My life "BEFORE" and "AFTER"

For some time now I have been living a life between the “before” and “after”. Before leaving for the frontline. And after returning to Lithuania. And then - preparing to leave again. Three years of this.

Ah, there is also this stage called “already there”. Today, I am already there.

After coming back from Kursk direction, this time I recovered with great difficulty. Dark, bleak, and hopeless, that is what I experienced there. Today, I spoke with my regiment's psychologist, who had been in that direction from the very first day of January.

"How are you?”, I asked.

“Fine”, he said.

“But how are you really?” I insisted

I got no answer. Most likely we, like many others, simply buried everything as deep as we could, and the question “how are we really?" will only become an answer years from now.

“A civilian finds it hard to understand, how you can watch death for an entire day,” a soldier's wife once told me; we were speaking about the gulf between the civilian and military worlds. I have long been hearing soldiers, about how civilians not only fail to support them, but often actively push them away. Dishearteningly, the soldier's wife also reaffirms this, as she tells me her story.

“A civilian in no way understands, how you can watch death for an entire 24 hours,” she says. “Or, when young people die on my husband's hands, how heavily he bears all of this. My best support to him is - to listen, when he wants to talk about it. And to share silence with him, when he wants to remain silent.”

“I remember his first combat deployment, and I was at the same village where I am now, though, at that time I was staying with friends. He wrote to me that he was going out on a combat mission and might be out of contact for three days. Back then, he was an infantryman; for me, of course, this situation was very hard and frightening. And then, you know, I fell asleep and dreamt that he was wearing a completely black suit - like a diver's suit, something like that. And in my dream, he was covered in some kind of black dirt, and everything is black from that soil, he is carrying something black on himself, and black is everywhere. His face is black; his hands are black. The feeling, if I were to describe it, I would call it 'the breath of death’.”

“I woke up, it was so hard for me; I could even say that I had a panic attack. Later, when my husband had possibility to contact again and was able to reach me, he wrote: ‘I never thought I had enough strength in me to carry a dead person on myself’. Yes, the hardest thing, he experiences, is when he loses his soldiers”.

The woman says, she very much supports and understands her husband and his fears. “Every human life will have to be accounted for, and I mean, not here, because accounting for it here - is not frightening. It will be frightening, when we all stand in front of God”

Sixteen degrees here and the trees are still bare.

I thank the Media Support Fund for supporting the post series "War in Ukraine: The Gap Between the Military and Society”