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In response to
"‘It’s tense’: Under constant fire, Ukrainian soldiers dismiss any suggestion that they cede land."
by
crash davis
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What it’s like to be shelled
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LYSYCHANSK, Ukraine — You’re driving on the edge of an eastern Ukrainian city, speeding down a cement road, when the ground in front of you explodes.
You’ve made this drive before. Usually the windows are cracked so you can hear outside: Listening to Russian shelling and Ukrainian artillery fire is important so that you know what’s flying through the air around you.
But on this day in mid-June, all you remember is the ground jetting into the air in a black geyser of dirt and smoke, and your brain trying to rationalize what’s happening. Watching the blast is like watching a car crash, your brain trying to place the explosion in time and space, trying to tell the rest of your body that it’s OK, that this was supposed to happen.
But it’s not OK, because you watch another black streak descend and explode. It’s closer now and so loud that everything goes quiet.
The single thought: There’s a trench a quarter-mile away at the checkpoint, and you can make it if you drive fast enough.
But it feels as if you were barely moving. On either side of your tin-can Honda crossover there are more explosions. You’ll find out later it was a cluster rocket — little munitions dispensed from a bigger rocket — but at that moment your brain is on mute. You can’t hear the blasts.
You can only see the shrapnel come through the windshield. It puts a hole the size of a quarter right above the hood.
You look at Slava, who’s driving, and expect to hear a scream, but the only noise is the stereo as the shrapnel cuts through a speaker in the dashboard.
How many minutes has it been? One? Two? You’re crouched behind the dash, waiting for it to stop or for you to die. You look up. The outline of a rocket, one you’ve seen before lying on the ground in countless Ukrainian fields, falls out of the sky.
It lands on the road and rolls into the grass.
You’ve just been shelled.
You were caught in the middle of a burst of violence that has gone on for months all over Ukraine. You were lucky; you’re alive. Thousands of others are not, many of them civilians. They are dead or wounded. Their homes were destroyed. Families torn apart.
And it’s not stopping anytime soon.
— The New York Times
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