Re: News from Forum Participants
Posted: Sun Sep 04, 2022 9:11 pm
Returned. Alive, Working towards being "well," however that may be defined....
I completed orientation in Lviv at the end of March. Upon a review of my background and my Russian language abilities, I was sent to the east of the country to practice and to train and support Ukrainian physicians and army medics in emergency medicine. I was frequently tasked to help set up, staff, organize, and facilitate logistics for emergency medical units for soldiers and civilians.
I had been around explosions from grenades, explosive shells, and an occasional tank round on missions during the Second Sudanese Civil War, but the use of missiles, air strikes and the heavy artillery of this war provided new experiences for me in many locations. The shockwaves from these large explosions that pass through the body I found particularly unsettling. Living with existential dangers creates mutually supportive, enduring bonds and those developed while I was there. I have managed to stay connected with my Ukrainian colleagues. An emergency service supervisor whom I became good friends with was crushed to death under rubble last week after a Putin missile targeted rescue workers extracting the dead and injured from a recently destroyed apartment building.
Putin's army knows how to shell, bomb, and turn communities into rubble, decimate; pillage, deport, rape, torture and incarcerate populations, but that is about it. His soldiers are not really soldiers but a poorly trained, poorly equipped, incompetently led assortment of undisciplined mercenaries, some professional but mostly amateurs who are recruited from Russia's vast, impoverished hinterlands and penal colonies. Ukraine is full of Russian atrocities, some of which will be discovered in the following months, but many will be uncovered only many years from now if at all.
To be fair, the two Russian POWs I was briefly acquainted with were simply scared, clueless young men who only wanted to return home to their friends and families and didn't really know why they were there in the first place other than to make some money to send back home. Both were left behind by withdrawing Russians and picked up and treated by Ukrainian medics. Russians typically leave their dead and seriously wounded behind.
One was blinded and disfigured when he made the mistake of peeking over his fortifications to watch the destruction of Ukrainian lines by an expected Russian artillery barrage that fell short in front of Russian positions and blew up in his face. He lost both eyes, his nose was gone, his face was embedded with pebbles, dirt, and shrapnel. He sustained a brain injury and did not regain consciousness for one hour. Other than the loss of maxillary front teeth and a section of upper lip, his maxillary and mandibular structures were mostly spared, permitting him, often painfully, to communicate and to eat. His zygomas, orbital bones, frontal bone and other facial structures received multiple fractures. I am not a plastic surgeon, but I did what I could to pin, screw, and wire his facial structures together and to debride and repair his wounds. He will require extensive plastic surgery follow up to undergo a series of grafts, revisions, implants, as well as a cranioplasty for a section of frontal bone to make him recognizable.
Unfortunately, these are unlikely with Russia's marginal health infrastructure. A fabricated mask to cover his disfigurements and a cane to find his way will have to do. The Russian military and government leadership have a long history of indifference to their disabled war veterans particularly if they are repatriated POWs who are typically treated with suspicion. Of course, he reportedly can be compensated with a sum of rubles for his service and sacrifice. Since he has significant impairments from his TBI, he will need someone to assist him. That person, if he/she is willing and able to assist, together they could fill out numerous, redundant government forms, submit themselves to the will of countless bureaucrats, discreetly dispense an occasional financial incentive, endure endless investigations, interrogations and delays, and in the end, they might just receive some rubles to help his family back in Khakassia. Maybe.
The wounded and disabled are not useful for war propaganda and that is the only potential value they could have to the Kremlin. A man blinded and disfigured by misdirected Russian artillery certainly would not support the triumphant bombast of state media for Putin's "Special Military Operation." The other Russian POW had a perforated bowel from a gunshot wound. A temporary skin-only closure was performed in the field. When he entered my care, he was hemodynamically stable and alert, but understandably complained of severe abdominal pain. I conducted a laparotomy to remove the AK-74 projectile and repair the bowel with the assistance of a first-rate Ukrainian surgical team. Unfortunately, he was already developing diffuse peritonitis. After the laparotomy, he was immediately placed on IV antibiotics and drains were placed for his infected peritoneal fluids. Despite our efforts, he died of sepsis.
I was in various locations in the east until the end of July and was sent back west after I was injured running in the dark into a Kharkiv shelter when a missile struck nearby and exploded, the shock wave shaking the building and throwing me off my feet and down the stairs. It was just as well. I was burning out from all the meatball surgery, and I felt totally spent after the amputation I performed that afternoon of a burnt, gangrenous left arm of a 14-year-old boy while hearing his mother crying, cursing, and screaming outside the operating room.
After a few days in Kyiv, I traveled to Lviv to work with casualties from the Ukrainian military and civilian populations. Surgery in the AM, and the rest of the day into the evening remotely performing consultations with surgeons around the country. Other than the large volume of departing and returning refugees, Lviv seemed like a normal European city. Air raid sirens and attacks were rare. When the U.S. Embassy once again urged US citizens to leave on August 23, I finally decided that it was time to plan my return home.
