Strangeness

Things are particularly odd when you have just been blown up.

Sorry for the delay folks. I not only needed some time to recover from everything somewhat, but being an exile requires me to travel sometimes, which for one reason or another often isn’t conducive to writing. I am settling into a situation where I should be in a good place to write for the next two months, wherein I am hoping to basically write the book about my experiences over the last three years in Ukraine, as well as covering the war generally, and in the areas I fought, and going into a deep dive on all the reasons I went there and how I was able to do so. I am hoping to wrap up the story of my being blown up in this piece, which may make it run a little long, but I want to get out my long overdue personal update which will cover why I left Ukraine, and why I left when I did, and what my situation is now, and has been in the couple of months since I left the army, so I want to wrap this story up and get to that.

Now where were we?

I was racing down the road to the rear, hoping to catch up to Vlada and Oleksii before they arrived at the next stabilization point to the rear.

The Ukrainians helping load Vlada into the back of the ambulance had slammed the doors shut and it had immediately rolled away, right after Oleksii told me the name of the stabilization point they were going to. A name I didn’t recognize. We mostly used cell phones to communicate, but there wasn’t any cell service where we were, and of course the Starlink at our stabilization point was laying shattered amonst the burning rubble.

I blame the blast wave for my not thinking to turn on the army radio. It didn’t help that I almost never used it. Usually on outbound runs, whichever medic was in my passenger seat handled the radio while I kept an eagle eye on the road, trying to thread a line through the endless potholes and keep an eye out for mines dropped by drones, and grounded drones laying in wait for us to drive by. I used the radio so little, that it wasn’t until the last few months I was in the army that I ended up with a callsign, and that was pretty random and spur of the moment by someone who needed to tell someone else to contact me one of the times I was driving alone and ended up being a Ukrainian approximation of my initials. Everyone knows I spell my name with a K, but somehow I ended up with CJ as my callsign, and printed on the schwag our unit made just before we pretty much ceased to exist.

So, right after being blown up, and going back into the fire twice, and seeing my badly injured doc, who I had worked closely with for over two years, being put into the back of an ambulance, it never occurred to me to turn on the army communication radio. I assume the other ambulance had a radio, but I have no idea if they tried to hail me or not. Oleksii and I ended up back together for another few hours later in the night, but that didn’t end up getting discussed, and only saw him in person for a short period of time weeks later. For the moment, we’ll leave it at that, I need to decide when I am fleshing out the book whether I am going to hassle people with questions like this, or just leave it as is. I am of two minds about that.

Although I neglected to turn on the radio, I did make sure my phone would audibly let me know if anyone tried to contact me, as I knew that as I got further from the front, there would at least be pockets of reception.

As I left the small town that our stabilization point was in, I was partially thankful that it was shortly after midnight, and so there was very little traffic on the road, as there were often deep ruts in the ice, and often only three ruts in the road, so when you met a vehicle going the opposite direction, one of you had to somehow climb up out of the ruts to pass eachother. When the conditions were at their worst, this was a real challenge. One time, it took everyone bailing out of three vehicles to push one of them out of the ruts so we could pass eachother, as neither of our vehicles were able to climb out of the deep icy ruts. Our front wheels would turn, but couldn’t get any purchase, so we’d just slide forward over the ice with the wheels uselessly angled to the side. This was less of an issue with my armored ambulance with its big offroad tires, but it was still with the mechanics, getting repairs.

I say it was only partially a relief that there was little traffic out at this time of night because there were still plenty of enemy drones overhead, clearly evidenced by tracers from our air defense arcing accross the sky in front of me as I drove further down the road. This most likely meant that they were shooting at Shaheds, but unlike in the past, the Shaheds weren’t only hunting bigger game, and had started attacking individual vehicles. Usually, they were going after our air defense trucks, but to the Russians, an ambulance is a high value target, and there were very few other vehicles driving around, so I was one of the only obvious targets out there. Driving under these conditions with the one, monocular, night vision device our unit had was nearly impossible, so as usual, I was driving with my headlights on as well, further highlighting me as a target.

