THE HARDEST THING IN WAR IS… waiting

Understandably, saying what is truly the hardest thing in the war in principle is impossible. Everything there is both hard and brutal. The “most” of anything barely exists there. The hardest, the most terrifying, the most brutal.

With my regiment's soldier, 38-year-old Andrii, call sign “Serb”, that time we talked about waiting. What does it means to sit in a war and to wait. To wait for… no one knows what.

“Where do we start,” the soldier laughs. From “I was born, on such and such a date, then I was baptised ant then I went to…” he asks and laughts again.

“No,” I say. “Let's talk about patience in war”.

He's not surprised at all about my suggestion, because he knows very well, what I am talking about. War is very multifaceted, truly not the TikTok version, that a casual observer sees from the outside. It tests you in every way, not only on the battlefield. Sometimes it simply sits you down to wait.

“Is it possible to learn to wait in war?” I ask him.

“I don't know,” he answers. “To learn? Maybe not to learn, maybe it's more like to get used to it. Yeah, you get used to it. And this isn't just about the army, about waiting in the army, in the war. It seems to me that nobody in general likes to “just wait” and even more so, to wait for no one knows what. Well, you get used to it, you come to terms with it, and still - it kills you. Well, you understand, not in the literal sense of 'killing’, but that constant uncertainty”

“Andrii,” I say to him, “I have generally come to understand, that in war there is an insane amount of waiting. Not at all, the way most people imagine war, as some kind of social network action, where something is constantly happening somewhere, exploding, shooting.”

“Well, the structure of the army is very drawn out,” he answers, “and everything is arranged so, that you can shed responsibility from yourself; all decisions are made by the commander, accordingly, the higher and more senior the commander, who makes the decision is, the less responsibility falls on the majority of soldiers. And it seems to me, that all the time, everything stretches out for precisely that reason, that one is simply waiting until somewhere out there, some most distant commander takes on the responsibility. That, it seems to me, is precisely why everything drags on like this.”

The war is NOT ONLY ABOUT BRUTALITIES.

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