When You're a Writer Who Went to War

[00:00:01]I want to address my off-the-cuff reflections here after I just left the Ukrainian armed forces. I'm recording on my phone in Lviv, which is why the audio quality might not be so good. And I'm reflecting on everything I just went through while everything is still fresh in my mind. So yeah, I served for like a year here in Ukraine. It was 2 months in the legion and 10 months in the National Guard of Kharkiv. The thing about war is that people keep saying war isn't a game, war is not a game. And that's true. War isn't a game. War is, however, a story because after you go through it, all you have left is a story. Because all the experiences in your head, they form a narrative in your mind, that's how you make sense of things. And when we all go through war as a collective experience and we write it down as history, it then becomes a story. We write down, when we look back on our lives, we see it as a story. We organize the events of our lives in our story.

[00:00:54]As we live our lives, we're writing the story of our own lives in our heads. And that's why we get tempted to seeing ourselves as the main character, we get main character syndrome, which is very dangerous, especially in war when you think that like destiny owes you something. But the thing is, it's better not to see ourselves as having a special destiny because we don't know how our story is going to end because we are both author and character. That's our experience as we exist. Don't see yourself as the main character. You might be the main character in your own specific narrative because you're the center of yourself, but you're not the center of the story. And you're not necessarily the hero of your own story.

[00:01:32]If someone else saves you, are you really the hero? No, the person who saved you is the hero. And we can all be heroes. George R. R. Martin's books of A Song of Ice and Fire is very good in this aspect of depicting war, the fact that there is no actual main character and you have different perspectives and people clashing with each other and some people just die randomly and things like that. I do admit that my respect for George R. R. Martin's insights and his work of A Song of Ice and Fire has increased. But I have to say even though he wasn't a war veteran like Tolkien, cuz Tolkien actually experienced World War I, one of the one of the great horrors of history. And so he came up with Lord of the Rings after that, which kind of proves that it there is something to be said, like it does hold an insight on how war is. But even though George R. R. Martin was never really a war veteran, and he was like a cynical academic and just a critical critical of wars >> while also being able to portray the big epic parts of miracles and resurrections, cuz I do think that miracles happen in war. I witnessed a lot. Um George R. R. Martin has these great metaphysical mystical elements. When you're actually part of war it does seem that way, cuz some people survive things that you wouldn't believe. And certain chance events happen that you're like, this has to be designed, like God interve- Um and I have experienced some of these things myself. When that drone exploded just a meter and a half in front of me and I wasn't wounded, I couldn't even feel the shockwave. It was like something had protected me. It was it was incredible, incredible thing to experience. And I had experienced a lot of explosions by that point and even got trapped in rubble before, so I know what explosions are actually supposed to be like. So when that drone exploded and I was completely unharmed, I I thought it's a miracle, it's a miracle. And George R. R. Martin's books do have moments like that, magical miraculous moments. The thing is war is a collective experience that we go through and then we write about it. And when you read what other people went through and then what you're times to go through, it feels like you're going through the motions almost, which is kind of weird.

[00:03:30]But some things are uniquely yours. And the thing about war is that it it's been such a source of stories, whether historical factual stories or propaganda narratives that bend the truth or outright fiction like Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia that were written by war veterans, Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger, retellings of their experience like All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque, I I believe that was his name. And yeah, we all have our different experiences on war. In my personal experience, it felt kind of like I entered into a storybook because I read so much, whether it was history or I read Storm of Steel and All Quiet on the Western Front before I But I also read, you know, Lord of the Rings and Dune and stuff like that. And Warhammer novels and Star Wars novels and all that nerdy crap, which is why when I finally experienced war for myself, it felt like I had entered into a storybook because everything it's a it's an experience that we keep repeating over and over again, and everything fell into this natural pattern that countless other generations had experienced before me.

[00:04:34]So, what I mean is that like all the people around me, for instance, they fell into archetypes, things that you see in stories all the time, like the want-to-be tough guy who's like, "Yeah, I've been in the French Foreign Legion.

[00:04:45]I'm the first guy in my country to serve in two foreign armies." But then when the, you know, chips are down, he's just like acting like a coward. He's like, "Oh, no, I don't want to go in the assault unit. Oh, no."