Shortly outside of town there was a ‘Y’ in the road. I had a decision to make. Oleksii has shouted the name of where they were going to me just before the rear doors of the ambulance he was in slammed shut, but not only did I not recognize it, I now couldn’t recall what I thought I heard him say. It didn’t help that it was an unfamiliar Ukrainian word. Later, when I heard it said in a lot less stressful situation I realized I did indeed know the name of the town in question, but I didn’t even know there was another stabilization point in that town, much less where in that town it was. I did know where the next stabilization point towards the rear was, and the one beyond that, so I figured I would head that direction, and check in at the first one, and at least get comms back up there, if I hadn’t gotten word to press on to the one beyond that by that point.

Further reinforcing my decision to take the right fork was the fact that I assumed they were headed to the stabilization point further to the rear and that although I could get there from either road, the path to the left lead to some very treacherous hilly sections given the extremely icy conditions out. Every time I had had to take that route over the past few months I expected to slide off the road, and perhaps roll the vehicle, but at the very least require some serious assistance getting recovered and back on the road. It was in the realm of miracles that we had only lost one vehicle this way this winter. There were a LOT of white knuckle moments sliding down hills with little or no control taking that route many, many times over the past few months, and although I felt remarkably okay, I knew that I couldn’t be operating at one hundred percent efficiency given that a big bomb had just gone off right above my head less than an hour before. So, given all that, I took the right fork in the road.

Travel in Ukraine is often a painfully slow, lengthy process and this night was one of the worst. The snow and ice over the road had partially melted and frozen and been refreshed with new layers dumping on top of it multiple times over the winter, leaving a several inches thick layer of ice over the roadway, with ice covered snow over that. There are so many potholes in the road in this area that you can’t avoid all of them, and some of them are the size of large bomb craters and you just drive right through the middle of them. All of this makes for extremely slow going, especially since as soon as I got above 15 to 25 miles per hour I could feel the vehicle losing traction and starting to slide over the ice like hydroplaning on water, with basically zero control over the vehicle. This all meant that I was limited to usually driving right about 15 miles per hour, but was white knuckling it between sliding on the ice, worrying about sliding off the road, and the drones so obviously overhead. I had our electronic jammers running, but despite tales from my compatriots of having seen FPV drones chasing them lose control and crash in the review mirror thanks to the jammers working, I didn’t have any faith that would save me drones, or from Shaheds, much less fiber optically guided drones, which I was still very much in range of. Of course, adding to the pressure of the situation was my desire to catch up to my team by the time they arrived at the stabilization point, and to learn that Vlada was going to pull through. I had no idea how badly she had been injured, and as much as I was a loner in the army, she was one of the people I was closest to, and I had worked with her since joining the unit. She was not only one of the two best English speakers in the unit, but our XO, and now acting CO, so we had interacted a lot, and she was often a part of the team I was deployed forward on rotations with, and had always been kind and understanding with me. I liked her a lot, and was very worried about her.

Initially, I thought that I had escaped the whole ordeal basically unscathed, other than a few cuts and scratches and bruises, mostly incurred when I fought my way through the rubble back into the burning building twice. Later, I would have one place say that I didn’t have a concussion, and another place say that I did, but at first I wrote off the second place saying so as a kindness on their part so that they could mark me as somehow injured from the whole ordeal and be elgible for a few days off for being blown up and the bit of monetary compensation that comes with that as well. Which, of course, I never got. At the time, I initially felt pretty normal, and didn’t think that I was really affected at all. As time went on in the days and weeks afterwards though, I not only wondered if I really did have a concussion, but what the threshold is for having a traumatic brain injury, because not only did things get pretty weird for me over the next few hours, but I’d swear I am still not quite myself at this point. Of course, part of the latter is my trying to transition from having been a soldier for the past two and half years, and in a war zone for three, to now being a father figure in a peaceful land, and trying to adjust to normal life while trying to process everything I have been through and seen, combined with the stress of trying to navigate immigrating to yet another country new to me. I’ll have more to say on all that a bit later.

At the time, I could feel a weird headspace settling in. To be fair, I had just had somehere between 20 and 100 kilograms (45 to 220 pounds) of high explosive go off a few meters over from and a few meters above me. The blast had mostly leveled the building, blowing out the wall of the room I was in above the height of the bed I was in, with my body and the bed stopping the shock wave from blowing out the wall below the height of the bed. So I had just had a pretty significant shockwave go right through me.

