“I Don’t Need Your Scary Truth”

Written by Charles Busch, Executive Director

When it comes to war, it’s hard not to choose a side. The war in Ukraine is like that for me. The Russians invaded without provocation. They are bombing whole cities to rubble. Civilian deaths mount. And already there are claims of war crimes. 

To show solidarity with the Ukrainians, I stood on Main Street in my hometown of Lincoln City, Oregon with about 30 others.  It was a sunny Saturday afternoon.  We waved yellow and blue banners and held cardboard signs saying “Stop the War in Ukraine.” People in the cars that passed waved and honked. Nobody shot us the finger.

Our President announced that the U.S. is sending 33 billion dollars in military weapons to Ukraine. Javelin antitank missiles, M777 howitzers, and HIMARS High Mobility Rocket Systems. As a citizen, I am complicit. As a person committed to nonviolence, I abhor it. The sign I held that Saturday afternoon was a shout to the Russians to stop their killing, not a nod to the Ukrainians to kill Russian soldiers.

What I know about Russian soldiers is little. But surely they are like all front-line troops. They are young. They believe their country would not send them to war if it were not necessary. And each has a mother at home praying for them. Knowing that, just that, should be enough for us to oppose shooting them. But it helps to know more, and I’ve been helped by Russian writer Svetlana Alexievich. 

In 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Alexievich went there. She wanted to know the soldiers, and what they saw and felt. She wanted to know what they could not put in their letters home. She wrote, 

It was my first time in a war. I was so shaken by what I was seeing…how simply soldiers kill, how then they drink vodka, sell, laugh, barter. 

They wanted to get souvenirs for their mothers, but where did they get the money? They sold bullets, which the following day would be used to kill them.

Alexievich’s name is not well-known outside of Russia, though she won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature. She writes neither novels nor poetry, but a genre of her own making: a deft mix of oral testimony, contemporary history, and matter-of-fact reporting. Her writings feature the voices of common people. It is their voices, she believes, that can awaken us to the self-honesty needed for change.  

Alexievich spent weeks in Afghanistan interviewing combat soldiers. She talked with them in mess halls, canteens, and barracks. And at night, sitting on ammunition boxes under the stars. The men needed to talk, and she listened.

SOLDIER: When a bullet hits a person you hear it. It’s an unmistakable sound you never forget, like a kind of wet slap. Your mate next to you falls face down in the sand, sand that tastes as bitter as ash. You turn him over on his back. The cigarette you just gave him is stuck between his teeth still alight.  …Within two or three weeks there’s nothing left of the old you except your name. You’ve become someone else. 

SOLDIER: My first fatality was a chap we pulled out of a tank. “I want to live!” he said—and died. It’s unbearable to look at anything beautiful, like the mountains, or a lilac-covered canyon, straight after you’ve been in battle. 

You just want to blow it all up. Or else you go all soft and quiet. Another lad had a slow death. He lay on the ground and started to name everything he could see, and repeat it, like a child who’s just learning to talk: “Mountains… tree…bird…sky…” Until the end.

 SOLDIER: We probably survived by hating, but I felt full of guilt when I got back home and looked back on it all. Sometimes we massacred a whole village in revenge for one of our boys. Over there it seemed right, here it horrifies me. I remember one little girl lying in the dust like a broken doll with no arms or legs. And yet we went on being surprised that they didn’t love us.

Returning home to Moscow, Alexievich knew she had only half the story. Each soldier carries in him the immensity of a childhood, the circle of all those he loves, and the dream put on hold to put on a uniform. Alexievich sought out wives, widows, girlfriends, mothers, and fathers. And best buddies. She interviewed hundreds and often returned to hear more. She wanted the words that would convey their pain and our complicity in it.

MOTHER (talking about her son Yuri recently returned from the war): At two o’clock one night the doorbell rang and there was Yuri on the doorstep. “Is it you, son? Do you know how late it is? “ He was standing there in the rain, wet through. “Mum, I just wanted to tell you—I’m finding life hard. All those high ideals you taught me, they just don’t exist. Where did you get them all from? How can I carry on living?”

MOTHER: We still can’t bring ourselves to open the suitcase full of his things that they brought with the coffin….He died almost immediately from fifty shrapnel wounds. His last words were, “It hurts, Mama.”…I used to hate Sasha’s killers, now I hate the State which sent him there.”

After a decade of fighting in Afghanistan, the Soviet Army came home in defeat.  By then, Alexievich had completed her book, Zinky Boys. The title refers to the copper coffins in which the dead soldiers were shipped home. The book is hard reading. It shows the wounds that outlive war, and the survivor’s questions which are never answered. It reveals the lie on which every war depends: our violence is justified, and will bring peace.

WOMAN: I shan’t read the whole book, because of an elementary sense of self-preservation. I’m not sure whether we ought to know so much about ourselves. 

 MOTHER: You are saying that I should hate the State and the Party. But I am proud of my son. He died an officer in battle. His comrades loved him. I love the country we used to live in, the U.S.S.R., because my son died for it. And I hate you! I don’t need your scary truth.

Today, Ukrainian soldiers point rifles at Russian soldiers and Russian soldiers point rifles at Ukrainian soldiers. They do not know the name of the person in their sights, or how scared he is. Had the two of them met elsewhere, at a soccer game or campground or chess match, they would greet one another. Remark on the weather. Ask, “Where are you from?” And if the spark is there, they would sit down to talk, have a smoke, share a meal, trade jokes. And after, promise to stay in touch. “Come visit. Really. You’ll love my mom’s cooking. You can stay with us.” 

But today they fight a war they did not choose. They aim to kill one another. Some will be buried on home ground, others shipped home in copper coffins.   

You and I cannot stop this war, but there is something we can do: we can refuse to support the use of violence by either side. We can choose the larger ground of shared humanity. Because front-line soldiers everywhere are the same. They are young. They believe their country would not send them to war if it were not necessary. And each has a mother at home praying for them.

*Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War, by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Julia and Robin Whitby, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1992