And don’t look away
We are going from house to house, carefully following the steps of the sapper moving ahead of us.
From beneath the rubble of a destroyed house, I see a foot in a tightly laced boot. The camo is dirty and faded, but the pattern is still visible. I run my eyes through the ruins and see the outlines of another body half a meter away… And another… and another…
I've been to this place a good ten times. But I didn't see dead men. I'd come into this white brick house, if you can call this mountain of construction waste a house.
The shell hit right in the middle – probably the living room. Only the corner supports were still standing on the perimeter and you could see the outlines of where the rooms had been some twenty centimeters high. Some of the walls had collapsed inwards. Some of the brick had just crumbled on the outside, covered soldiers who were hiding behind the house.Despite the overwhelming horror of what I see, my brain automatically registers the facts. All of the bodies were in different positions, with their weapons and in body armor. They may have been covered by rubble already after death, because there were no signs that anyone had tried to dig themselves out.
Only one of the fighters had any tourniquets on him: on his legs and one arm. The rest had no tourniquets or bandages.
In a shed, we found a box of used IVs reading in Ukrainian: "Sodium chloride", syringes and ampoules. But it's more likely that the medic was making injections somewhere else, maybe in the house. It was surely a medic, because the variety of ampoules and the number of drippers suggested that there had been many wounded.
The lack of ration packets suggested that they hadn't stayed here for long. There might be more answers under the rubble.
When the search team had extracted the bodies and put them in white bags, only the boys' body armor was left lying by the wall.
I stood in front of the carefully gathered helmets and bulletproof vests and tried to imagine what exactly had happened here. Why were they all here together under the wall of this house? What did they see, what were they doing before the bomb hit?
The fighters call these shells 'parachute bombs'. The village and neighboring fields are covered by the black and white paracord and pan-shaped caps. I've never seen this type before – not when we were fighting for Lysychansk, nor when we were defending Bakhmut. The fighters who went through the hell of Novotoshkivka all agree that during the Kherson offensive those bombs were the worst thing they'd lived through. None of the other missiles or shelling could compare to the destruction caused by aerial bombs. And that our peaceful cities would be in ruins, if we'd allowed the Russian bombers to fly over our heads.
Amid the scattered shells, the staggered tank mines, and dirt-covered anti-personnel mines and splinter mines, we move forward from house to house. All of the buildings are completely destroyed. The remnants of walls and fences are heavily riddled with shrapnel. The roofs have collapsed, windows have been blown out of their frames, there are clothes and household goods scattered around the yards. Mine and shell pits etch the streets, gardens, and what used to be orchards like a case of smallpox.
Gray trees like crutches with broken branches and split trunks are the only hint that this central street was once shady and green.
On a broken walnut branch, a child's swing gently rocks the memories of its favorite little scoundrel. The body of a falcon is still warm, caught in the wire from an FGM, dangles with its head thrown back in a silent shriek. The remains of geese who tried to escape the shed and got stuck in the wire fence… The body of a big brown and white sheepdog with a hole at the level of its heart.
Tractors, harvesters, cars, and motorcycles – shredded like paper…
People's lives – erased, crumpled, destroyed.
Everything here screams of unbearable pain.
Tears roll down my cheeks. For some reason, the magical "get it together" doesn't work.