[00:04:55]The guy who's a little fat and chubby, but then when the chips are down, he proves to be very brave. And even like really cheesy stuff where the guy, one of my commanders, was severely wounded saving my life, and then the sergeant came to save his life, and my commander is like, "No, no, save yourself. Leave me behind." And the guy's like, "No, I'm not leaving you." Like that that crap actually happened in the liberation of Kupiansk when I was like that literally [ __ ] happened. You know, it's it's like a cliché. But like when which is why it feels so surreal when you're actually into this kind of It's which is why like certain stories tend to exaggerate one side or the other because war is horrible and hell, and war does have its heroic moments. And so, you have things like The Storm of Steel written by Ernst Jünger, which emphasizes the heroic desire to become something more than what you are. And And you have All Quiet on the Western Front, which focuses on the horrible, cynical parts of war. The All Quiet on the western front part is a little too cynical. While I think that Storm of Steel was a little more accurate in how I experienced everything. We like to pretend we like to pretend that being mature is to be overly cynical and to not admit that a story like Lord of the Rings actually has bearing in reality.

[00:06:04]Like no, reality is actually all cynical and [ __ ] But no, believing that virtue is possible even when everything is going to hell around you helps keep you sane. But then again, I was a volunteer. And I think that Storm of Steel is the volunteer experience of going to war, while the author of All Quiet on the Western Front was a conscript. And I think that's very much the conscript experience. And I One of my missions, the worst mission I went through, was one that I did with all conscripts, where I was the only foreigner and only volunteer. And everyone around me was a Ukrainian conscript. Ukrainians whose language I couldn't even speak. We had to like literally do missions on Google Translate for [ __ ] sake.

[00:06:43]And that mission went [ __ ] tits up, of course. That's when I saw a man die in front of me and I I spent 24 hours trying to save the life of a of a Ukrainian in the trenches when we were got caught under artillery. And that was also the mission where I had to hide right next to a dead body, so that the drone wouldn't see me and it would only see the body that I was hiding behind.

[00:07:00]Or dodging a drone, like seeing a drone coming right at me at the last second and dodging at the last second and exploding and wounding me when the shrapnel hits the back of my leg. Or that time I was knocked aside by the shockwave and then the window imploded and words and the power went out and thank god, like if the missile had hit the building I was at, I would have died then.

[00:07:20]Or you know, grenades exploding next to me and shattering my thumb in front of me where I just see the thing disintegrating before my eyes. Or that time that me and the surgeon doctor, we actually shot down Either him or me, one of us shot down a drone that got like 1.5 m right in front of us and it exploded. And by a miracle, no shrapnel hit. That was That was insane.

[00:07:41]Yeah. And some things do seem miraculous. And also like things that we see in stories like plot armor. People go like, "Oh, there's no plot armor in real life." Mother hugger, like some people do have plot armor. Uh, there are people that I've like witnessed that did 20 assault missions one after the other and they're still alive. Like like bro, [laughter] how are you not dead? Also, the guy who is very uh eager to do missions and he's very brave, but then he gets killed cuz he's too eager. I've I've seen that as well. Which happens in stories all the time. The warrior chick, cuz you had Alina Shook there, which was our sergeant. You know, she's a beautiful woman and stuff like that, warrior maiden type thing. And she was there. She actually saved our lives when we got lost in the woods and the Russians had mined the woods and she came in there and she guided us out. Or she had to prove that she, you know, that she was tough and stuff like that.

[00:08:29]Uh, and she was our commander, but we like we most of us loved her. Um, so yeah, like all these archetypes, the guy who pretends to be brave, but actually is a coward. The guy who doesn't seem like he amounts to much.

[00:08:40]He's a fat and chubby and small, but then he he goes the distance and he overcomes his limits and he becomes like this admirable guy. The heroic figure, the commander who actually takes a grenade for you. Um, and then you wonder like what archetype are you going to fall on? And of course, me being me, I fell into the religious lunatic kind of archetype in these stories, right? And like the film Fury with Brad Pitt, you have like that kind of thing. We have like different You have the young soldier, you have the hardened commander. You know, you have all these different You have the more cynical guy with a shady background. You have the religious guy. And that's pretty much how it is. Like there's a reason these archetypes keep repeating in war stories because that's human behavior has a limited set of of uh options, right? Human behavior Human The human condition gives us a limited set of options of how a human being can be in this world, how we can how we can uh react to the And so, different people we end up falling into these repeated patterns. We keep just doing what other people in the past has done as well.

