Part 2: Eric on luck and religion during basic training
Eric: It is, you know <laughs> fucking exhausted.
Vic: Has the car situation been sorted?
Eric: Fuck no. That fucking idiot is like, drunk in Ivano-Frankivsk being a fucking menace to society. I’m like, “hey, asshole, come back with my car please”.
Vic: <laughs> So you kind of, are you trapped there until he comes back, or?
Eric: Yeah, I’m just kind of stuck, and like- eh, it’ll be fine. It’s not me that’s going to get yelled at over this at this point, you know.
Vic: Okay. Yeah, fair. So, how long were you in training for?
Eric: So, it was about two months. I’m not sure the exact number of days. It was like roughly two months. It’s like officially 50-something days, or something weird like that. The way they count days is a bit strange, because we’re not- we never really worked out if they count Sundays or not.
Vic: Did you get Sundays off?
Eric: You know, sort of? Sundays were the, supposedly the rest day, but by that what they meant was you’ve still got wake up at like fucking five in the morning, and you know, then you’d have to, you know, after breakfast, you’d have to put on all your gear, and you’d go for like a march, for you to put a bunch of bullshit in your rucksack.
Funnily enough, they kind of stopped, they kind of gave up and stopped doing that after a few weeks. Initially, they were like, “okay, we have to go like for this long walk, and then do some lessons, and then you’ve got like the afternoon off, or the evening off”, or whatever, you know, the after lunchtime time is? Although by off they meant like not training, and instead doing chores, or whatever, and then you’d get your phone for like an hour. That was Sundays.
We got very lucky that during our training time was Orthodox Easter, happened to be during that time. So that was actually a real Sunday off, where nobody did anything, and you know, we all got blessed by a priest, and all that. That was a, that was an interesting cultural experience.
Vic: Is that all in Ukrainian, or do they get translators?
Eric: So they- one of the mobilized guys ended up just being assigned to translate because he said that he spoke English. So we had a translator, but all training, all lessons, everything was done in Ukrainian. If our translator was sick or something, it was like tough luck. Figure it out.
Vic: How’s your Ukrainian now?
Eric: I know a lot more swear words.
Vic: <laughs> Yeah, sounds about right.
Eric: Not amazing, because a lot of the, like- while all instruction was in theory done through Ukrainian a lot of the guys we were with were for, were from the eastern regions, and their first language was mostly Russian. So a lot of it was done, you know, a lot of communication was in Surzhyk, which is completely fucking impossible for me to understand. Because there’s some random words in Ukrainian, some in Russian, I can never figure out, like, how that works.
Vic: Yeah. So during your time there, you mentioned something about getting run over by a tank. Was that a standard experience?
Eric: <laughs> Yeah. That is a standard thing in basic training here. Each training centre has its own version of it, but it’s like a- so they give you this big long speech on that training day about how it’s supposed to inoculate you against stress or something, and you know, test how you react in a scary situation. But, by the time you’re actually getting ran over by the tank you’re fucking knackered, like you’re completely gassed out, and you’re just like, “okay”.
So you know, this tank drives towards you, and you, at the last safe moment, you turn around and lie down in, like, this little hole in the ground. The tank drives over you, and then you get up out of the hole and shoot the tank in the back with a rocket launcher. In some training centres, apparently, it’s throw a grenade at the tank, which I think just pisses the tank off to be honest? But, you know.
Vic: <laughs> Yeah.
Eric: Before that they have you do this whole thing where you have to like sprint and then crawl underneath the tank with its engine on, come out the other side, get into a firing position, and then repeat that a billion times. So the idea of being under a tank at that point is completely not bothersome. The only difference is the fucking thing’s driving at you and goes over you. That’s like one of the- there’s like a number of bits that are kind of standard during basic that are kind of like- there’s the day with the tank, and then there’s the obstacle course, or the psychological preparation course, or something they call it, where you have to do a lot of running and crawling under barbed wire, and stuff is exploding and all that as a team.
Vic: Do they actually help, do you think?