Since I had completely overlooked turning on the army radio and was alone in the ambulance, it was dead silent. Normally, I’d blast the heater and roll down the window, both because I liked the additional situational awareness, and to at least hear the wind of my passage such as it was at these very low speeds, but just the day before the window had failed, and dropped down into the door. Oleksii had somehow managed to get it back into the up position, but we weren’t planning on trying to roll it down any time soon. Failures like this were particularly frustrating, as once again we were down to only this four-wheel-drive ambulance operating, so it wouldn’t be repaired until it was forced out of service for a larger issue, assuming we could do so because one of the other damaged vehicles finally got returned to us.

As I drove on in silence, intently focusing on the weaving path through the deeper potholes, poorly illuminated by our mud covered headlights in low beam because I didn’t want to spotlight myself as a target any more than I already was, a weird, creepy feeling settled over me.

My world became just the small area spotlighted by the anemic headlights. There is no light in the Ukrainian countryside. If there is power in the region, no one has the lights on in their farmhouses, because they don’t want to be a target for the Russians. So the world all around me was entirely black, except for alternating between a tunnel of wintry trees or just the heaped snow at the edges of the row barely lit by my mud dimmed headlights.

I focused on the road ahead, not that there was anything else I could do, and it is absolutely what I had to do, both just to stay on the slippery road, and to keep an eye out for mines laid by Russian drones. My world became just that small circle of dim light surrounded by darkness, as a creepy feeling settled over me in the aftermath of being blown up.

I really noticed it when on rare occasions another vehicle appeared. This part of Ukraine isn’t perfectly flat, there are slight elevation changes that hide oncoming vehicles from you as well as the occasional small hill. So although there wasn’t a lot of traffic out, over the nearly two hours I was out driving around alone I did come across a handful of vehicles traveling the opposite direction. Each time I did, they would appear fairly close to me, having been hidden by elevation differences between us until that point. Each time headlights suddenly appeared, even though they weren’t terribly close to me, I had a fear response. It felt somewhat similar to when someone is standing behind you and has just hit you and you are expecting them to strike you again. When the headlights would appear, my adrenaline would spike and I’d feel fear, something that I am not used to feeling. For reasons I will get into elsewhere, and explore, I had come to believe that I was going to live through this whole damned thing, and probably wasn’t even going to be hurt, and after three years in the warzone, was even more blase’ about risks and danger as I was when I started this whole thing. I basically was never afraid before this. Even the couple of times I actually ran for cover from incoming mortar fire early in the war, it still felt just like the prudent thing to do, and I was partially doing because the person next to me was running, I didn’t really feel afraid. Even sitting in a bunker being shelled for the better part of an hour, with dirt regularly raining down from the ceiling, I just kind of felt mildly concerned. I was worried about possibly being buried alive, but I wasn’t really afraid. Even when the drone smashed into the ground in front of our ambulance just before Christmas and splattered it with shrapnel and we ran for a bunker nearby, I didn’t really feel fear. I was sure I was somehow going to be okay. I did the prudent things, bailing out of the vehicle, taking cover, etc, because you don’t want to tempt fate, I may be so agnostic that I am functionally athiest, but I basically, functionally, subscribe to the theory the god helps those that helps themselves.

But now, after nearly three years in Ukraine, I was feeling it. And for no good reason at all. I shouldn’t be afraid of vehicles 35 kilometers from the front line. No Russian vehicle makes it through the front line. In my entire time here, a few tanks broke through once, once, on the Prokrovsk front, and were knocked out within a kilometer or three from the frontline. There was zero chance of the headlights of an oncoming vehicle being a threat to me this far from the front, but each time one appeared, I would have a serious fear response spike and have to talk myself through basically what I just explained above, that hey, there is no way this is a threat to me, chill out.

This happened repeatedly as I drove for about 45 minutes until my phone finally beeped with a message. I gingerly pulled over to the side of the road, mindful not to slide off of it on the ice, and saw several messages come through.

Glenna, the only other American still in the unit was checking on me. With our XO knocked out, our chain of command was in disarray, and she had taken it upon herself to check on me, as they had gotten word that Oleksii and Vlada had made it to another stabilization point and no one knew where I was. Technically, there were at least two doctors who were lieutenants who outranked her, but they were both new graduates from medical school when they joined us about a year and half before and had had very limited military training. She was not only a nurse, but had been a Navy Corpsman attached to the U.S. Marines before coming to Ukraine at the beginning of the war. She is technically a sergeant in the Ukrainian army, but in our medical unit, no one really acted in anything I could recognize as a traditional NCO role, but the word had spread through our secure comms channel about the incident, and despite the fact that she was back in Kharkiv on her rest rotation she was concerned about me and wanted to know what was up.

