It was a hard week.

Medics Rebekah and Oleg after a long day. On her arm, Rebekah has written the numbers of the vehicles they hoped might carry home one of their teammates. He did not make it.

To be a journalist covering conflict is a practice in self-preservation. With each new soldier I meet and interview, who welcomes me into their homes, who feeds me, and who confesses their traumas, it is an exercise in bracing myself against the knowledge that they may be killed on the battlefield. And potentially very soon. 

My time living in the West Bank and Israel, where conflict underlies almost every fabric of life, gave me a base template to prepare for the sufferings of war. But here in Ukraine, the volume of suffering, trauma, outright destruction, and immense human toll is a new level. My time in Ukraine has been a new kind of immersion into war.

This week was my first time experiencing what I had been dreading since embedding with units working on the frontlines. Here in Ukraine, I am not just here covering the war, I am living it. I have been housed and fed by the generosity of Ukrainian soldiers who have gone out of their way to give me everything while they have nothing, while fighting a battle, losing their comrades daily, all while separated from their families and the life they once know. 

Last week I went to live with a medical battalion working on the frontlines of the counteroffensive in southeastern Ukraine. 

Within three days of living there, 20% of the soldiers I was staying with, who I had shared meals and a home with, were killed in the span of two hours. 

On Sunday evening, the unit celebrated the Ukrainian day honoring medics. There was ice cream, beer, and a roasted duck. I was offered a second round of ice cream and after politely refusing, I was met with a long and teasing tirade by the man who said he had walked kilometers and kilometers on foot to acquire the ice cream and the duck. After I eventually used my phone to translate that I had already had one- don’t worry I appreciate you! Thank you for caring so much that I have ice cream!!- he relaxed and smiled, clearly appeased that I had in fact not refused his gift. That was Cap. Within 24 hours of meeting him, laughing with him, and immediately loving him for bringing me a cold treat on a hot day after a week without a refrigerator, he was dead. 

The medics celebrating Medics Day. The next morning, Dima [far right] would be injured trying to evacuate wounded soldiers.

At 5:00 AM the next morning, I woke to the sound of radio chatter calling Oleg, a medic I was sharing a room with. Rebekah and Oleg have worked together for months and she had brought us to the offensive to embed with his unit. It was not the first time a call was received in the middle of the night. The first 24 hours after I had arrived were incredibly busy for the medics, the radio frequently bursting out to call somebody to duty. The days that followed were quiet as they rested and recovered, bracing for another assault that would mean their services were once again needed. 

The radio call sounded frantic and urgent, but then again all interruptions to sleep via a radio will sound that way. Oleg and Rebekah quickly dressed and left, accustomed to the perpetual on-call status of medics in war. 

Overnight, the soldiers stationed in our area had once again begun a new assault. A team of our medics were positioned nearby in a BTR armored vehicle that would be used to evacuate injured soldiers. 

Within an hour of the assault beginning, the medics lost contact with headquarters and Rebekah and Oleg went to go deliver a new battery to the position.  

In a video Rebekah took along the way, she expresses relief when they hear Cam’s voice on the radio. “Cam called you, yes? F*****g hell, finally.” 

They delivered the new radio battery and went back to their evacuation spot. Shortly afterwards, the BTR headed out to the front to evacuate soldiers.

Sometime around 7, Rebekah came into the room to grab something and told me the BTR had been hit by artillery and they couldn’t get in contact with the crew. She quickly departed again for the evacuation spot to wait for news and to treat the many injured soldiers who were being steadily rushed back from the front. 

A couple hours later I was woken up once again by a phone call from Rebekah. 

“Cam is dead. Dima is injured. We can’t find the rest of the crew.”

“F***. What?” I scrambled to orient myself and catch up. 

“Cam. The BTR driver. He’s dead. Dima is at the stab point. We don’t know where the others are.” I cursed again, not having any other words.

They asked for water, cigarettes, energy drinks, and food. I quickly stuffed as much as I could into a bag and made for the car. 

I drove the few minutes to the evacuation spot where ambulances were waiting to take soldiers to stabilization clinics after they were brought back from the front lines. 

It was utter chaos. 

Plumes of dust from the dirt road swirled thick in the air. Armored vehicles, army trucks, and ambulances were zipping around, swerving to avoid hordes of soldiers, medics, and idling ambulances. The armored vehicles were evacuating soldiers from the road to the left, about five kilometers from the area of fighting, and groups of medics were quickly loading the soldiers into their ambulances before zipping off to the right towards the clinics a few kilometers away. 

I saw the driver for Rebekah’s ambulance and shouted over the frantic din, “Bekah tyt?/ Bekah is there?” He nodded and pointed inside the ambulance. I quickly parked on the side of the road where groups of soldiers were sitting in the shade, looking exhausted and depleted. Stripped-off body armor and helmets were strewn across the grass. 