[00:09:41]Heroic deeds as well, the same great deeds as well a lot of the times.

[00:09:44]Anyway, when I first joined the Legion, it kind of felt like I had joined the Night's Watch, you know? Like it was kind of like that. You had the You had some naive people that joined this like that I was one of those guys who joined out of a sense of of like honor or whatever. And you had some of the people with shady backgrounds who you know, probably did some criminal stuff in their past, but was there then and you know, but the thing is I think the reason why this like seeing what you experienced as a story makes the most sense is because a lot of those moments when you're in the heat of the moment in war like the tension is so high that when you're out of that high when you're out of that experience, it feels kind of other worldly when you think back. It seems like you just went through something abstract and and weird and different, which feels like it's not real memory, but just like something you watched or something or like it happened to somebody else or you know, like a lot of the times when I think something happens in a story, people go like, "Oh, no, like that wouldn't happen. That's far-fetched, you know? That seems convoluted. That seems contrived." But in real life like holy [ __ ] like sometimes it's like what an amazing coincidence that saved my life.

[00:10:59]>> [laughter] >> Like that actually does happen in real life more than you think. Characters in stories, they're not real people. That's true. But every real person that you met is a character in your head because when you experience the person, you then have an image of that person in your head and that's that's what you carry with you.

[00:11:17]So although characters in stories you read aren't real people, the real people you meet in your life are characters in your head. So so saturated with media and war stories that when you actually join a war, it feels like a meta narrative in itself. Like you're a self-aware character in a story, which of course in a way, you are. You're a self-aware character in the story within your own head. And I think that's the key to ending to overcoming something like PTSD, which apparently I have or I've been diagnosed with PTSD, but I but it doesn't feel like I have PTSD cuz I've seen some people with like real PTSD with the things that you actually see in the movies, like uh you know, the flashbacks and they have like start hallucinating gunfights and start hiding under the table and they start like, you know, they have like that thousand-yard stare and stuff like that or or they like go ape [ __ ] and lose it. I've seen people with that or the people have break down into tears. I have none of that. I just have like the occasional bad dream. I'm grateful for my battle scars because they serve as evidence of all the crazy things I went through and that all that crazy [ __ ] I did actually happened. Cuz when I look back, I can't believe that I experienced what I experienced and that I made it out of there. It's like it was a daydream or a haze or hallucination, but then when I look at my hand and I see the scar on my thumb that almost disintegrated, I'm reminded of it of that moment in that forest with the explosion. And when I look at my leg or when I start limping, I'm reminded that I dodged the drone at the last second. And it feels great.

[00:12:37]Unfortunately, like it feels great. I guess that's what it makes me feel guilty more than anything. I love the fact that I went through this. One thing though that fiction does not reflect a lot, for whatever reason, about a war is that you can you have the hero you have the archetypes, right? You have the mentor archetype, which would be like the instructors in the military who've seen some [ __ ] and are teaching you how to survive. You have the hero, right?

[00:13:01]That's self-explanatory. You have the supporting side characters. You have the warrior maiden. You have the funny guy.

[00:13:07]You have the crazy guy. You have the grumpy guy. You have the badass. You have the guy who's there for money. You have the rogue charismatic guy. You have the guy who's kind of nuts. You have the religious guy. You have these archetypes all the time in these war stories. One archetype that is not explored enough, but in reality is a major force in all of our lives. And that's the mother archetype, just like the mother of the soldier. Like a lot of the times heroes are orphans. And the funny thing is, yeah, like I've met many of the best soldiers that I met here were actually like adopted orphans. And it's funny how they do seem to have like a natural edge cuz they don't have a mother that's worried about them. Um one of the reasons why I'm leaving right now after 8 years because I can't keep putting my mother through this. But the mother is a major force in all of our lives. Most of all have a mother here, so they talk to her in their last moments when they get wounded and then they use Starlink to talk to their mothers. And same thing with the wife, like I've I've taken care of wounded soldiers on the front who the first thing they do is while I'm taking care of them they use their phone to talk to their wives, which is a little distracting. I have to try to keep them from bleeding while their wife is crying on the other end. It's [ __ ] horrific.