So, I called her back, and told her where I was (just shy of the turn-off for the next nearest stabilization point towards the rear) and we tried to figure out where Oleksii and Vlada were and were going to be, and where I should be going.

While we were doing this, I started receiving messages from our next most senior officer after the XO, one of the young doctors. He was at the stabilization point I was nearing the turn-off to and he directed me there, despite the fact that Vlada and Oleksii hadn’t come there. I didn’t see any point in going there, but was about to acquiesce to that when I started getting messages from Oleksii. He was just arriving back at our blown up stabilization point, hoping to salvage something from the rubble, being dropped off by the returning border guards ambulance. He wanted me to go back, and come pick him up and we’d go on to the stabilization point he had dropped off Vlada at. He told me that Vlada was going to make it, but was seriously injured.

I now had three conflicting sets of instructions from two sergeants and a lieutenant.

Glenna had told me that Vlada and Oleksii were not at REDACTED, and had agreed with me that I should then proceed further to the rear. Anton had directed me to REDACTED. And now Oleksii was telling me I needed to turn around, and drive back through all those drones and pick him up and then basically repeat the journey I had just made.

It has often caused me problems in my life, but luckily for me, I kind of don’t give a fuck about the chain of command, or rules, and do whatever I think is right. So, although I loathed adding to the endless driving I was set to do tonight, I told Oleksii I was on my way, gave him an ETA, sent a message to my units group chat saying that was what I was doing, and that I’d likely be incommunicado for at least another hour to hour and a half or longer, and I gingerly made a many point U-turn on the narrow, icy road, further narrowed by all the snow. I didn’t bother consulting anyone, asking permission, or asking what I should do, I just made a command decision and informed them what I was going to do, and promptly moved out of contact. Because that’s how I roll.

(Private)

So, I retraced my path, even though I was loathe to do so. It was less the threat of the drones, and more about having to drive it all two more times that bothered me. Ukraine’s roads are pretty featureless on a good day. There are very, very rarely any road signs, you just have to learn the road by someone showing it you once and you having had driven it before. I had already taken a wrong turn once on my way out, and lost about 15 minutes total, it taking me nearly half that time to realize I had taken a wrong turn. I had done that because I was concerned about a particular intersection, where it was easy to take a wrong turn, that when I had been shown this route I was told that it leads directly to the front line. Obviously, I didn’t want to drive my ambulance right up to the front line, much less closer to it, as the closer you get to it the more enemy drones are in the air, hunting you, so I had mistakenly taken the turn before it the opposite direction, because in the dark, with pitch blackness all around, and a basically featureless road it all looked the same. In addition, most of the year, I was able to traverse this much faster, so I kept worrying that I had gone further than I had at the slow pace the icy conditions forced me to. In some areas, I recognized stretches of road, because I had memorized all the potholes, particularly in areas where you had to make sure to take a particular line through the road to not get stuck or fall into a big crater, but with everything covered in snow and ice, and some of the potholes basically filled in with the same, large stretches of the road were basically completely featureless.

So I nervously made my way all the way back to our still burning stabilization point, worried I was going to accidentally end up on that road to the front again. Once again, every time another vehicles’ headlights suddenly appeared over a hill coming at me I had that weird, strong fear response. I didn’t get lost this time, so it took a little bit less time for me to get back, but the drive still felt interminable in the pressing silence with only a small area in front of me dimly lit by my headlights, and darkness all around. The wave of Shaheds seemed to have passed though, as this time I at least didn’t see air defense firing tracers into the sky.

When I made it back to Oleksii he was ready to go. With the building pretty much fully engulfed in flames by the time he returned to it, he basically wasn’t able to salvage anything, so we immediately set out for the stabilization point that Vlada had been taken to.

Which of course, was off to the left on the first fork out of town. Which was why I never caught up with their ambulance, which had to be moving even slower than me, given that it was a two wheel drive Mercedes Sprinter, on smaller, less capable tires than mine.

