning a gun produces a symphony of brush strokes, taps, tings, snaps, scratches, clicks, and bangs. Two grenades were distributed to a man, and we each carried a vacuum-sealed parcel of food. I had a treasured piece of Belgian chocolate given me by D, the technically talented multilingual liaison between us and the monoglots at HQ. I also took a satchel of nuts and a few of those ubiquitous sardine cans as quick and convenient snacks. Each of us carried a tourniquet, and a medical kit. Helmet and bulletproof vest were optional.
That week I had signed a paper listing such vitals as blood type, emergency contact, and family address, lest anything should happen. “Lest anything should happen”: a phrase that avoids explicit mention of capture, injury, or death. Of these three, perhaps the second is the worst. The team member I was paired with remarked to me before the Kherson mission that if he were to lose his legs from a bomb, I may as well leave him in the field to die. Some feel, considering the particular character of the enemy, that any contingency, even the last, is better than the first, since the first would entail a protracted and increasingly ghastly version of the second, likely followed by an inglorious and anonymous version of the third.
Before debouching into the midland from the trench, we delivered a gift, donated by an organization associated with one of our crew, to the men at the front line: a crate of cigarettes. It was, I believe, what the Ukrainian soldiers had been hoping for. The appointment fell to me to present the parcel with an impromptu speech.
No, the man prone on the ground is not dead, though you would be forgiven for believing so, given the passivity of his position against the uproar of his surroundings. We are at the Kherson front, in a wooded glen, waiting. We keep low, as our base behind us is playing artillery ping pong with the Russians in front of us.
Reconnaissance work consists chiefly of this: lying in a patch of briar or thorn and straining your neck to watch a horizon across the moor. The "waiting game," it seems, is played out here as it was in the bunker. Listless hours elapse. The artillery continues its arc above us, a black rainbow.
Flies, you cannot swat them (note: flies here bite); sneezes, you must stifle them; gasses, you cannot expel them; words are passed between like shared test answers in a highschool classroom. You eat lying down or with your back against a tree trunk. Lunch consists of the omnipresent sardines, stale nuts, a small rock of the Belgian chocolate, what would normally amount to an insipid repast was now seasoned by the circumstances. One doesn’t often have the experience of dining al fresco in quite this manner. Each bite, each chew of each bite, the languorous moments after swallowing, is succulently slow. I chew lingeringly, grinding the nut pieces into a butter. A nibble of the rich chocolate sends me into euphoric transports. I resolve to save the last piece of it for the last day, as an incentive.
A dry canal bed runs perpendicular to the two front lines. In this we make our base. From here we advance to their line, to here we return to sleep. I break off the longest bough I can find and hand it to our Ukrainian scout, M. With this makeshift tool he prods the ground before him. Finding a mine or boobytrap, he indicates the spot with a small flag; finding none, he crosses over the cleared space. This is the slow, tedious work of making one's way across a minefield.
In the patch. We are about 70 meters from the Russian line. Ahead of us is another patch of bushes, and M decides to advance ahead of us to determine its usefulness as a vantage point, telling Korea and me that he’ll be back in 15 minutes. Half an hour passes. M has the only radio, so we can’t communicate with HQ. Korea asks what I think. I tell him we'll wait another quarter hour. If M isn’t back by then, we'll advance to his last known position. Nothing else for it. There is no roundabout angle of approach, the ground consisting mostly of open land with a few copses and thickets for cover and tufts through which to crawl from one place of concealment to the next.
A few minutes before the 15 minute mark, we spot M returning at a fast crawl, casting look behind him every so often. Korea and I get up on a knee behind a tree trunk and aim the rifle in the direction of M’s anxious glances. We beckon him on. In bated pidgin English, he explains: A roaming patrol had stopped just beyond M’s hiding place and struck up a conversation above his head. He had no choice but to hunker down and wait. We tell him how we nearly followed him there. We have a shaky laugh, and slap each other’s backs in our relief.
A volley of machine gun fire. Everyone gets flat and still. And fast.
We make it back to the canal. I’m happy to retire from that incommodious thorn bush.
An artillery shell explodes in the field a few meters from where we lay. M listens to the radio report and begins laughing.
“That us?” I ask.
“It's us,” confirms Korea, with a smirk. “Everything normal.” Ukrainian artillery is becoming quite dependable—you can always trust it will be off-target.
“Нормально,” [normalna] repeated M.
We all laugh some more, stifling the sound.
We get a message from HQ telling us not to engage the enemy unless he comes up on us. So we’re back to the waiting game. And in the welcome lull I play the If (quickly striking this word, and substituting When) I Get Out of This game. The game helps one press through the dull or trying moments; to dwell on the happy future relieves the mood of the hapless present.
