Dmitro, my good Ukrainian friend, lost his daughter in the war. Julia fell late in the spring of 2022 during the conflict of Siewierodonieck. She was a medical rescuer, a volunteer who had a full-scale invasion or thought to wear a uniform. She didn't want to follow her father, a professional soldier. And yet she died on the front. – Revenge on the occupiers now gives my life meaning – Dmytro confessed to me after his daughter died. “I don’t know what will happen erstwhile the war is over,” he added.
In times erstwhile I was dealing with conflict reporting in Iraq and Afghanistan, I met quite a few people who lost individual close in the war. Among them was fresh Year's Eve's father, a paratrooper who died in Iraq in 2004, an avid cyclist. – On his last bike he spent six 1000 zlotys, then it was quite a few money. And he was in the basement for hours, moonlighting, reworking, improving. He graduated from mechanical engineering and had a knack for specified work. Before leaving for Iraq, he ordered a peculiar frame, another 2,000 spent on it. She had already come after his death... – the parent mentioned.
– Unwanted souvenir for a son's hobby – I asked.
– You know – the man smiled lightly – Sylvester, before he went, put his bike on the closet. I only took him down once, took him to the cemetery and took a image at the grave. And then I put it back. He was lying there, in his room, 12 years. I didn't have the guts to do anything to him.
Maria, Grzegorz's mother, who died together with Sylwest, admitted: "At home we have an altar where we smoke candles, we put flowers. And we live on, acknowledging that this must have been the case," she said 12 years after losing her son. She seemed reconciled with reality, but erstwhile I asked for pictures (for a memorial article), she fell into pieces. Evidence of increasing up combined with the cognition that there would be no further sequence, restored pain and caused tears.
Monica, the wife of an Iraqi rebel soldier killed, didn't want to be a widow. She remarried, became a mother. “Memoirs from that life are little clear, they go away,” she told me years ago. I say goodbye to them gradually, as I erstwhile did, slowly, I say goodbye to the people who killed my beloved man.
“No, I will never forgive the Russians,” Dmytro wrote. In the summertime of 2023, we lost contact. I don't know if he's inactive cultivating his hatred.
There are various measures of war ravages, Trauma is 1 of them.. You can even capture it in statistics. According to medical practice, post-traumatic stress affects on average a 4th of those sent to the uniform war. We know that it is an extended disease, that its effects (in the form of violence, alcoholism, breakdown of household ties) besides affect the closest soldier. According to the Polish MON, 50,000 military missions in Iraq and Afghanistan came through. On this basis, we can about estimation that The trauma resulting from Poland's participation in both wars affects respective tens of thousands of people. A tiny town. Social problem? On a larger scale, no.
Meanwhile, between 2014 and the beginning of 2022, over 400,000 Ukrainians crossed the Donbasa front. In the realities of full-scale war, this number reached 2 million. all turn on the front line is another 1000 future veterans. And PTSD victims.
Yet, trauma will not be limited to the military survivors and their families. It will besides take down the dead and the dead. It will spread among hundreds of thousands of civilians who have been trapped in the areas of combat. It will call for "its" in a multimillion-dollar mass of city residents exposed to rocket attacks. He'll get any refugees. Of course, a soldier who experienced the cruelty of direct combat will stay more susceptible than a fugitive sentenced to discomfort due to leaving home, relatives, functioning in a new, alien environment. But sensitivity is besides a individual trait, and it may turn out that a footless veteran can cope more easy with a disability than physically the full Kiev resident, who ate fear erstwhile watching manoeuvring missiles and kamikaze drones flying over the house. Either way, it will no longer be a “little town” but a “kakapaza of the country”. A macro-scale problem that will make further dramas long after they stay silent. Suffice to say that by 2010 suicide had committed 100,000 U.S. veterans of the Vietnam War, almost twice as much as the losses incurred in the fighting.
“I fear that the best will go away,” confided to me in the autumn of 2022 a reader, Polka circulating between Kiev and Warsaw. She meant failure among military personnel, "a defect in social tissue, felt for the next decades," as she wrote. Men "capable of controlled force and at the same time morally organized and caring". I did not share and inactive do not share this pessimism, despite my awareness of the devastating effects of war. Because, of course, quite a few valuable people are going to die. From the position of their families, they are unrepeatable losses, from the level of local communities or professional groups – similarly. But we must remember that border situations – like war – besides make “new people”. It may be a fact banned by literature, but inactive a fact. What qualities of this fresh quality will prevail is not foregone. The way and circumstances in which the war will end will be decisive. Let us stick with the soldiers: will they be sentenced to post-frontal bitterness, or will their optimism of rebuilding? Will Ukraine divide Germany's destiny after the large War, erstwhile crowds of demobilized men became the basis for dangerous ideology, or the United States after the second planet conflict, erstwhile veterans, who were engrossed in life, contributed to incredible economical growth and demographic leap? In fact, small depends on Ukraine and much on the West – whether it abandons it or, on the contrary, helps to get back on its feet.
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Quoted statements by the wife and parents of WP soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan come from a book entitled In Our Memory. Iraq, Afghanistan – 2003–2014 (Military Publishing Centre for Civic Education, 2016) to which I co-author. I had these talks in spring 2016.