I had just assumed that we were going there to meet up with Vlada as she was being finished being patched up and continue all making our way to the rear together. I assumed Oleksii had been already checked out, and other than the weird fear thing, I felt fine, and had no visible wounds. So when he told me that we were going there to be checked out, I balked and said that I was fine. He said that may well be, but they’d have to check me out anyway. I can be incorrigible, ornery, and have no regard for rules, procedures or policy on a good day, but at that moment I was really feeling strongly that way, and just wanted to go home. Oleksii had a burst eardrum, Vlada was wounded, and we lost all our gear for our stabilization point, so I knew that our rotation was over and that we were headed home.

So when we got to the stabilization point, I had a bit of an attitude. It was after midnight, I had been driving for hours, and had been blown up, and it was still going to take a few hours to drive the rest of the way to Kharkiv, so I just wanted to be done with everything. I was fine. I was walking, talking, and had no visible injuries and was capable enough to not only drive for hours, but to go back into the burning building twice and recover the keys for our ambulance.

When we arrived at the stabilization point, there were already a half dozen walking wounded in the hallway waiting to be seen. They walked us right past all of them to be seen first. Now, I may have wanted to go home as soon as possible, but this didn’t sit right with me. I wasn’t really injured, and there were wounded waiting to be seen, and I hate it most of the time when medical personnel give preferential treatment to other medical personnel over others. This didn’t help my attitude any, and I was vocal about not being seen at all because it wasn’t necessary.

When we entered, I immediately noticed two people I took to be medics. Mainly because one of them was really dogging me. I don’t know why, but I can guess after the fact, but one of them was really glaring at me and staring at me constantly. The other was watching me very closely as well. I wanted to just chalk it up to a couple of medics assessing me for a concussion, but there was clearly another vibe there as well.

Now, the Ukrainian army is a singular thing in a lot of aspects, but one of those is uniforms. Since a majority of the people either joined voluntarily or were drafted after the war began, and either way aren’t professional soldiers, the army has a kind of people’s army feel to it, and this really shows in its approach to uniforms. Basically, if you aren’t showing up for a photo op for receiving medals, or an officer expecting to visit a headquarters for a meeting, anything goes. In the summer you will see a lot of troops in civilian shorts, t-shirts and flip flops. In the winter, people, especially medical personnel, wear whatever civilian clothes they feel like. This got even worse when our forward positions for the medical and other support units got pushed back to villages twenty, thirty, or more kilometers from the front line. The people living in those villages feel like having a bunch of people in uniform in their towns was making them even more of a target and requested we be in civilian clothes as much as possible. After that, I rarely saw any medical personnel in anything resembling army clothes, everyone seemed to take it as license to wear whatever they wanted all of the time, even if they spent all their time inside the stabilization point and didn’t walk around the town. There were a few of us that still wore uniforms, but we were the exception. I will go into a deep dive on this in the book, but suffice it to say, that even more than before, you had zero idea what rank anyone was unless you were informed as to such.

So, to my eyes, there are two dyke looking paramedics dogging me. Now, let me be clear, I don’t care what sexual orientation anyone is, I am totally fine with whatever, I am just saying, if they looked like metalheads, or punk rockers, or frat boys, or some other stereotype, I’d say that, but they were straight out of central casting dyke paramedics to all appearances, although their clothes were basically civilian clothes.

So, I showed up with an attitude, which wasn’t helped by getting moved to the front of the line when I thought I didn’t need to be seen at all, and now, while I am sitting in the chairs in the hallway outside the exam rooms in this converted building, there are two mean looking dykes staring me down, not saying a word.

I look at them a few times, stare back for a bit, with some attitude, then proceed to ignore them. A doctor happens by, and he spent some time in the U.S., and so HE introduces himself, shakes my hand and chats me up for a bit. I respond favorably to that, and we have a pleasant conversation. Unfortunately, just as he walks up an introduces himself to me, one of the dykes starts saying “English? English?” towards me from several meters down the hall. Now, I have been speaking English with Oleksii since I got here probably for at least ten minutes before at this point, and that, combined with the fact that they were halfway down the hall saying this, I wasn’t sure if they were talking to me, so when at the same time this nice doctor walks up, introduces himself and starts chatting me up, I just give them a quizzical look and turn to him and engage him. In retrospect, I am sure that was very disrespectful. As I would learn later, one of the two women was the head of the 113th’s medical service. The same woman that odered us to stay on position when she knew we were going to be hit. It also probably didn’t help that she likely knew who I was, and recently I had basically refused to take an operating room technician position in her stabilization point.