I grabbed the supplies and rushed over. Halting mid-way through the road and running back towards my car as an ambulance quickly tried to drive past. I decided to grab my camera bag and relocate to Rebekah and Oleg’s ambulance. In the few seconds it took me to turn back around and make for their ambulance it was gone. I turned and saw it driving away toward the clinic so quickly hopped back in the car and raced after it. I parked at the back of the clinic so as not to get in the way of the ambulances quickly loading and unloading. By the time I got to the front, I saw their ambulance driving away back towards the evacuation spot. 

On my way past, I saw the medics from our unit gathered in a circle, hugging one another and looking utterly distraught. On a mission to get the supplies to Oleg and Rebekah and feeling uncomfortable intruding, I walked quickly around them. As I approached an ambulance I had first thought was Rebekah and Oleg’s, I realized it was the commander’s. Its driver, Roman, approached me. An incredibly kind soul, the previous night Roman and I had spoken at length via Google Translate where he recounted why he had joined the army, telling me what it was like to live under occupation in Kherson, saying after two months he just had to get out of there. The only possessions he still has are a jacket and a spare pair of pants.

As he walked up to me, the pain of the day was clear as day, his eyes bright red.

I gave him a quick hug and asked the stupidest question but the only thing I could think of, asking how he was. He shrugged. I pulled out the bag of supplies and asked him what he needed, offering water, cigarettes, maybe a slim jim. He took an energy drink, said thank you and that he didn’t need anything. I gripped his shoulder as a goodbye and set off to find Bekah. In the panic of the day, my desire to try and do anything to help them on such a difficult day superseded my need to film them. I had been trying to be very respectful of the unit, working to earn their trust in order to make them feel comfortable enough to let me film them in their most intimate moments and I knew pulling my camera out now was not going to be received well. 

I went back to the evacuation spot where I finally connected with Bekah and Oleg. By then they had been in the ambulance for five hours without water, food or coffee. They looked exhausted. Bekah’s face was smeared with dirt and dust. 

At that point, two medics were confirmed killed, three were injured, and two were missing. By the end of the day, the third medic would be confirmed dead. And that’s just from the one team of medics trying to evacuate and treat injured soldiers.

I transferred all my gear and supplies to their car and finally got out my camera. 

The hours that followed were painful to watch. I had arrived at the end of the evacuations, and only a few remaining armored vehicles returned in that period to bring back the last of the soldiers from the fight. 

The assault had been called off only hours after it began. The Ukrainian forces had met incredibly heavy Russian resistance from the very beginning and not only did the Ukrainians fail to take the new territory, they were pushed even further back.

The mission was an utter failure. I don’t have an exact number of how many were killed and injured and we will likely never find out. Dozens were killed and even more injured or missing. At the nearest stab point, one of the medics told me that by 12:00 they had treated maybe 20-30 soldiers. Six or seven had not made it, succumbing to their injuries. And those numbers are just for one of the many clinics and hospitals that received injured from the day.

Rebekah told me that when they evacuated Dima for treatment after taking a shrapnel wound through the stomach, he just kept apologizing to them. He had evacuated himself on foot after their BTR was hit, eventually getting picked up by another BTR that was returning from the battle. He told them there was no way his driver, Cam, had made it, apologizing that he couldn’t save him. When Bekah lifted up his shirt to begin tending his wound, she told me with a smile he told her “It’s normal, it’s normal, all normal.”

I never had the chance to talk to Cam about his background. I do not know if he had a family, what he did before the war, where he came from, or what he had experienced. His life was taken just as quickly as I had met him. The same is true with the two other medics killed that day, Cap and Multi. These names are variations of their callsigns. I never even learned their real names.

Cam completes a paint by numbers kit which Rebekah left behind at an old command post.

The medical unit rests once all evacuations are complete. They are still waiting for news about one of the medics who remained unaccounted for.

Dima and Student, the other wounded medics, were two of the first people I had spoken to in the unit. After pulling up to the house after a long drive, they were milling about outside of our car. Before I had a second to orient they immediately engaged me in a conversation. In perfect English, Dima apologized that he didn’t speak English. I laughed and assured him his English was great and insisted I should be the one apologizing for not speaking Ukrainian- this is your country, I told them.

Though I could tell he understood much of what I was saying, Student insisted he didn’t speak any English and kept turning to Dima to translate for him. The conversation soon turned to Ukrainian dialects and how while Student might not speak English, he had an extensive vocabulary of local dialects. We talked about the difference in some words in Eastern Ukraine compared to where Student grew up in the West along the Polish border. He rattled off a list of different words to describe a dresser, a comedic act it seemed he and Dima had clearly been through before. Dima explained to me how one of the words actually literally meant something was handmade, or could be used to describe the act of something being made from hand. Explaining that in the process of making it, it was one word, but in the end, it was a completely different one. 

They were the first two who welcomed me into their home, and throughout my first few days with them they were constantly trying to make me feel home, Dima often translating for me around the others. 

The night before the assault, Dima spent much of the night on his phone, sitting in the darkened entryway to the house, only his face softly lit by the glow of the loved one he spoke to from afar.

*Note: Names are changed as the families of the deceased still do not have all the details of their deaths.