At the Front, Part Two
The conclusion of Haim Shweky's Ukraine sojourn
Below I’m proud to present the final installment of Haim Shweky’s experiences at the front in Ukraine. Once again, Haim recounts the sights, sounds, and feelings that accompany war in vivid, often terrifying detail. I have a feeling we’ll be hearing from him again in the not-too-distant future. If you want more from Haim, you can subscribe to his Substack here. 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
This guest post is free and available to the public. To get access to the full episode, as well as an ad-free podcast feed, Q&As, comments, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.
Operation: The Pool
Again the waiting. This time in a bunker. This time in a trench. This time in a minefield. This time in a forest.
The moments before a battle are a vacuum in which each man's mind dwells on the possibilities of an action not yet taken place, a thinking subject to all the fancies of a feverish mind and the manipulations of high emotion. But when the action begins in earnest, and one is occupied with the dynamism of the moment, with navigating its ever-changing paths, the phantasmagoria of rapid scenes flitting before one, all that apprehension comes to nothing. One is too preoccupied with living out an action to bother contemplating it. Need arises, one meets it. Simple. An obstacle, one hurdles it; a danger, one avoids it; an opportunity, one takes it. The battle is a hundred-mile-per-hour fastball. You can’t control its speed or trajectory. You can only swing and hope.
It is quite difficult to do one's intellectual duty and examine one's feelings and thoughts during such a time. One desires only to quell the apprehension, not to sharpen it by focusing on its unsightly aspects. People speak in cliched descriptions of a “knot” of fear in the “pit of the stomach.” But a similar knot lodges itself in the chest as well. The parched throat constricts, the limbs tingle and grow numb, the breath shallows, sharpens, and stutters.
“The thing about an artillery bomb is, if it’s successful, you won’t know it.” At least there’s that! But this gallows humor did not soothe me. Out in the field, with the artillery falling on both of us, this line, which I had heard many times, did not once come to mind.
Well, there’s nothing for it, I tell myself. That was my line, my laic mantra, for meeting an intractable situation, an irreversible difficulty, an unavoidable condition. There is no way out but through.
Well before my arrival, there had been talk of a “big operation.” We only knew it involved a push to the south, into Kherson. It had been rumored and canceled many times, once only a day before it was to commence. Now it’s spoken of with more assurance. The operation will occur this week. My flight departing from Warsaw is a week hence, and the team leader asks if I intended to join the mission. I resolve to participate in the first phase of the operation and then to find my way back independently. He suggests that I ride back with the first medevac, who would ferry the wounded away from the front line. When I ask what to do if there are no injuries in the first hours of the operation, he smirks and says something about the workings of a miracle.
At 4.00 am, the operation is to open with a fusillade from our artillery, beginning five hours of “death from above,” as our translator put it. The enemy's base is hidden within a concrete hollow that we call “the pool.” Following the artillery barrage, our team is to advance to this spot, and from there we will storm what remains of their headquarters.
We awake the morning of the mission to silence. Some hitch has occurred with logistics (not unusual), but the mission is nevertheless a go. We wrap yellow tape around our shirtsleeves to distinguish friend from foe in the field. We pack ourselves into three separate trucks and drive along hilly, unpaved roads to the Kherson front.
I reproduce a dispatch sent into The Glenn Show the hour after I left the site of battle. The lines still vibrate with the intensity of the former moments:
That I am writing this letter at all is a very simple fact that I cherish. You’ll have read in the news of a southeastward push by Ukraine towards Kherson. In the first phase of that operation I took modest (truly modest) part—brief though breathy.
A more extensive account of this episode I defer to a hotel room in Warsaw, sometime next week, with the quiet and space and idle time (and stationary) necessary for written reflection.
Briefly, perfunctorily: The assault eventually rebuffed the Russian defenses but that initial thrust was sketchy. As soon as we (recon team) reached our position the enemy seemed to know of it. Artillery and machine gun fire kept us head-down knees-up behind a berm. They seemed to have anticipated us and made the appropriate greeting. Friend was wounded by a shell and I medevaced him out. This was early in the fight. Some time elapsed before infantry and tanks arrived to relieve the team. They did so and our forces eventually nudged ahead. This concerns our assigned patch of dirt, near the small town of Pravdino. How the grand offensive turns out is for the news to report in time.
This is only a hurried live broadcast; promptness justifies it, present events dictate it. From here (separate email to follow) I resume the narrative where it left off.
