The Things We Don’t Carry
What I learned About Combat Veterans in Ukraine
In early March, I flew back to the USA after a hacker claiming to have been paid by the Russian government doxxed my location and threatened my life. When I landed, I hadn’t slept in three days and could barely manage a coherent thought.
An Iraq war veteran on his way to Ukraine insisted I call him because he was used to threats and I am not. Over the next hour, he told me crass jokes and funny stories from the infantry, trying to calm me down the only way he knew how.
At one point, his voice cracked and he said, “I had to do terrible things because you asked them of me. This time, I’m willing to do terrible things again because I have to so that you don’t have to.”
He didn’t literally mean I asked this of him, but his words have stuck with me. He is right; we did ask that of him.
The cruel irony of the war in Ukraine is that the people Ukraine most needs are those who have endured the most. Few people have the combat experience necessary to help Ukraine train its soldiers and fight on its behalf.
Ukraine needs them, and thousands of them went.
Those who are qualified are mostly infantry and special forces from the Army or Marines Corps, the men and women who endured multiple combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
They left pieces of their friends and pieces of their souls on the rooftops of Fallujah and in the valleys of Korengal. They carried packs so heavy their spines compressed.
They survived but did not live — came home to a place that did not feel like home and never would — home to a country that did not ask what they went through and did not want to know, to friends who once knew them but now no longer understood them.
Then they went back and did it again. Because once you are used to artillery instead of fireworks, the artillery starts to feel more like fireworks. And once you adapt to chaos, the chaos starts to feel more like peace.
I became involved in Ukraine’s war effort through strange circumstances. The night of the invasion, I posted on Reddit offering my airline miles to a combat veteran or medic who wanted to go to Ukraine to volunteer. I meant to find two people who wanted to go and that was it.
Instead, I had hundreds of people offer the same and had most of the future International Legion of the Territorial Defense of Ukraine contact me. For the next month, I matched volunteers with donors and helped them get on their way.
At one point, one of them asked me what would happen if he got hurt in Ukraine — who would help him get home?
I didn’t know the answer to that question. I became the answer. I work with a team of volunteers who help people fleeing the war in Ukraine, including helping people injured on the front line get home.
I am not military or anything close to it. I’m a formerly pacifist law professor who has rarely fired a gun. Yet I ended up in an extraordinary position with a rare view of things civilians never see and are not supposed to see; an accidental Heimdall with a front-row seat.
I’ve been a confidante, comic relief to the front line, the only civilian friend, and the link to normality when they need it. I’ve taken calls to help their best friends go home after injury and calls from the airport when they are stuck at security with too much equipment they can’t explain.
I’ve seen two common themes emerge among those who went to Ukraine:
They believe in the cause. Few things are more selfless than flying to Ukraine to volunteer to fight a war. The volunteers are either unpaid or paid very little. They must bring their own equipment, which costs thousands of dollars. They are fighting in some of the most horrific combat the world has ever seen.
They went and did this for us willingly. I’ve often been told, “I was born for this,” or “This is what I do.” They know the risks. They accept the consequences.
But beyond believing in the cause, the other common thing I hear is that they are the right people to go because they do not matter.
I’ve had men tell me that no one will miss them, and their wives are better off without them. They’ve told me they are degenerates or alcoholics anyway, so if someone has to go, it may as well be them because all they know is firing a gun, and if they can’t do that, then they don’t know who they are.
When I ask them if they have a will, they tell me there is no point because there is nothing to leave, and they won’t get a Power of Attorney because there is no one trusted at home to administer it anyway. They say this about themselves even though they text me to ask how I’m doing when they are the ones in trenches under shelling.
They don’t see the people I see.
Combat veterans are an especially challenging group to load onto commercial flights and volunteer in Ukraine. The vast majority don’t have a passport. As so many told me, “Grunts don’t do paperwork,” so learning how to get one and get it fast does not come easily.
The same men who survived war zones have often found the civilian world inhospitable to them. They are unlikely to be financially stable enough to afford all their equipment, a flight, and then months or years on the ground in Ukraine.
Many positions in the military lend themselves to careers in the civilian world but not the combat infantry. What does a tanker do in the civilian world? What role does a rifleman or a machine gunner have? For too many, it has meant no role at all and no defined place in the world if it’s not in war.
Without exception, the men who struggled the most to get on a flight, the ones who spelled their e-mail address wrong, misunderstood the paperwork for body armor, or missed the flight, all went on to leadership positions in Ukraine.
