If there is a hell, it sounds like our place.
I hope none of you will ever have to be on a battlefield like ours in Ukraine where getting shot at is genuinely not the scariest thing happening.
We've gotten to the point here by now, where - constant, groundshaking - detonations all around us don't even make us twitch anymore, literally. The incomings - mortars, grads, uragans, cluster bombs, phosphorous bombs, tank rounds, yeah that's it basically - are so frequent and so close that everybody who can't handle it has left by now, after shitting their pants (quite literally), and the few who can handle it for whatever fucked up reasons have gotten so used to it that we don't even look up or stop our conversations anymore when shit's blowing up.
I've never felt it so much how 'relative' a feeling of safety is. In Kyiv people were hiding in the bunkers when the air raid alert went off and started freaking downtown when the suburbs were hit. I also thought that's bad, hearing the detonations at the edges of the city, and was concerned. At least there, like almost everywhere else far enough behind the front, they have a beginning and end siren whereas in Dnipro it just sounds for hours and hours depending how long the air raid alert lasts. So I got completely desensitized to sirens living there for a few weeks. Just in time to move to the places where there are no sirens anymore because if there were they would be sounding 24/7.
At the fob I thought it's bad when the incomings are so close that the ground is shaking and you find uxo 300m next to the base afterwards. And I thought it's bad when that happens multiple times a week. At the forward outpost (a basement, like almost all of them) I thought it's bad when you get direct hits right into the building on top of you, when the ceiling is shaking, the basement walls are vibrating, concrete pieces are raining down on you and the whole place gets dusted up. And I thought it's bad that this actually happened every single day.
But no, turns out all of that is actually pretty harmless stuff from my new perspective ('relatively' speaking). Now I feel safe at the fob and almost safe at the outpost. Because at the new 'base'....
We literally start to feel unsafe when we hear shrapnel flying around and/or hits so close to us that shrapnel should be flying around. What might make us get up for a moment, all in good time, is a phosphorus bomb coming down in the field right next to us, just to watch the show, because it looks pretty sick. I spare you the part though where this view at the same time worries us sick about our guys who are currently around somewhere in that direction because that's a whole different topic.
I can't even describe it in words (I'll try anyway, don't worry) what kind of a soundscape that is here, the one that you have to be exposed to, for a long enough period of time, to completely lose your natural 'duck and cover' reflex when something explodes real close to you. It takes a lot to reprogram your brain like this, believe me.
You have this constant rumbling in the distance. Almost like thunder that almost never stops, but not quite, a bit weirder. You have the far away explosions that are just unidentifiable bangs. You have the medium close hits that are already so loud that the dogs seem to be deaf afterwards for awhile. And they whistle when they fly by you (and of course they also whistle when they hit close). You have the close hits that make the ground and the buildings shake or even blow out the windows (or would if they wouldn't be long blown out already). Then there's the clusters that sound like fireworks, after the initial bigger bangs. The phosphorus bombs sound very similar to the cluster bombs. Then there's the outgoing grads that almost sound like a jet starting but slightly changing up and down in pitch a bit (which makes sense if you consider what grads are and that you launch multiple at a time, in short order). And you have outgoing mortar that produce a bang that sounds like a hit, only that you can hear a slight whoosh sound after the hit, and you can smell the cordite in the air.
And then there's maybe the scariest sound, outgoing tank rounds, in our case meaning enemy tanks because our friendly tanks are too far away from us to hear them clearly. They have a slight gong-iness to them that makes them unique. Not like a real gong sound of course, but mostly like a very loud mortar or something, but there's this underlying very low vibrating tone that I can't describe any other way than 'slightly gong-like'.
And now mix some of these together at the same time, in changing combinations, and imagine this for the better part of the day, and night. It's quiet sometimes too in fact, but most times it's not. Most times it's like this.
Even with my attempt to describe it to you, you really can't imagine how this sounds and feels. One guy of our unit, former military and volunteer fighter like everybody else here, was admitted to the hospital because of uncontrollable shaking and panic attacks. That's how bad it is, that's how much this environment fucks with people's nerves.
And consider, it's not just the hellish soundscape alone. The living conditions at the base are like life 100 years ago, not kidding but literally. You sleep on the ground, some of us like myself not even in a house on the floor but on uneven ground. You get water by pulling up a bucket from a well, you wash your clothes in a bigger bucket by hand, with soap and cold well water. You shower cold, outside, after you gathered enough water for your shower, from the well. I showered in the rain yesterday, at night, almost naked outside in the cold, and I was happy because that was so 'convenient'. You eat cold soup or meat or whatever right out of the can because camping cookers/gas are rare and hard to come by and everybody agrees we need them for coffee more than for hot food. And food is rationed by the way. And let's not even start with the topics personal hygiene, or medical services when needed. You would be shocked, seriously, I wasn't kidding with 'life like a 100 years ago'.
So my point is, you're constantly tired, you're constantly 'bored' and waiting, you're constantly hungry, you're bruised and cut (and stung by mosquitos) absolutely everywhere and everything hurts and itches all the time (but nobody ever complains). You're always dirty, and oh boy you guys have no idea what that even means believe me, you could literally bath in cowshit and you wouldn't smell as bad as we do sometimes (I mean it, seriously). And then, in this condition, you are also constantly under artillery or tank fire.
And that's just at the 'base'. Out at the positions the living conditions are obviously much worse, the artillery is much worse, and you have actual contact ie firefights happening, but that's a different topic.
And you know what... Nobody, nobody at all of the people I live with, ever talks about any of this with anybody back home. Because it's traumatic and that makes it hard, and because they wouldn't understand anyway, and because there's no point. I feel the same way honestly, I can low-level feel it's traumatic but it doesn't bother me (yet), I also think there's no way you even remotely understand what I'm talking about, although you probably think you do, and it's just frustrating to even write this stuff down. And then I think it's such a unique experience, in modern times unique, that somebody has to do it, and nobody else does it, but I can because I'm autistic and probably stupid and who knows what else is wrong with me. So here we are.
I'm basically in WWII, plus drones and starlink (for which you need electricity, hence a generator, hence fuel, and yeah, find fuel at the front line in a warzone lol... that's how often we have internet connection), minus horses. Actually if we had horses that would make some things so much easier, I just randomly notice. Fuck, I want a horse now.