The Boom
The thing about an artillery bomb is, if it’s successful, you won’t know it. You hear the incoming whistle of death on the approach, and you curse. Everyone curses, and everyone has their particular personalized expletive: the omnipresent “shit,” the upgraded “fuck,” the denominational “Jesus Christ” (even I, heretical Jew, have caught myself uttering the name).
The acoustics of falling metal. One learns to recognize the type and nearness of artillery by sound. Some have the wah-wah envelope swish of a boomerang. Some wail down with a strange and hollow keening, as if in premature mourning, whereas with others the whistle is brighter, cheerier, like a construction worker's catcall. Gunshots whizzing near your head sound just like they do in the movies, a whistle and zip.
The howl and thunder of artillery. I grue at the thought of it. Such scenes as these make themes for opera. But one does not rehearse life before stepping onto its stage.
If you hear the explosion, you're good. Meaning as good and whole as you were a hideous instant before. You hear the telltale, haunting whistle, you mutter your heaven-directed plea, you lower your head into the grass. In this tense crouch, you wait, all contraction, your eyes glaring down at an unremarkable patch of ground. You wait for a sound, an orgasmic boom, nearer or farther. Hopefully not too near. Too near and you will feel rather than hear it. Nearer still and you will neither feel nor hear it at all. You wait in a pitch of dreadful anticipation for the lovely, ameliorating explosion, the welcome reverberatory crash of the boom. The satisfaction is only temporary, and Thanatos's whistle is again soon heard.
Britain and I are one pair, Mexico and Korea another. We are lying behind a hillock, foreheads to the grass. Bullets from a heavy machine gun play a trill at the top of the small mound a foot above. Artillery falls on every side. You cannot guess where it will land. There is nothing to do but stay put. There is no rolling out of the way of falling metal. One is never so bare, so totally vulnerable, so removed from his own meager devices and controls of the world as here.
I heard screaming from the right bank of the hillside, followed by: “Korea's hit!”
“I can’t move! I can’t fucking move!”
I saw the others fall back some meters to treat his wound, and I lost sight of them within a copse. Suddenly, a bomb landed directly where they had taken cover. I saw a great retch of earth, then a gray ominous plume bellow up from those trees. But some moments later, I saw them scurrying a safe distance away.
I handed Britain the radio and proceeded to crawl until I caught up with them.
“Somebody carry K.”
“I got it," I said, approaching.
“You sure?”
“I’ll take him.”
“Take his rifle for him,” Mexico said to the others. I removed my weighty, constricting vest. Korea never wore a vest, but even without his gear, he was heavy. I laid down perpendicular to him and attempted to roll him over onto my back as we learned in the army. He had little energy to center himself, and I couldn’t lift him.
“We don’t have time for this shit, come on!” said Mexico.
I got up and tried the second way to lift a wounded man. From a standing position, I laid one of my feet over the foot attached to Korea’s good leg, grabbed an arm, and hauled him up and sidelong over my back.
We began running toward our trenches. It is not an easy thing to carry a limp human being at a run. Trudging through that field, I recalled having done this in training, and as the bombs fell to either side of us, I thought to myself, As I trudged through that menacing field I recall thinking, not without an appreciation of its irony, “So—this is what's it's like to be doing this for real.”
An unbroken noisy background of machine gun fire and the syncopation of exploding shells. Hearing the prelude to a bomb’s death song, we stop in place, drop, and huddle until the gonging crash rings out. We rise again and continue our scamper.
I pride myself on my fitness, but sprinting with a heavy man’s weight unevenly distributed across my shoulders while trying to stop him from sliding down my back quickly taxed my cardiovascular limits. Every minute or two, when either he or I wearied, I put him down and we continued at a crawl.
“Just keep moving. Don't think. The more you move, the sooner you can lie down. Come on, you Asian bastard! After this you'll get all the fucking kimchi you want.”
Having recovered my lungs, I took him over the shoulders again at a run (really about the pace of a brisk walk). In this manner—shoulder and drop, carry and crawl—running with him laid horizontal over my back or dragging him behind, all while shouting at him deprecating encouragements, we gained the trenchline. When we made it across, I was dragging him behind me, his two arms draped over my neck from behind like a human cape.1
This was no heroic act. I don't say that out of “false modesty.” I feel no particular sense of self-satisfaction or pride when I think back on it. While I carried Korea, he conveyed me. His injury prevented my own. I was, of course, relieved to be back in the relative safety of the trench. But while the battle went on, my only task was giving a comrade a lift to a place he needed to be and I desired to go.
 | A guest post by
|
Thank you, Glenn, for publishing this. Very tough to read (from the comfort of my living room), but infinitely tougher for Haim and all the brave fighters.
Haim is a talented and vivid writer and storyteller.