Eric: I mean, the obstacle course thing, because you have to run it as a team, it definitely helps a lot with, you know, like the guys you run it with, you kind of, you seem to get along a bit better afterwards, kind of thing. Especially because some people will find a way to sit it out. It’s pretty common for guys to call in sick that morning to avoid doing that. So, like, it’s good for creating a shared experience, and it, it does push you to certain limits, and you learn that actually, yes, you can do things that otherwise seem fucking impossible. When we were running the obstacle course, our translator had to drop out of it midway through, so we’d to figure out how to do the rest of it with no translator, and just a lot of yelling.
Vic: So it’s like a physical obstacle course?
Eric: Yeah, it’s like, as a team, you have to work through a bunch of obstacles, get to the end, and then come back. And all the time- on the way there, you have to bring, as a group, you have to carry, like, basically just a heavy ammunition box, and you have to bring that fucking thing through all the obstacles. The instructors are allowed to, like, they’re trying to steal your rifle, they’re trying to steal the box of ammo, you know. They’re allowed to use some force within some limits, so like- and you’ve to look after everyone else, and when you get to the end, they administratively decide one of you is wounded, so along with everything else you’ve got, you’ve to drag that asshole all the way back through the obstacles. There’s a lot of burning tires and shouting and explosions and nonsense.
You know, the most difficult part of that was figuring out how the fuck to get a guy who’s not able to move over a fucking wall. Like, do you just kind of huck him over, or what?
Vic: What did you go with?
Eric: We end up just kind of like having a couple of guys go up on top of the wall. Some people kind of shoving him up, and then the guys on top kind of hauling him, and then, you know, just kind of dropped him off the other side a bit. <laughs> Not a very elegant solution but, you know, it worked.
Vic: Yeah, you got him there.
Eric: It worked! He wasn’t terribly happy about being punted off the other side, but like, you know.
Vic: Yeah. So was it mainly Ukrainian people, or was it a lot of internationals?
Eric: There was only a handful of internationals. The vast, vast, vast majority were Ukrainians in our unit, like our training company. So we ran into guys from a couple of other training companies, then it- on average, out of 180 to 200 per training company, you’d have maybe at most four or five internationals. Apparently they- that training place gets like maybe four, maybe five per month.
Vic: So it’s still a steady stream?
Eric: Yeah, it’s like, a few every month, but like not a huge number. Not enough to like- like when the instructor is saying that if there were more of us, they could have just made a whole group out of us, but because there was only a handful of us that were like, “well, you know, we have to figure out, like, how to deal with you”.
Vic: So, what prompted you to enlist four [years] and however many months into the full scale invasion?
Eric: So a lot of my friends have already enlisted and I’d been looking into the possibility. I was doing a lot of other volunteer work and then eventually I was like, “fuck, you know, I’ll go do that”. Just kind of the right thing to do.
Vic: I get that. Any regrets yet?
Eric: No. Not yet. I’m sure there’ll be some soon. <laughs> So usually on average it’s like- so after six months as an international, you can just, you can leave. A lot of guys, they get to about five and a half months, and then they go, “actually, fuck this, I’m out”. So, we’ll see.
Vic: So they give you an out, like, built in?
Eric: Yeah. There’s a built-in out in the contract. Actually there’s technically two outs. So, for internationals, your contract is only three years long, whereas for Ukrainians the contract is until the end of hostilities. Like theirs are basically indefinite. Apparently they’re changing that soon? But for internationals you can leave after- so you can leave in your first two months, so like if you wash out a training or something. That’s kind of a safety mechanism, so like if somebody’s not cut out for it during the training, they can, you know, they can fuck off, and they won’t be a burden to everyone else for the next few months. Then after your first two months, you’re locked in until month number six, after which you can put in your papers at any time and leave. It is incredibly common for people to leave after six months.
Vic: Do a little bit of holiday, and then go?
Eric: Yeah. Well, what happens a lot of the time is people will- like, I’ve met a few guys who, they’ll spend six months in one unit, they’ll break contract, and then they’ll sign a new contract with a different unit. There’s no real, like- on paper, there are ways to change which, which unit you’re in. But none of those methods work for foreigners. So it’s pretty common for people to do their six months and then they’ll quit, and then they’ll join another unit, do six months there, and they’ll kind of do that a lot.
