The Steppe Wolves, Zaporijjia Region
A memory of war, 2023
Crows gather on crooked branches, cloaked against a red-draped sky. They say ’tis September, but already the trees are shorn of leaves and scorched with the effects of bombs, and recently drones dropping white phosphorus, a deadly christmas display of tinsel decorations floating from the sky. You can look but you cannot touch. But if you are in a hole in the ground surrounded by burnt tree trunks you look straight up, and you know they will touch you. A touch is enough to slowly burn like an autumn bonfire.
When you survive, you find you have awarded yourself PTSD and a number of other ailments, until the morning, when the fog arrives, a deadly unknown chemical that they also drop to remind all it is out of the ninth-month midnight.
That was September, the year of no falling leaves, when the crows did not migrate but stayed on the bony trees, immobile.
The Steppe Wolves mobile artillery unit isn’t officially part of Ukraine’s military, The 68-year-old commander — callsign Grandpa — assembled the all-volunteer unit with dozens of Ukrainian and a smattering of foreigners, men mostly over 60 years old who are considered too old to be drafted but still want to fight. Roving behind the front line with truck-mounted rocket launchers, they take orders from field commanders and work with other troops, contributing to the war effort despite lacking official support from the military. “Commanders that provide the Steppe Wolves with targets are happy,” a 63-year-old fighter with the callsign Zorro once said to all, when happiness was an option.
Taran, the commander, said the unit had been attempting to officially join Ukraine’s armed forces to directly receive ammunition — and salaries — but has been unsuccessful.
For dversepoets — prompt from a line of a Walt Whitman poem.
I have no experience of war - but the way you describe it reinforces my resistance to war and conflict. How awful and barbaric the whole thing is, and yet, and yet people must defend and survive. I admire the Steppe Wolves.
You paint a stark picture of the horrors of the war in Ukraine, the suffering, the dying, the burning under the "red-draped sky." "A touch is enough to slowly burn like an autumn bonfire." The human peril, the devilry in the drones and chemical warfare, but especially the phrase "year of no falling leaves" brings into sharp focus what autumn is to a Ukrainian soldier. You couldn't have written it better or touched us more deeply. What a band of brothers the Steppe Wolves are: thank you for telling us about them and I hope they receive official recognition soon. They certainly more than deserve it.