It gets better. And by better, I mean worse.

The two paramedic looking ladies with no rank insignia continue dogging me throughout my conversation with the nice doctor. They are just shooting daggers at me the whole time. Or, at least one of them is, and the other is clearly watching me very closely, I assume assessing me for a concussion via my behavior. Now, say what you will about folks, but it has been my experience that a lot of lesbians, especially ones that present as bull dykes have a chip on their shoulder, often hate all men (fair), and expect that they aren’t going to be treated fairly or with respect by men, especially if they don’t present as traditional females. So, I expect that my ignoring their belated, half-assed attempt to communicate with them and instead carry on a friendly conversation with a male doctor, who was her subordinate, after I had already flouted her authority by basically telling my CO that I wouldn’t be doing the role she assigned for me to work as operating room tech in her stabilization point, I think all this may have rubbed her further the wrong way. Plus, you know the guilt, from having gotten us blown up.

Nonetheless, I am a medical professional, and I have worked in medicine for over thirty years. Now, I realize I come from the United States, and cultures are different, but I am of the belief that cultures aren’t necessary equal. Ukrainian medicine strikes me as rather unprofessional in some regards, and part of that is both machismo culture and a legacy of Soviet times, where they often just treat their patients as objects, not people to be respected and treated with dignity. In the United States I would NEVER even consider putting hands on a patient without introducing myself, telling the person my rank, and what I was going to do. This extends even to comatose patients, my ICU patients I ALWAYS extended the same courtesy to, for a variety of very good reasons.

So when the angry bull dyke came over without introducing herself and telling me what she was going to do, and just started putting hands on me, I think I was very restrained in just giving her a what-the-actual-fuck lady look. She walked over to me, and put her hands on my head, poking at my hat, which I later discovered had several holes burned in it from embers when I went between the flames inside the burning building, then she pulled it off my head and began palpating my skull with her hands. Without saying a word to me.

Obviously, this did not help my attitude any.

After that, she handed me my cap back, and I imagine I angrily jammed my fleece camouflage skull cap back on (because I, as usual, was in uniform) and she went back to standing next to what appeared to be her partner, a little down the hallway. Continuing to glare at me of course. Which at this point, I am pretty sure I returned in kind.

After that, I was seen by an actual paramedic for a few minutes. She said I was fine. It was a very rudmentary examination. I walked in, and when she asked, I said I wasn’t wounded, so she didn’t have me disrobe at all. She just asked me some questions and checked my eyes and ears. She said there was some trauma to my left ear, but the eardrum wasn’t burst, and she didn’t believe I had a concussion, but that I would need to be further checked out at a hospital in Kharkiv, that this was just preliminary. I wasn’t happy to hear that, as I just wanted to go home. Somehow. My keys were in my backpack in the burning building.

When I come out of the exam room, Oleksii has been checked out too, and he tells me that they are going to drive us the rest of the way. I balked at that. I had already proven I could drive just fine, and the medic just said I didn’t have a concussion, so I insisted I would drive us to the hospital in Kharkiv. From here, probably about a two hour drive still, with us having to detour far around the bridges the Russians had blown over the river.

He wasn’t hopeful about this, but said we’d try. So then we had a parlay with the two dykes, who at this point, I still had no idea who they were, and I just thought they were two more paramedics. The head of the 113th doesn’t speak any English so Oleksii is interpreting for us. He tells her I want to drive us. She refuses. I insist. She refuses again, and asks Oleksii something. My Ukrainian is nearly non-existent, but sometimes I can understand what they are saying and I hear him say something along the lines of “We are the International Legion, he’s an American, he kind of does whatever he wants”. He’s kind of right, but she is the medical director for the 113th, I’ve already defied her once by refusing to come work for her as an operating room tech, and she doesn’t like me, my attitude, probably men in general, and I appeared to diss her when she tried to talk to me, and now I am trying to defy her in front of all of her staff.

Yeah.

So we go back and forth a few more times, she is asking for the keys to my ambulance, and I am refusing and insisting I am going to drive. She has the trump card though, I have just been blown up, so despite the fact her medic said I don’t have a concussion, she can claim I do, or may have one since I haven’t been fully, properly, checked out and force me.

I was tempted to just tell Oleksii to follow me and walk out, but I didn’t want things to get physical. I have worked in an Emergency Room, and if this was playing out in my ER, staff, and security most likely would have physically restrained the patient from leaving on their own.