Vic: Okay, just see different areas?
Eric: Yeah, that seems to be it. Or a lot of the time, it’s so they can find the right fit or something, you know. Wherever they signed up first to isn’t working out for them, so they, you know, they’ll hop around until they find somewhere permanent. Or for some it’s just they wanna try different things.
Vic: I guess it makes sense.
Eric: There’s disincentives to doing that. If you quit and rejoin, you have to- it’s a hassle, and also it can be seen as a bit of a red flag if somebody’s like done the bare minimum length of time in a whole bunch of different places. It’s often just a way to find the right job, because if you’re- so for example, Ukrainians can apply for a transfer to, like, transfer without quitting and rejoining, because they’re not allowed to quit. On paper internationals are able to do that, but in practice it’s just easier to just, you know.
Vic: Yeah.
Eric: Do the job hopping type thing.
Vic: So I think, I guess you know a little bit about my project, that I’m bugging people about the Ghost of Kyiv, and that sort of thing.
Eric: Mhmm.
Vic: During your time in basic, do people ever mention any of those types of characters?
Eric: Um, some of the famous ones get like referred to in conversation periodically, but there was a lot of more like- like those kind of characters would be mentioned to be more- they’d be stories you’d hear within the brigade about guys, or stories you’d hear, you know- they’d be more localized. Instructors that tell us stories of like various guys who did amazing things.
And they did have, like- there was some of the lectures that referred to- we had a whole three hour lecture one time about various heroic figures and stuff. So I think the, I’m not sure what the word for it is, but kind of the, the legends and kind of folklore of sorts is included within what they call the national patriotic education part of the training program.
Vic: Okay, what does that cover?
Eric: Um. It’s like some- like they showed us some films about, like, if you’re taken prisoner. Interviews with guys who were POWs who got exchanged back. It’s like, you know, how to deal with that. They showed us some films about some of the people who, like, during the start of the full-scale invasion defended Kyiv, and all that. You know, various heroes, and shit. And then there was some stuff about history, but our translator didn’t really translate some of that very well. There was one lecture, that kind of was the history of the nation type thing. There was another that was- the first half of it they were explaining, like, “don’t go AWOL, bad things will happen”. Then the second half was like here’s some inspirational stories from like guys in our branch, you know, who did great things. A lot of it was designed to inspire you to stick around and do things.
Vic: Any of the stories stick with you?
Eric: There was a couple of ones of like- a lot of it was like, “oh, this guy has spent six months on the position without a rotation”. They had a couple of photos, you know, totally fucked up, beardy looking dudes. Clearly been stuck in the shit for a very long time, and they’re like, “oh, and this guy, you know, he killed three people with a knife” and you’re like, “wait, what the fuck?” You know, it was very much that sort of thing. <laughs>
Vic: <laughs> Yeah.
Eric: You know, and it was designed to, like, they’re trying to show, like, here are some role models of people who self-sacrificed a little bit or did crazy things, you know. The difficulty that me and the other internationals had with these lectures was the translation of them was minimal. So we just kind of knew that, like, they were referring to heroic figures within that branch of the military.
Vic: Right. So it’s just talking about the guys, they don’t bring any of them out to talk about their experiences?
Eric: So the instructors talk a lot about their experiences. All the instructors, from what I understand- the instructors are all people with significant experience, and in general, how you become an instructor is you are actively serving, you get wounded, and then when you’re like recovered, but not quite ready to go back to combat, they make you train people for a while. So like all of our instructors had like some of the most fucking wild stories of like them and their friends, and like various situations they’d been in. Some of them would pull up videos and show us like various crazy things.
Vic: Any of them get run over by a tank?
Eric: Everyone gets run over by a tank! But one of them was joking with us after, and he goes, “This will never happen in real, if you’re that fucking close to the tank, you’re dead”. He was like, “If you see a tank, you’re probably fucked. If you’re that close to the tank, you’re definitely fucked. And if for some reason you’re under a tank, you’re probably squished”.
Vic: Yeah.
