Never Mind That - It's Just the War

By Robert Harris

Ah, Kharkiv. The "fortress city" of Ukraine. A city of 1.4 million, situated half an hour's drive from the Russian border with no natural frontiers to protect it from invasion, and no shield except the iron will of its defenders. When I came here for the summer, I wondered "what am I going to write about this city that hasn't already been written?" As it turns out, the answer didn't come from the anyone in uniform. It came from the children. See, for Westerners living in Ukraine during wartime, one of the most frequently-asked questions from those back home is "so, what's it like living in a war zone?" And ever since arriving in Kharkiv, my answer has always been the same.

"You get used to the air raid sirens. Getting used to the fact that the children are used to the air raid sirens... that's harder."

For those of us who have been in life-and-death lines of work before, especially those where combat was part of the job (soldiers, cops, corrections officers, and so forth) it's not that hard to walk into danger again. We have a sort of mental switch that we just toggle to its combat-zone setting, and move on. "Incoming drone? Oh well. Bills have to be paid, classes have to be taught, work's got to get done, war or no war." And when we get home, whether it's at the end of the day or at the end of a deployment, it takes some time but we reset the switch back to "civilian life" settings.

What makes the everyday life of Ukrainians -or Ukraine residents- different from this, especially in the frontline city of Kharkiv, is that we find ourselves doing our everyday civilian jobs like teaching or distributing food or typing away at a keyboard (meaning our brain tells you that we ought to be in our civilian headspace) but still always on alert because death could come flying out of the sky at any moment on Iranian-made wings, and lives are riding on our ability to react in an instant (all of which are typical of our combat headspace). Still, after three and a half years, most people who have experienced life under fire (and by now the entire city has) have managed to make that adjustment. It's like something in our brain says "oh, okay. This time death came to visit us, instead of us going to visit it."

So we adapt.

At least, we tell ourselves we adapted.

Air-raid sirens, explosions, machine-gunfire, the unmistakable lawn-mower-esque sound of a Shahed within half a kilometer... we come to accept these things as "the new normal." Like the youth in Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, once we've looked death in the eyes and seen, after all, it's only death, we get used to it. It's all part of the plan. Danger is something we expect to face. Something we expect ourselves to face.I've never woken up in a panic from the sirens. Or the explosions. When I was in the middle of teaching an online lesson in front of my window and a drone struck the apartment across the street from me, I didn't freeze up. When the sirens interrupt my class and I have to move twenty students from their classroom to a bomb-shelter, I don't have a moment's hesitation; I just go. When I was in Dnipro and had the dubious "luck" to be there when the much-overhyped-and-underwhelming "Oreschnik" woke me up by its first re-entry vehicle hitting within a kilometer of where I was sleeping, My only thought was "whatever that was, I'd better find my phone so I can get footage of it." Why should I be afraid? The worst they can do is kill me, right?

But then, there's the sound of children playing outside.

And for this writer, that's when my brain, unable to grasp that the "here is war" reality settings and the "here are children" reality settings are in fact running simultaneously, cycles through a sequence of possibilities. "The war is just a nightmare and the sounds of the children outside are waking me up from it, right? No. I'm overworked and sleep-deprived and it's a hallucination, right? No. I'm having some sort of Old-Testament-Style prophetic vision then, right? ...No. No, that really is the sound of kids playing on the playground, with a war going on around them."

And every instinct in me, the parent, the teacher whose job is to give students a better future, the ex-CPS officer whose job was to protect children from danger, all tell me to grab the parents by the collar and shake them and ask "are you crazy?! Get these kids out of here!" You know, as though they have anywhere to go.

The sirens sound off again. The warning app on my phone joins in this time. "Attention! Air Raid Alert! Proceed to the nearest shelter... Don't be careless. You're overconfidence is your weakness!" And I'd really love to meet the geek who decided every notification from the air raid app should have a Star Wars quote in its English translation; the "all-clear" notification even ends with "May the Force be with you." I digress.

The alarm goes off, and the children go right on playing. One or two of them walk up to their nearby parents. "What's the incoming?" One of them asks. "Shaheds? A Kinzhal?" His voice shows no more alarm than if he were asking 'what's for dinner?'

"Drones," his mother answers, checking her phone. "Shaheds, on the border between Sumy and Kharkiv. Nothing to worry about."

Oh, is that all? It's just a Shahed. It's just a 3 meter by 4 meter flying bomb capable of leveling a house, with a robot brain programmed to seek out civilian homes. That's all. "NBD," as the young folks say.

And the few kids who looked up at the sound of the siren go right back out onto the playground. They all keep laughing and playing, like this is completely normal. And then, that's when it hits me.

For them... it is.

Because as surreal as it sounds, there's no other alternative. It's easy to say "take shelter every time there is an air raid threat," but the reason they can't comes down to math. There are 24 hours in a day, and the entire oblast spends an average of 23.8 of them under air raid threats. Everyone here has developed a definition of the distinction between "safety" and "danger" that is more than a little different from the rest of the world. "The siren went off? Keep an eye on the phone. If you hear the S.A.M's firing, that means there's something within a few kilometers. Time to get inside. When you hear the AA guns firing, that means something is REALLY close and it's time to get in the hallway behind an extra wall." And we catalog that list of protocols in our mind without dwelling on the fact that the moment the siren went off we knew we were all, including the children, in danger... or the fact that if a drone hits head-on, that wall won't be enough to save us.

That's why there's already an adage here in Kharkiv. "If you're going to run to the shelter every time there's incoming fire, take a change-of-address form with you." It's the kind of mindset any soldier or cop can recognize. The work we do puts us in the company of death, so we learn to carry on like it doesn't frighten us. It does, but if we acknowledge that then we'll never get anything done.

And this mindset, typical of soldiers and cops, is exactly the mindset the children have here in Kharkiv.

But when I'm awakened by the sounds of children playing outside, or when I'm dozing off in the breakroom at work and I'm awakened by my students laughing on their way to class, any time I'm jolted from sleep to consciousness by the sounds of children, it's this perfectly normal, everyday, home-and-hearth sound, rather than the noise of war, that makes my blood run cold. Because I know I'm in the middle of a war zone. I'm constantly aware of that inescapable fact. I chose it. I came to it voluntarily. But my brain is screaming at me, "these kids are not supposed to be here! Get them out of here!" And it isn't until my brain finishes rebooting that I realize, "actually, the kids are indeed supposed to be here. The war isn't."

Because here, danger is not something temporary that they can just hide from for a few minutes, or a few hours, or even a few days. It's all day, every day. Winged death can come calling at any minute (and it's quite, quite, QUITE well-established that Russia loves hitting targets filled with children). We get used to the idea that we ourselves are in constant danger. That's easy. But here, the children, children for God's sake, have had to get used to the same reality. And if the children hid from danger every time it raised its head, they'd never play.

So, they play.

They run around. They climb on the monkey bars. They push each other on the swings, or the merry-go-round. The older ones play basketball. They do what you'd expect children to do: laugh and play like they don't have a care in the world. All to the background music of air raid sirens. Because this is their work. Games have to be played, fun has to be had... War or no war. They do this in spite of the explosions. In spite of the sirens. In spite of the presence of death all around them, under constant fire from a lunatic who openly declares his intention to massacre them. Because in the world they are growing up in, that's just the way life is.

It's their normal.

For the children of Kharkiv, the constant presence of death is their "normal."

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Robert Harris is a teacher in Lviv and the author of Smells like BULL-Shevik to ME! - A Conservative Talks to Conservatives About Russian Lies.