I have mostly recovered from my injuries of late July, but I still need to use a cane to walk any distance. My daughters appeared shocked when they greeted me at the airport. My usually playful grandchildren hid behind them and their husbands. I didn't ask, so I don't know what they were reacting to. Maybe it was the cane or perhaps I looked much older somehow. I did lose significant weight and likely appeared frail. My wife greeted me with her characteristic kindness and equanimity. The rest of my family then cautiously embraced me. Their greetings cheered me, but their tearfulness troubled me. I cannot forget the countless I left behind.
My Ukrainian friends gave me a departing gift of the first 1988 Russian edition of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate. I am trying to re-read this great novel, but I frequently end up staring into distant space instead of reading. Sleep poorly, can't get the sirens out of my head and I startle and jump at sudden noises. The worst is when it is dark and quiet. I often see what appears to me as a hooded, black figure crouching in the corner of the bedroom at night. The voices, screams, noises, groans, and cries of the past months then arise from that presence until daylight. Images, scenes, and faces appear out of the dark.
I often check around the house late at night for fire since I keep smelling burning rubble. Even the sickeningly sweet smell of drying blood occasionally drifts by. Dread going to sleep due to the nightmares and an irrational anticipation of air raids. At least my wife was able to talk me out of sleeping in the basement. Although not this bad, I have been through this sort of stuff before, and it usually just ran its course unless I made it all worse for myself and everyone else by attempting to make it all go away with frequent shots of vodka. I have been a witness to many awful situations and listened to countless deeply tragic stories over the years, but what I saw and heard in Ukraine will haunt me the rest of my days.
I suppose my faith was never there to make any sense of the pointless tragedies and cruelties of this war or the complete meaninglessness of all the suffering I witnessed. Through what I have experienced over the years, I have learned that it is foolish and dangerous to assume one understands God's plans and intentions. I am just grateful that God granted me the grace to do what I could to help relieve some of the suffering despite the existential darkness I experienced and protected me from the seductions of the Devil's ever dutiful handmaidens of cynicism, indifference, or despair.
Don't have anything else to say here. The experience of war is difficult to describe to those who, to their good fortune, have not been there. I've seen enough. I pray now only to spend the rest of my life in peace with my ever patient and loving wife, my family, my grandchildren, and my orthodox faith community
I completed orientation in Lviv at the end of March. Upon a review of my background and my Russian language abilities, I was sent to the east of the country to practice and to train and support Ukrainian physicians and army medics in emergency medicine. I was frequently tasked to help set up, staff, organize, and facilitate logistics for emergency medical units for soldiers and civilians.
I had been around explosions from grenades, explosive shells, and an occasional tank round on missions during the Second Sudanese Civil War, but the use of missiles, air strikes and the heavy artillery of this war provided new experiences for me in many locations. The shockwaves from these large explosions that pass through the body I found particularly unsettling. Living with existential dangers creates mutually supportive, enduring bonds and those developed while I was there. I have managed to stay connected with my Ukrainian colleagues. An emergency service supervisor whom I became good friends with was crushed to death under rubble last week after a Putin missile targeted rescue workers extracting the dead and injured from a recently destroyed apartment building.
Putin's army knows how to shell, bomb, and turn communities into rubble, decimate; pillage, deport, rape, torture and incarcerate populations, but that is about it. His soldiers are not really soldiers but a poorly trained, poorly equipped, incompetently led assortment of undisciplined mercenaries, some professional but mostly amateurs who are recruited from Russia's vast, impoverished hinterlands and penal colonies. Ukraine is full of Russian atrocities, some of which will be discovered in the following months, but many will be uncovered only many years from now if at all.
To be fair, the two Russian POWs I was briefly acquainted with were simply scared, clueless young men who only wanted to return home to their friends and families and didn't really know why they were there in the first place other than to make some money to send back home. Both were left behind by withdrawing Russians and picked up and treated by Ukrainian medics. Russians typically leave their dead and seriously wounded behind.
One was blinded and disfigured when he made the mistake of peeking over his fortifications to watch the destruction of Ukrainian lines by an expected Russian artillery barrage that fell short in front of Russian positions and blew up in his face. He lost both eyes, his nose was gone, his face was embedded with pebbles, dirt, and shrapnel. He sustained a brain injury and did not regain consciousness for one hour. Other than the loss of maxillary front teeth and a section of upper lip, his maxillary and mandibular structures were mostly spared, permitting him, often painfully, to communicate and to eat. His zygomas, orbital bones, frontal bone and other facial structures received multiple fractures. I am not a plastic surgeon, but I did what I could to pin, screw, and wire his facial structures together and to debride and repair his wounds. He will require extensive plastic surgery follow up to undergo a series of grafts, revisions, implants, as well as a cranioplasty for a section of frontal bone to make him recognizable.
