The soldier next door

Olexander* knew it was time to evacuate. “We woke up at 5 a.m. from the sound of a missiles that hit the former soviet military base territory near the town and realized that the war has been begun..”

Russian forces had been advancing for months, and if they waited much longer it might be too late. Before dawn, he awakened his wife and son, packed them into the car with what little they could manage, and left his hometown - a small agricultural city in Southern Ukraine about an hour’s drive from Crimea.

“What was life like for you before the war?” I asked.

“Life for us was great,” he recalls. “When you are like us, in your mid 30’s or 40’s, you don’t need much to be happy. You have a job, kids in school, kindergarten was close, it was very quiet. Stable. We had a nice home in a small town… after a decade of living in the big city, (Kiev) we had returned to my hometown and it was nice. We lived on the bank of a river, half a mile from the forest. I worked in managerial operations and logistics - mostly food manufacturing.”

Even so, he was keenly aware of his family’s proximity to the Crimea region which had been invaded and annexed by Russia in 2014.

“There wasn’t much of a military presence in our community, because it was such a small town. At that time, Ukraine was limited in their military force, so they had to prioritize fighting and defending the major cities. The rural south of Ukraine wasn’t in that priority status because of the limited quantity of army (personnel).”

Using Crimea as a foothold, Russian tanks rolled into his neighborhood just three hours after Olexander and his family headed out of town.

“We drove all day, and stopped after 600 miles on the road to rest in a hotel. It had become mandatory for all men to serve in the military, so I drove my wife and son to the Hungarian border where a friend who lived in Slovakia picked them up. They stayed with him 2 days, and then left for the United States to stay with my wife’s best friend.”

Olexander then turned the car around and headed directly to the military recruiting center. He joined the “Territorial Defense” - essentially an equivalent to the National Guard made up of regionally designated battalions who come from largely civilian lives to support light infantry needs.

“I had never served before, but in that situation everybody wants to be helpful. I got no training at all. In the first month it was total chaos. No one country can be prepared for such a level of war and attacks. What we have in Ukraine now is the biggest war in Europe since World War 2. You cannot be fully prepared for that kind of thing.”

He would spend the next two years serving the Ukrainian army while his wife and son did their best to rebuild their lives in the United States.

“I’m not trying to brag like I'm a hero. My wife says ‘thank God you’re smart not handsome’,” Olexander laughs.“For people who have never been in the army - they think 90% is paratroopers or soldiers attacking a position but it's not. At least half of any army is accountants, logistics, support. You can always find and train a person who can be in the trenches. For the army it's complicated to find a qualified skilled person in logistics or accounting. I was a battalion accountant responsible for wages. Later, I was responsible for the food supply of the brigade. I was responsible for 2,500 people in different places. It was like what I was doing in my civilian career. It wasn’t so dangerous or risky compared to the front lines. When I was an accountant I was 10 miles from the front line. Every day we woke up to rockets and missiles.”

“Every kind of service is important in the army, it does not matter if you are a marine, paratrooper or accountant. I respect every department or branch, especially guys in trenches.”

In June of 2023, Russian forces bombed a hydroelectric dam and man-made reservoir near Olexander’s home. The reservoir was over 800 square miles, and its destruction has caused massive flooding of nearby towns as well as an ecological nightmare as sewage and chemicals flowed into the towns, into the river, and into the Black Sea.

“Our whole agricultural system was dependent on the irrigation from the reservoir,” he explains. “Now it’s empty. Now it’s a salt swamp.”

He leans back from my kitchen table, and gazes out the window at something no one else can see.

“After serving for two years, I still have mixed feelings about leaving Ukraine and leaving the army. I feel a guilt. I left my friends and my country ... When I feel any guilt or shame for leaving my country and my brothers in arms, I recall that none of them blamed me, even the other way around, everyone was glad I was leaving. I send money to them, from every paycheck, helping covering their unit's needs, That's the least I can do.

“What has your experience been here in the United States?”

“It’s a great country. The wealthiest, the strongest in the world. Here there is so much opportunity. It’s not so easy, for sure… There are pros and cons, I worry about health care. But I like this country because here we are like most of the people. We are all different. The United States is a nation of immigrants, so even if your English isn’t perfect, it’s normal. This country was founded by immigrants, and immigrants have always been the driving force pushing the nation forward.”

Olexander noted the amplified political polarization that has altered our systems both here and around the world.

“Especially after social media, it's so easy to manipulate. Unfortunately, now it's so difficult to win with real world issues. It becomes all about these far right or far left things. Everybody wants to be happy right now, and to blame someone else if it doesn't happen. It's not just an American thing, it's the whole world.”

With no path to green card status, Olexander and his family live in a state of unease watching ICE raids take place across the country. Immigrants from Ukraine who have left due to the Russian invasion are granted ‘ temporary humanitarian parole’ - a status that can be terminated at the order of the current administration, as was done to the temporary parole program for Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan immigrants earlier this year.

“We pay taxes, we work, but we have no legal pathway to citizenship. We don’t even have rights to political asylum.”

Olexander’s story didn’t come to me from a headline or a government report. It was recounted over my blue checkered tablecloth, told in the quiet voice of a neighbor who has lived through the unthinkable. And maybe that’s what we need to remember: wars are not abstractions. The survivors are real people, sitting in ordinary chairs, carrying extraordinary burdens.

As he says it:

“Everybody wants to believe that it's never going to happen to them. Until it comes to your home, you don’t realize that it’s real.”

*names have been changed.

Sofia DeMartino is a Gazette editorial fellow. sofia.demartino@thegazette.com