So, finally I pulled the keys out of my pocket. At this point, Oleksii is standing to the side of us, but between us, so she is maybe three meters away, so I toss the keys to her in a slow, underhanded toss.

She just stands there.

Letting the keys smack her in the belly and fall to the floor, where she has to pick them up.

The medical director of the 113th Regiment. Right in front of her staff.

Needless to say she isn’t pleased. She says something to Oleksii, and then says something else to him, and he turns to me and says “Why did you do that”? I said that I thought she would catch them and just stared at her.

She angrily says something else to him, and at this point I am done with all this, and so I decide discretion is the better part of valor, and to eat a little crow and I say: “You know what, that was rude, I apologize”.

Then we all troop outside, to board one of their ambulances and ours. Oleksii is going to ride with the two ladies in the front of their ambulance, and I am going to be a passenger, in the front of my own ambulance while some Ukrainian dude drives it back to a location halfway to Kharkiv for us to leave our ambulance there for some damned reason, and wait for yet another ambulance to show up to take us the rest of the way to Kharkiv.

I am even more pissed now. We are putting two targets on the road for no reason. We are putting wear and tear on two vehicles and burning gas in two vehicles for no reason. And we are going to leave our only four wheel drive ambulance in the middle of nowhere, that will require another hours long trip by two people from our unit to pick up, when we are already short handed trying to help the 113th staff multiple stabilization points and our “rear area” aid station. It’s all so stupid, I am fucking pissed.

So, the one injury I do kind of have in addition to the trauma to my left ear and whatever is up with my brain is that I definitely am suffering from some smoke inhalation having gone into a burning building twice. I have been coughing some throughout the time I have been at this stabilization point. So what does the guy who is going to drive me do as he gets into my truck? He lights up a cigarette. Without asking me. His patient. My truck. Me with a fresh smoke inhalation injury. Fucking inconsiderate, unprofessional asshole.

Then, before I can say anything, he rolls down the window. The broken window. Or more properly, he tries to roll it down. As he starts to do so it drops to the bottom of the door. It is more than a dozen degrees below freezing out and we have more than an hour drive. He dicks around with it, while driving, multiple times, failing every time and asking me how to fix it, and all I can tell him is it just broke yesterday, and Oleksii was the one who somehow miraculously got it back in place, and I have no idea how to do so without tearing the door apart, since this time it has fallen all the way to the bottom, and I don’t have any tools with me.

So we drive back with very cold air blowing in the cab, totally overpowering the heater, while he continues to smoke, while I keep coughing.

Our next stop turns out to be the house that the dykes are renting. We have to wait here with them until another ambulance shows up to take just Oleksii and I back the rest of the way Kharkiv. So I am hanging out with this very pissed off lady in her living room until then.

We sit on separate couches in her living room and basically ignore eachother for a couple of hours until the other ambulance shows up.

Amusingly, her cat came over and sat with me, not her, and I petted it most of that time, smiling at her.

Eventually, the other ambulance finally showed up, and we just managed to get into the hospital before it was swamped by the morning rush of patients, trapping us there for many more hours. There, the neurologist said to me “Why are you here”? And I said; “That’s what I said”. She said I didn’t have a concussion either, but somehow in the end, my paperwork shows me as having a concussion. Later, I would learn that not only was the angry lady I had so much trouble with not only the medical director of the 113th, but in order to save face, that she was telling everyone that my behavior was due to my having a concussion. Now, I’ll admit at this point that I feel like between the weird fear response thing after being blown up, and some of the mental struggles I have been having since, that I suspect I did get some sort of brain injury from that huge blast so close to me, but I don’t think I would have behaved any differently if I hadn’t just been blown up. I do wonder how I would have behaved differently if she had any rank insignia, or someone had informed me of her authority, but I still doubt I would have acted any differently. If I had known at the time that she was the person responsible for us being blown up…well, I might have been even more difficult to deal with.

My Oddyssey never ends. I will cover how I dealt with not having keys to my apartment, not having any cash or any bankcards, and having lost all my field gear at another time, as well as the Odyssey that was the next two months, traveling all over Ukraine in order to get my passport replacement process started, to repeatedly return to REDACTED to try and get my discharge papers from the army, and to return to the American embassy once again to finally pick up my passport.

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