Eric: They’d kind of, they run through like a training exercise, and then- because the actual training itself, it’s all prescribed. It’s like there are things- there are lessons that, like, they’re, it’s a lesson plan from the Ministry of Defence, and it’s all a little bit Soviet to be honest. And what would happen is they run through the lesson, and then afterwards they’d be like, “Yeah, ignore all of that, that’s all bullshit, that’ll never work” <laughs>.
Vic: In terms of like tactics, and hybrid warfare sort of things, or?
Eric: Yeah, they’d be like- there was some of the exercises we’d run where you had to march in like a checkerboard pattern or something, and then disperse into a line, and attack something. They were like, “don’t do that, you’ll fucking die”. They were like, “we have to teach you this, because it’s written down that we should teach you this, but don’t do it ever”.
Vic: Yeah, I guess anything grouping up is bad.
Eric: Yeah, they, they spent like quite a lot of time tryna, you know- they’d run through a lesson, then they’d tell us what’s wrong, or, you know, not practical about it. And they’d very much try to drill home some of that. They’d be like “don’t do that”, you know. <laughs> I think that’s a, that’s kind of an artifact, though, of like- it’s clear that the training material is being reformed, but that’s happening quite, you know, at the pace of bureaucracy.
Vic: Yeah.
Eric: So like, they try to run through the mandatory material, and then they try to explain stuff a little better themselves. They’d like, or the odd time, they just go, “This lesson is fucking stupid, we’re not doing it. Just say we did it”. <laughs> There was a certain amount of, I guess, pragmatism or something in that sense. Some of them would be- what I did notice was the ones who’d been through more fucked up shit would be simultaneously more relaxed and also more strict at the same time. Like if you fucked up during, like, an important training thing, you’d be doing a shitload of push-ups, and they’d be screaming at you. But if they thought something was not important, they’d be like “we’re just not doing it, we’ll just chill out”.
Vic: Can you give an example of like what they thought was important and what wasn’t?
Eric: So the lessons on assaulting trenches, clearing trenches, they took very seriously. Anything that involved fire and movement, they would take extremely seriously. Anything that involved shooting, you know, fuck-ups were not permitted. But other stuff, like using hand signals to communicate, they were like, “you’re not going to do this shit, you’re going to be- this is pointless” is kind of how they saw some of that, because radios exist.
It was interesting, like you could tell that they really cared about we did a lot of, like, an awful lot of training with tourniquets and medical. To the point where the instructor was like, we’re doing so much of this because if you need to use it, you need to be able to use it. He’d tell us- he was a medic, and he’d tell us some of the most horrific things, you know, as examples while he’d be teaching us how to do various tacmed stuff. He’d be like, “well, this is what it says” but he tried to impress on us, like- this is the opposite of civil medicine. When you’re triaging wounded guys, he was explaining to us that in civilian life you treat the most fucked up person first, whereas in combat you treat the least wounded person, because the most fucked up guy is probably dead anyway.
Vic: Okay.
Eric: He was like, “it’s unfortunate, but you know, go for the least wounded guy first, and then work your way towards the most fucked up guy”. And his rationale for this was, you’re trying to give the most people the possibility to survive.
Vic: Yeah. Is that why there’s so much emphasis on being able to put on a tourniquet yourself and stuff, like, should people be able to self-rescue more?
Eric: Yeah. The way they put it is that when you’re in what they call, you know, the red zone, directly under fire, not in cover, it’s- you should either be able to put on the damn tourniquet yourself. Or the only thing you should do to somebody is just put the tourniquet on, and then, if possible, drag them to shelter, and then you can perform more aid. But they’re, they’re very much for, like, if you can unfuck yourself, you should unfuck yourself, don’t get other people to put themselves at risk.
They- one interesting thing was, I know from previous guys who were trained a year before me that they didn’t cover tourniquet conversion, where you convert the tourniquet from like a tourniquet to like a wound packing and dressing. Because that was that was often deemed a job for a real medic, but now they’re training everyone to do that because it seriously reduces the chance of needing to amputate.
Vic: Like shoving the strap in and using it to kind of block up the hole?