When I finish this mission, I think: New York, family, hot showers. Food that isn’t canned. I think of that girl back in Poland with the red hair, all the more striking against the sheer paleness of the rest of her, who works at that wonderful artisan pizzeria in Warsaw. I’ll ask her out when I get outta this. I even come up with my line. I’ll sit down and nonchalantly wait for the menu. “I'm actually not hungry,” I'll say. I'll tell her how I'm on my way to see family in New York, how I just got back from Ukraine, and how I am in Poland for the week. “Show me a cool spot where locals have a drink, and I'll tell you all about the front.”
I think about New York and my wonted spots while growing up: McSorley's, that Napolitano restaurant on (what street was it?), the Lower East Side, the Strand, Alabaster Bookshop. I smell the aromatic steam and fumes of Chinatown, hear the jazz in that club in the West Village. That underground mezcal bar in Chinatown that Shadya once took me to. I still owe her a proper date after all these years, too long. We’ll have mezcal shots chased with cinnamon-laced orange slices and go pizza scavenging the day after. I think, naturally, of home. What a contrasting image one's bedroom of youth presents against this dried-out canal bed! Under its twinkling canopy of rockets!
Perhaps all this thinking is a mistake. I can’t sleep. I yearn to be good and done with the mission. All the more reason to do the job well and get back safely.
Listening through the sounds of the elements for the sounds of man produces a horrible tension. To strain your hearing for a twig crushed underfoot, the rustle of a bush … is that a winged insect or an approaching drone? Listening so keenly, one hesitates to swallow, so quiet is the night. The sound of swallowing in my throat engulfs the sound of the world like a crashing wave. To strain your sight for the slightest movement or a recognizable silhouette in the dark. Korea lies across from me. At every sound, he peers over the berm looking out for enemy patrol.
As in one direction, so the other; every move a meticulous calculation to muffle the sight and sounds of yourself.
The small sounds of the evening, usually unnoticed, ring out: the small cracklings of the treetops, the rustlings of the ground, the breathing of the wind, bird-chirpings, and insect-buzzings. Every such small sound puts you on guard, makes your ears perk up, and sends you intensively listening, darting, with a ferocious imagination as to the possibilities of fitting human form to sound.
Presently we hear the Russian night patrol, speaking the desultory talk which occupies the time of any two bored night guards. We hear their animated chatter, their laughs, and the sudden cessation of their sounds as their dog sniffs and lets out a soft woof. I feel like a fugitive hiding out in the swamps surrounding the county jail, a search party of police and bloodhounds sniffing him out. I suspected a shout of view halloo! and a furious barking to erupt any moment.
Eventually they go away, and then comes a few hours of stasis. Sleep, in any bedding, is a powerful authority and eventually dominates any of the forces which look to keep one awake.
The sun spills over the clouds onto the ground like slow-running honey. We crawl back to the rose bed. We watch distant silhouettes pass every half-hour over the horizon of a hillock.
I hear a drone above. I had forgotten about that buzzing bastard. Knowing the drone to be “one of yours” is a comfort from above, like a floating guardian. An enemy drone can be the prelude to a climactic scene. The drone hovering some meters above sounds like a fly buzzing not far from your ear. Every so often I hear a spurt from a machine gun or the high whistling whoosh followed by the cracking burst and bassy reverberation of artillery. There are missiles that give off a low whistle and flutter, whose impact sounds like a cracking roll on a Chinese tom-tom. Others, farther out, sound like the crash of an aluminum dish as wide as a field.
From rose bed to canal bed, I've become impatient with the cycle. I remove my helmet, place it behind me as a prop for my neck. A nearby whoosh, then a nearer sound: a heavy, dull, ominous thud in the grass just behind my head above the edge of the canal. We all jump down into the deepest center of the canal, parts of each atop the other, covering our heads as best we can. I wait for the sound...
“It's okay,” pronounces Korea, rising. “Artillery shell. Ours. Dud.”
M reports the abortive missile. “Too close! Artillery fire landing near our position.” He speaks in Ukrainian, but his tone says it all. Ukrainian firepower was coming up short of the enemy, or to say it another way, it was coming down on us.
The report comes back; M nods and confirms. He makes the universal finger twirl that means “wrap it up.”
“That's it, we're out,” says Korea.
We gather our gear posthaste, and head back to the trench at a jog.
At our nearest, we were 40 meters from the enemy. We were lucky to get back with all ten digits; some of the more brutish Russians were known to sever the fingers of captured Ukrainians, after killing them extrajudicially. Another thought I put quickly out of mind. Arriving at HQ, I have that curious sensation that marathoners feel at crossing the ribbon. We unload the truck, stow our gear. I need a smoke.
To be continued …
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Ego trip, I if there ever was one, without any understanding or knowledge of the actual causes for the Russian military action in Ukraine!
Thank you Glenn for giving these reports the exposure they deserve.