Since the war began, I’ve lost many of the emotions connected with death, because I work with death here. Recently a comrade was killed—someone I’d been drinking coffee with earlier that same morning. He was talking about the usual things soldiers exchange: “Where are you from? Do you have a family, kids? Who were you before the war? How did you end up in the battalion? What do you do? When’s your leave?”
By evening, he was gone. A drone hit him and, in a single moment, erased the entire history of his life. Three months have passed since that day, and I can’t even remember his name anymore. There’s no other option but to move on. Lie down to sleep, calm yourself, and watch a video about a vacation in Madeira.
From the combat diary of a UAF medic: “you pass the bag on”
For some time now, I haven’t liked summer. In higher temperatures, insects get to a corpse quickly. Within a day, or at most two: the eyes, mouth, and ears are covered with a white, fluffy cotton of maggots. The stench of a rotting body triggers uncontrollable retching, but that can’t matter—you have to search him and find some documents confirming his identity so he doesn’t go on as “John Doe,” “unknown.” Better that I suffer for a moment than that his family later has to wait a long time for the body, the funeral, and all the formalities. So you stuff a piece of fabric into your nose, dig out a bit of metal, plastic, or a military ID booklet, label the black bag, take off your gloves, pass the bag on, return to the shack, and fall asleep to the sounds of the ocean in Madeira.
It’s worse when a severely wounded man ends up with you and, in the meantime, his heart stops. You immediately start cardiopulmonary resuscitation—compressing the chest, counting, shouting, “twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty,” while your buddy raises the Ambu bag. One, two. And you jump back in, count again—one, two, jump, count, one, two. And so it goes until you reach the stabilization point with the casualty.
After an action like that you’re drenched in sweat, soaked as if you’d just stepped out of the shower—only fully clothed. You hand the man over to the doctors, and from there they work their magic: injections, a defibrillator, electric shocks. You sit in the corner of the room, waiting for that distinctive beeping of a pulse. This time, you don’t hear it. Death.
A report to headquarters: we couldn’t pull him through, two-hundred. And once again that utopian thought comes into your head—that in a moment I’ll be back at base, lying among the trees in Fanal Forest.
Read too: Christmas on the front. Sasza went home and everyone envies him [WAR DIARY]
“The police won’t get here anyway. It’s too dangerous.”
Another time we had to pick up a civilian. He was lying dead by the side of the road, next to a pack of tea, a can of luncheon meat, his documents. A small guy, a kind of “uncle” type with a red beard. Good thing he was light—it made it easier to load him into the bag. We don’t know why he died; maybe he was hit by a car, because at night people drive without headlights and you can’t see anyone. But there’s no blood, no broken bones. In the end, we don’t really care what actually happened to him. It’s dangerous here, drones are flying around, so we quickly collect the body and get out.
We delivered him, pass him on to the next team. They ask what to do with him—I answer honestly that I don’t care. Maybe take him to the morgue, say we found him by the roadside near the village of Kalynivka. If the police want, I can come and show them the place where we found him, but we all know the police won’t go there. It’s too dangerous.
And again, back to base: sleeping bag, YouTube. Death circles everywhere here. It has become normal, ordinary. You don’t think about it—only about how one day I’ll fall asleep in Madeira.
Read too: Konstantin Gadauskas: “In Bucha we conquered death”
About the author of the series From the Combat Diary of a UAF Medic
Volodymyr Huliuk is a combat medic with the 30th Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. He volunteered for the army in February 2022. Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he worked as a guide in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone and in the capital, Kyiv, leading, among others, Polish tour groups. He has a wife and two daughters who are waiting in Kyiv for their husband and father to return from the front. You can support Volodymyr Huliuk’s unit through a fundraiser run by the UA Future Foundation, dedicated specifically to this UAF battalion.