Eric: It’s like where you get the haemostatic gauze and you fill the wound with it, then you cover it in a compression bandage type- like a pressure bandage, and then you can loosen the tourniquet and maybe even like entirely loosen it. You can check if, like, the bleeding has been effectively stopped by the wound packing and pressure bandage. They really emphasise this, like we were practicing that, fuck, maybe three times a week. That was like very heavily emphasised, because they’ve come to realise that if the tourniquets on for more than a couple of hours, anything below the tourniquet is probably going to have to be cut off. So they’ve- because, the “oh, just slap a tourniquet and it’ll be fine” comes from more Western doctrine where a helicopter will come in and rescue you, but we don’t have that here.
So they really emphasized trying to save the limb, you know, save as much of the limb as possible, rather. So that your buddy doesn’t lose his leg, because- I mean, there’s a lot of guys now missing limbs and stuff. The doctor was saying that a lot of that is like they would have died otherwise, but maybe they’d have more of the leg left if their buddies had been trained in converting.
Vic: A guy I know, he had his battle buddies put the tourniquet on above his knee, but because he was a medic, he was able to kind of triage himself and realised they could have put it below the knee. He moved the one on that leg to below the knee, so he kept his knee on that leg, whereas on the other leg there was nothing he could do about it. I think that’s helped him a lot with prosthetics.
Eric: Mhmm. A below the knee is a lot, a lot better for the prosthetics people, whereas above the knee, that shit is difficult apparently.
Vic: Yeah, I can imagine. Do they cover what to do about drones in the training?
Eric: Yeah, they chased us around with drones an awful lot.
Vic: <laughs> Like just chasing you, or?
Eric: They- <laughs> there was like a couple of I’m not sure if they were visiting instructors or whatever, but they, you know- you’d have a lot of lessons where there’d be some guy with a pile of drones, and he’d just fly them and chase you around. He’d try not to hit you with them, shall we say, like, he’d buzz it over your head. He hit people a couple times, people got hurt, but that is what it is. You’d have to find shelter or run around a tree, or administratively try to shoot it down by pointing your rifle at it, and going “bang!”
There was a lot of that, and a lot of where you’d be walking and then a drone would come in, and you’d have to- if you spotted the drone, you’d have to tell everyone “drone! It’s over there, fuck, take cover.” There was a strong emphasis on that. The interesting thing is that they were kind of like, “you’re gonna have to improvise a bit.” They were like, how to put this, they basically said, “okay, here’s what we’re training you to do about drones. But also, it’s unpredictable.” There was a lot of lessons on using EW jammers and stuff to try to take out drones, but that came with the big caveat of like, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
Vic: Right. Do you feel like you’re ready to dodge drones?
Eric: Um, not really. <Laughs> They’re really fucking fast, and I’m not. Like one of the instructors was joking around a bit, and he was like, “well, I mean, they only have about 20 minutes battery, so you just have to keep running for about 20 minutes, and you’ll be fine.” I’m like, “yeah, but I can’t run at 100 miles an hour for that long”. Their kind of approach to, like- what some of the instructors who had experienced that were like “if you see or hear one hide.” Basically it’s the only thing you can do, and like, they had conflicting opinions on whether you should shoot at it or not. Some of them were like “you should definitely try shoot it down.” Others were of the opinion that only do that if it’s an immediate risk to you and your team, because if you do shoot it down, or if you start shooting at it, you’ve just announced your presence, you know? You kind of sit tight and hope it fucks off. <laughs> They, nobody’s got a good answer yet for what to do about them.
Vic: Yeah. How long is it until you’ll be deployed, do you know?
Eric: Well, so a lot of the guys I trained with are currently just wrapping up their job-specific training. I’m supposed to go straight to my initial job as an engineer this week. Then yeah, start work as an engineer, learn how to do various things, and then just, more on the job training. Then you can, at least in our unit, it’s like- you don’t go do things for a little while, you learn more stuff because they’re like, “okay, you’ve got like your basic training, but now you need like your job-specific training”. So yeah, that’s this week. Go do engineer things for a while, until they tell me to do something else.
Vic: Fair.
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