[00:14:18]And it's it's distracting, but I understand like they want to might be their last opportunity to talk to their loved ones. Uh but my mother was constantly in the back of my mind all the time. My sister as well. And most people are not orphans. Most people do have a mother waiting for them. And I think mothers don't get the mothers don't get the love they deserve in our stories.

[00:14:41]Like come on, show me a hero that actually isn't an orphan that actually still has a mother he has to think about how his actions will affect her. Like show me more of that, please, because that's what most of us have to go through. Like and it'd be so interesting for us to explore that more. That's I think something that's very much missing. And add the father in as well.

[00:15:00]Add the father in as well. Although the the the thing about like my father is that my father's more of like an ideal that I would want to follow cuz I admired my father a lot. My mother's more of a nurturing force while my father's more of an ideal for me to strive for. I think of my father less when I'm almost dying. I think of my mother more when I'm almost dying. But I think of my father more when I'm when I need to do something, when I when the chips are down, when I need to when I need an example to strive for. So, there are different moments when I think more of my on my father, there are different moments when I think more of my mother.

[00:15:29]But, when I was wounded and and and and almost bleeding out, I was thinking of my mother. And one thing that I want to talk about when it comes to like this chronically online [ __ ] that I that I have less patience for now that I actually served in war is sometimes people on the internet, especially dudes, they come up with the most [ __ ] things that they think sounds badass or something. When you when you actually went through it, you understand how [ __ ] it is. So, there was this meme going on a couple months back called the masculine urge to bleed out in the snow when you actually had people writing video essays on that [ __ ] It's like, "Motherfucker, I almost bled out in the snow." And there was even this one anime lolly image of this girl with the radio next to her. She was bleeding out in full military gear and body armor looking up at the sky. And I went through that. When I got hit by the drone, the radio was next to me, I was lying down looking up, looking at the drones circling above me, thinking I was going to die. And you have these people in the comment section of this video with this image on like idolizing that like, "Oh, so beautiful, beautiful death and shit." It's like, "Motherfucker, when you're actually going through that, you're not thinking of like, 'Oh, this is a beautiful death or oh, I'm living out of my masculine urge to bleed out in the snow.' [ __ ] you're thinking about your mother or you're thinking about like that you don't want to [ __ ] die, that you want to see your family again." And then you have these people just idolizing something that they don't really know what they're talking about. Like you're you're scared out of your [ __ ] mind or just full of regret. You're not thinking, "Oh, this is beautiful" or whatever. And even And And the thing is is that even like I guess I get it like sacrifice heroism is a beautiful thing.

[00:17:10]But even Jesus, right? When Jesus was on the cross, when he was in his last moments, you know, he cried, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Cuz that's what you feel in that situation, you know? So, since narratives are so important to make sense of things, I think the key is to live >> It's the right of story >> that we can then look back and say, "Yeah, there is meaning behind it." And I think what proves that is that we're we care more about meaning than we care about comfort. Like, if we're comfortable and isolated from meaning, if we're just comfortable and we're just rotting away eating Cheetos all the time, playing video games, or like working a comfortable desk job, like we can just go nuts. And so many stories have been written about people just going nuts living comfortably like that, like Fight Club. This idea of losing purpose, losing what it means to be a man, and that we need to fight to have meaning. Yeah, and the reason is I think because to live is to act, and you can't really act as a passive recipient of comfort. I think we can have plenty of meaning if we're loving each other and charitably working with each other, you know, to you know, live happy lives and stuff like that. We There's plenty of meaning in a happy family life, but we can't be a passive recipient of comfort. We have to be an active player, and player as in the Shakespearean, you know, definition of a like an actor in a play. We have to be an active participant in a story. Not all stories are about war. You have slice-of-life stories, you have wholesome cozy fantasy stories, but then there's wonderful meaning in that. But you have to be an actor. You have to act in that story. We find a lot of meaning in pain because just pain itself isn't what gives meaning. Otherwise, we'd find meaning just being tortured. And when you're like tortured, you're you're a passive recipient of pain, right? So, there's no meaning in passivity in general, whether you're being a passive recipient of comfort and you're like in this soul-crushing desk job, or you're a passive recipient of pain and you're just receiving torture in a dark room without any rhyme or reason. But we find meaning in war stories and stories about pain or overcoming great odds because sometimes you just have to fight. You just have to fight in order to reach the better end of the cozy peaceful life.

