Standing guard

Photo: Radio Free Europe

I was reading an article in the New York Times, or the Atlantic – I can’t remember exactly where – about how grim things are for Ukrainian soldiers serving on the front lines of Ukraine’s war against the Russian military that has invaded their country and seized a swath of territory in Ukraine’s east, all the way from the Russian border in the north to the east bank of the Dnipro River in the south.  Many Ukrainian soldiers have been fighting with only occasional pauses for R & R trips back to their hometowns – that is, if their hometowns aren’t in the portion of Ukraine that has been taken or destroyed by Russia – for more than 22 straight months since the war began on February 24, 2022, 644 days in all.  By anyone’s measure, that is a long, long time to be in combat.  By comparison, the 32^nd Infantry Division logged 654 days in combat in the Pacific Theater during World War II, more than any other Army division in that war.

It's hard to imagine what the war must be like for the men and women fighting Russia over there right now.  I haven’t been to Ukraine to cover the war, my days of traveling for days, even weeks, to a war zone to visit front line troops being long behind me.  So, what I’m going to do is use my knowledge of military service and my time as a reporter covering the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to do what I just said is so hard:  to imagine myself into the lives of Ukrainian soldiers fighting on the front lines.

Let’s begin where all wars begin – with training the soldiers sent to fight.  In our army, we send our enlistees – including, in past years, draftees – to Basic Combat Training (BCT) and Advanced Individual Training (AIT) in the various combat arms to which soldiers are assigned.  Basic Training takes about 10 weeks.  AIT can take anywhere from six weeks to several months, depending on your branch.  Training to be a combat medic can take nearly a year.

Minutia.  Grunt work.  Learning to be a combat soldier means doing the same things over and over again until they become second nature.  That is what military training amounts to, and why it is so repetitious.  You don’t want to need to think about what you’re doing when your life and the lives of others are at stake.  All that repetition and niggling details pay off when soldiers are sent into combat.  Take a 155 mm howitzer crew.  The aiming and reloading, aiming and reloading of one of those big guns is repetitious, but it’s what makes their effective use in war so deadly to the enemy.  Defending yourself from enemy artillery is just as important.  Crews are taught to fire and move, fire and move, so they can avoid return fire from the enemy that is often directed by counter-battery radar that tracks the arc of incoming artillery shells to pinpoint return fire. 

Training only goes so far.  There is no way to prepare for many of the things that happen in a war.  The danger of boredom is one of them.  Ukrainian soldiers who have been at war for nearly two years don’t spend every minute fighting the enemy.  There are dead-times, when your unit holds in place before the next combat operation.  Soldiers spend that time working to get ready for their next mission and they work to insure their own defense against the enemy, which may not have chosen that moment to stand down briefly and may be moving against them.

That is when one of the most boring things any soldier can be assigned to do becomes very, very important:  guard duty.  You learn it in basic training when there is no enemy to fight.  Soldiers are assigned guard duty on a rotating basis.  It’s called “standing guard,” and it involves in many cases both things:  standing on your feet and being on guard for any sound or movement by the enemy.  Usually, you stand guard in four-hour shifts, then you’re relieved by the next guard detail, handing off your station to the next soldier with a report on what has happened during your shift.  In the modern military, this can also involve manning surveillance against the enemy using drones or cameras that observe the area between your unit and the last known position of the enemy. 

On a static front like the one in Ukraine, guard duty can be the most important thing you do during the day or night.  But imagine doing it right now, when Ukraine is, to put it bluntly, cold and wet.  In the area around Bakhmut, where heavy fighting is still taking place, it will be 35 degrees on Thursday and about 24 degrees at night.  On Friday and Saturday, it will be in the low 40’s during the day and in the low 30’s at night.  It will rain all day on Friday and Saturday.  By this time next week, it will be in the 20’s with snow forecast for every day through December 14.  It’s a bit warmer in the south around Donetsk, but rainy.  From this weekend through December 14, it will be in the mid 20’s to low 30’s, with constant rain or snow.  Early next week, it will be in the low 20’s during the day and in the teens at night.  According to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), there is heavy fighting around Donetsk in the towns of Avdiivka and Krasnohorivka, with Russian military vehicles attacking Ukrainian positions in the industrial area southwest of Avdiivka.