What they have told me and what I learned about their lives is heartbreaking. We forged them into who they are and then told them there is no place for them. It makes me think that they are not the ones who have done the terrible things; we are.
The Iraq war was a lie. The Afghanistan war was a failure; people fought and died for 20 years with no clear purpose or path to victory. Most of us now accept that we were wrong to invade Iraq and wrong to stay in Afghanistan with no purpose, just to abandon it abruptly.
If the Iraq war was wrong, then so was everything we asked people to do in Iraq. Everything we asked them to do in our name was wrong. Everything they suffered as a result was wrong. These wars killed over 7,000 Americans, but the real toll is far higher.
Since 9/11, over 30,000 service members and veterans have died of suicide. We did not kill 7,000 of our fellow citizens; we killed almost 40,000, and that doesn’t include the broken families and broken dreams of people who could have lived happy lives but instead came home in their bodies but not in their minds.
We, as Americans, have never really addressed this. We do not acknowledge it. We have not atoned for it. I am from a country that waged multiple wars for two decades, yet, until recently, I did not personally know anyone who fought those wars.
The consequences of these wars have been borne by people who talk about it only with each other or, more likely, just don’t talk about it at all. We do not suffer them because they have not asked that of us, and they will not.
In April, I lost the first person I knew who fought in Ukraine. Since then, I have known twelve more. Sometimes it has been someone I knew well — someone who told me jokes and made me laugh or patiently explained military jargon.
Other times, it is the recognition of a name and the realization that there will be many more names, that I will know far too many of them, and this will continue for a very long time. I fear how high the count will be by the end.
My position in this war is unprecedented. There is a reason we don’t typically send each other off to war by helping to book commercial flights. There are reasons that injured soldiers aren’t usually tracked down by the woman who helped them and their friends get there.
Nothing about this is normal. It should not be.
The psychological toll is enormous. I don’t know whether to hope for my phone to be silent. Silence can mean that all is well, that nothing has happened, and that there is no one in need of help in Ukraine. It can also mean something has gone very wrong, and it is the quiet before the storm.
I both crave and fear the silence.
My role may be new, but someone has always borne the toll I face. In May, I helped the surviving members of an International Legion unit go home after losing multiple comrades. They had so much equipment that I had my shoes stacked on top of a bomb disposal kit.
They arrived in Warsaw with the belongings of the fallen, and I helped carry a bag so heavy it almost knocked me over. I later learned I picked up the heaviest one. There was silence as I put it on.
I realized how strange it must be to watch a woman you do not know pick up and carry a bag carried by a soldier — carried by your friend.
I listened as they called family members and determined how to say something no one ever wants to hear. I saw each of them break down yet try to pretend everything was okay. I was witnessing something civilians are not supposed to see — something we normally never see.
The fact that this is hidden from us is a gift we do not deserve. We do not see the toll that war has. But we need to.
For every day the war in Ukraine drags on, the toll becomes higher. We will create more people who will not return to us either in body or soul. We need to make sure we are doing whatever we can so that they do.
Every military veteran tells me how, when they leave service, they receive training on how to adapt to civilians, how to behave and change themselves to blend in. But the rest of us have never received training and never considered how to adapt to them. It’s time we consider it.
I have had men tell me, “I came back after Iraq. I made it after Afghanistan. I will not come back from this one.”
Whatever they need to live, not just survive, after Ukraine, we need to provide it. Whatever the price is, we must pay it. For many veterans, like my friend who called to check on me, serving in Ukraine is how they atone for the things we have asked them to do.
It is a bitter truth that if we did not invade Iraq and Afghanistan, we would not have the skilled people Ukraine needs now. We need to accept this truth. They use the skills they acquired in unjust wars to now fight for something worthy of their efforts.
But now that we know the toll that sending them to Iraq and Afghanistan has taken on them, what will we do differently this time to ensure we are not letting it happen again?
In the months since the war began, I have openly struggled with how to get over losing so many people I know. I’ve had multiple veterans talk to me, offering words of advice. They offer no words of comfort because there aren’t any that can be said.
They tell me you are one of us now. This is normal. We have gotten used to it — so will you. We lose friends, and we go on. That’s how it works. They tell me to mourn my life I had in February because it is gone. I must accept it.
They are correct. I am more used to it now than I was in April. I accept it. Nothing hits me as hard as it did then. I am a tougher, harder person than I was.
But I can’t help but feel that in getting used to death, that I have lost something in myself that I cannot regain. Something I cannot define but I will never get back.
That I, too, will never really come back from where I have gone.