Unfortunately, these are unlikely with Russia's marginal health infrastructure. A fabricated mask to cover his disfigurements and a cane to find his way will have to do. The Russian military and government leadership have a long history of indifference to their disabled war veterans particularly if they are repatriated POWs who are typically treated with suspicion. Of course, he reportedly can be compensated with a sum of rubles for his service and sacrifice. Since he has significant impairments from his TBI, he will need someone to assist him. That person, if he/she is willing and able to assist, together they could fill out numerous, redundant government forms, submit themselves to the will of countless bureaucrats, discreetly dispense an occasional financial incentive, endure endless investigations, interrogations and delays, and in the end, they might just receive some rubles to help his family back in Khakassia. Maybe.
The wounded and disabled are not useful for war propaganda and that is the only potential value they could have to the Kremlin. A man blinded and disfigured by misdirected Russian artillery certainly would not support the triumphant bombast of state media for Putin's "Special Military Operation." The other Russian POW had a perforated bowel from a gunshot wound. A temporary skin-only closure was performed in the field. When he entered my care, he was hemodynamically stable and alert, but understandably complained of severe abdominal pain. I conducted a laparotomy to remove the AK-74 projectile and repair the bowel with the assistance of a first-rate Ukrainian surgical team. Unfortunately, he was already developing diffuse peritonitis. After the laparotomy, he was immediately placed on IV antibiotics and drains were placed for his infected peritoneal fluids. Despite our efforts, he died of sepsis.
I was in various locations in the east until the end of July and was sent back west after I was injured running in the dark into a Kharkiv shelter when a missile struck nearby and exploded, the shock wave shaking the building and throwing me off my feet and down the stairs. It was just as well. I was burning out from all the meatball surgery, and I felt totally spent after the amputation I performed that afternoon of a burnt, gangrenous left arm of a 14-year-old boy while hearing his mother crying, cursing, and screaming outside the operating room.
After a few days in Kyiv, I traveled to Lviv to work with casualties from the Ukrainian military and civilian populations. Surgery in the AM, and the rest of the day into the evening remotely performing consultations with surgeons around the country. Other than the large volume of departing and returning refugees, Lviv seemed like a normal European city. Air raid sirens and attacks were rare. When the U.S. Embassy once again urged US citizens to leave on August 23, I finally decided that it was time to plan my return home.
I have mostly recovered from my injuries of late July, but I still need to use a cane to walk any distance. My daughters appeared shocked when they greeted me at the airport. My usually playful grandchildren hid behind them and their husbands. I didn't ask, so I don't know what they were reacting to. Maybe it was the cane or perhaps I looked much older somehow. I did lose significant weight and likely appeared frail. My wife greeted me with her characteristic kindness and equanimity. The rest of my family then cautiously embraced me. Their greetings cheered me, but their tearfulness troubled me. I cannot forget the countless I left behind.
My Ukrainian friends gave me a departing gift of the first 1988 Russian edition of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate. I am trying to re-read this great novel, but I frequently end up staring into distant space instead of reading. Sleep poorly, can't get the sirens out of my head and I startle and jump at sudden noises. The worst is when it is dark and quiet. I often see what appears to me as a hooded, black figure crouching in the corner of the bedroom at night. The voices, screams, noises, groans, and cries of the past months then arise from that presence until daylight. Images, scenes, and faces appear out of the dark.
I often check around the house late at night for fire since I keep smelling burning rubble. Even the sickeningly sweet smell of drying blood occasionally drifts by. Dread going to sleep due to the nightmares and an irrational anticipation of air raids. At least my wife was able to talk me out of sleeping in the basement. Although not this bad, I have been through this sort of stuff before, and it usually just ran its course unless I made it all worse for myself and everyone else by attempting to make it all go away with frequent shots of vodka. I have been a witness to many awful situations and listened to countless deeply tragic stories over the years, but what I saw and heard in Ukraine will haunt me the rest of my days.
I suppose my faith was never there to make any sense of the pointless tragedies and cruelties of this war or the complete meaninglessness of all the suffering I witnessed. Through what I have experienced over the years, I have learned that it is foolish and dangerous to assume one understands God's plans and intentions. I am just grateful that God granted me the grace to do what I could to help relieve some of the suffering despite the existential darkness I experienced and protected me from the seductions of the Devil's ever dutiful handmaidens of cynicism, indifference, or despair.
Don't have anything else to say here. The experience of war is difficult to describe to those who, to their good fortune, have not been there. I've seen enough. I pray now only to spend the rest of my life in peace with my ever patient and loving wife, my family, my grandchildren, and my orthodox faith community