Let’s imagine that for a moment.  You’re a Ukrainian soldier.  You’re defending Ukrainian positions in and around Avdiivka, a small town with several large factories.  It’s 30 degrees and wet.  You’re probably holding a position in a house or apartment building, no doubt sleeping, when you can, in the building’s basement.  There is no electricity it’s dark, and it’s cold, really cold.  You have a sleeping bag and maybe you’ve dragged a mattress down from a bedroom upstairs.  You’re eating field rations similar to U.S. MRE’s – meals ready to eat – plastic packaged dry meals you add water to.  Maybe you can build a small fire and heat the reconstituted gruel, maybe not.  It’s been weeks since you’ve had a real hot meal.  You are defending a coke plant near Stepove.  Coke is used in the production of iron and steel.  These factories and ones like them are essential to Ukraine’s economy.  Russian forces are fighting hard, according to ISW, and gained a foothold on a slight hill that enables them to shell Ukrainian front lines holding the majority of Avdiivka.  But all the fighting over the last couple of very cold and very wet weeks “do not affect Russian efforts to capture Avdiivka but simply extend the frontline,” according to a recent ISW report.

I could go on and report on the situation at the front lines further south in the Zaporizhzhia region where Ukraine has been stalled in its effort to push through to Melitopol, which would cut off Russia’s so-called land bridge between their forces in Ukraine’s east and their supply lines from Crimea.  But the reports from the front lines in Ukraine are all the same:  Ukraine moves a kilometer or so, taking some land heavily defended by Russian forces.  Then 100 miles away, Russia moves a kilometer closer to Stepove or some other village near Donetsk or Bakhmut.  With winter setting in and temperatures dropping and snow falling, the only good news for Ukraine is this:  Russia’s elaborate defenses along the 600-mile front lines, which include trenches, mine fields, and anti-tank barriers, are two-edged at this point in the stalemated war.  They have stopped Ukraine’s counteroffensive which began last summer, but they also prevent Russia from attacking more deeply into the land Ukraine still holds, because Russian forces would have to move through their own defenses to launch effective attacks on Ukrainian forces. 

That’s the definition of a stalemate.  Neither side can advance significantly.  Ukrainian and Russian soldiers are just as cold and wet and miserable as their counterparts on the other side.  There are reports of occasional Russian defections by worn out troops, but not enough to affect the war.  Ukrainians, defending their own country, are more highly motivated, but they have been sleeping rough in basements and bunkers and trenches for months on end, just like the Russians.

One of the boring, repetitive things soldiers do over and over and over is reloading the magazines for their AK-47’s, both Ukrainian and Russian.  They must find a safe place to sit for hours and take boxes of ammunition and push bullets into magazine after magazine, so they can go out the next day and empty those magazines of bullets shooting at the enemy, then they must find another safe spot to reload them all over again.  In between reloading and shooting and reloading and shooting, they’ve got to find a safe place to eat the miserable rations that reach them via resupply missions. 

Those missions are yet another wretched part of the war.  Ukrainian soldiers drive trucks from rear area supply depots to the front lines in Donetsk or Zaporizhzhia or Bakhmut.  As they near the front lines, they know that Russian artillery has zeroed in on their routes, and 155 mm howitzers that have a range of 15 miles can reach their convoys.  The Ukrainian convoys drive at night on rutted roads pockmarked with artillery craters, with their lights off in the rain and now in the snow, and they unload, and then they must drive back 50 to 100 miles to the places where Ukraine’s army has its ammunition and equipment and food supplies.  Every mile as they approach the front lines is dangerous.

The whole country of Ukraine is perilous and miserable.  A report on CNBC said that Russia has amassed a large stockpile of missiles they intend to use to “turn out the lights” in Kyiv and other major population centers during the winter, so Ukrainian civilians will be increasingly affected as it gets colder and wetter and snowier. 

The lights are already out on the front lines.  Ukrainian soldiers must live by tactical rules, which is to say, everything in the villages and bunkers and trenches where Ukraine’s soldiers await their next order is blacked-out at night.  So, when they’re standing guard to make sure Russians can’t attack their positions at night, they must practice sound and light discipline.  Russian listening posts can pick up conversation, even whispered conversation, and they are constantly on alert for the tiniest glimmer of light marking a potential target for their artillery or rockets.

Every Ukrainian soldier who thought they were tired of guard duty during their training is blessing the sergeant who threatened them with punishment if they were caught nodding off on guard, or if they missed a hand-over with the next guard detail.

Now, reloading their damn magazines and trying to stay awake on guard duty, is a life or death matter.  The iron and coke factories around Donetsk depend on them.  The ruined town of Bakhmut depends on them.  Kyiv and Kharkiv and Odessa and every Ukrainian city that comes under Russian fire depends on them. 

The war in Ukraine is dirty and wet and miserable and cold and miserable and absolutely necessary if Ukraine is to defend itself from Russian aggression and have any hope at all of taking back the territory Russia now occupies.  God bless those training sergeants, and God bless the Americans and Germans and other NATO countries that are sending the Ukrainian army weapons. God damn the Republican Party that has made Ukraine’s war against Putin’s aggression an issue they are trying to exploit for domestic political purposes as if thousands of Ukrainians had not already died trying to defend their beleaguered country.