[00:19:18]There's plenty of meaning in peace, but sometimes you do have to fight to achieve peace, which it might seem like a contradiction, but I feel guilty because I I survived and I'm fine, which is more than what a lot of the guys can say. And I feel guilty cuz to me I got everything I wanted. I was, you know, I went, I had an adventure, I got skills, I leveled up basically. Pardon the cringe, but that's basically what happened. I By the grace of God I survived one of the more brutal wars in recent memory and in one piece. And I At the same time though, what I wanted was to become stronger so I could help people. And this war was an opportunity for that. And I took this opportunity personally to learn what it means to try to save lives and to try to become stronger so that I can help more people after. I would like a peaceful life. I don't want to fight in wars anymore. I just want to I would like doing I would love to do humanitarian work in the future. Um maybe help people in war zones, but not necessarily be a soldier. I used to always be embarrassed that I wanted to be a hero, that I wanted to do something heroic. I don't know, I felt like it was inherently childish to think that way, that you're being easily manipulated by people that would want to take advantage of that or that, you know, only only children want to be heroes. If you're a grown man, then you have to, you know, being a good little taxpayer or whatever. But screw that, man. Screw that. And I guess I I guess I allowed myself to be driven by a 12-year-old fantasy that I had in my head or 12-year-old desire, childish desire to be a hero, which made me go to war. My experience with war is that it turns boys into men. No, sorry. The narrative The idea that people have is that war turns boys into men. And it does. It does. It makes you know, when you're more flaccid, more prone to seeking comfort, more immature, work can make you mature real quick. At the same time though, work can also make you immature. Work can also turn men into boys, cuz it's a bunch of guys living together like in a summer camp for lunatics in the middle of winter with rifles. And, you know, doing crazy [ __ ] and playing with these massive explosive toys. And in a way, I just allowed myself to be what I always wanted to be when I was 12 years old.

[00:21:36]But at the same time, I also ascended into something more than I was when I was just a good little worker drone, I a good little student, or whatever, just trying to I want to live a life of meaning, and I want to do good to people around me, and I want to help people.

[00:21:51]Left my country, I left my friends, and I went to fight a war in another continent. And some of my friends were left behind by me, and some of them fell into depression. Had a friend of mine who almost committed suicide. And I'm like, well, did I neglect the people around me to try to live out a fantasy in my head? Yeah.

[00:22:10]Yeah, maybe I did. But at the same time, I grew in strength, and I grew in skills, and I can come back and help them more. I learned things, and I'll be able to help the people around me more because I took this chance. People go like, "Oh, like you're Brazilian, why don't you fight for your own country?"

[00:22:25]It's like like by subjecting myself into this pain into this crucible, and having survived and learned so much, I can go back and I feel like I can help Brazil more. And also, Russia's a pain in the ass in all of Latin America, and I am helping Brazil by fighting off Russia because a weakened Russia is a better Latin America, because Russia sustains the entire left-wing power Marxist structure in Latin America. I think the ultimate truth that narratives do hold some truth. Again, like we're all making narratives all the time. Some narratives are false, some narratives are truth are true. But the narrative that is the most true is the one that can produce the most positive effects for the longest period of time. Without a narrative, nothing makes sense. Everything's just random. Rationality itself, the ability to reason, needs a narrative. Cuz what a reason does is what logic does is premise one, premise two, valid inference, conclusion. And that's what a narrative is, right? You have starting action, rising action, falling uh climax, falling action, conclusion.

[00:23:23]Cause effect Cause cause effect. And a narrative is just this idea of cause and effect with the events of our lives.

[00:23:31]That's what narrative is. So, it's absolutely important for reasoning.

[00:23:35]Without it, nothing makes sense. And I think the key to life is to perfect the narrative you have in your head to make it to grow in wisdom and insight so that the narrative that you have becomes more and more closer to reality. And so that you can tap into the true narrative of things. Because I do think that I do believe in God. So, I think that God, being the author of existence, he made existence itself as the one true grand narrative. And that we are made in the image of God. So, we're all capable of making our own little narratives. But since we're not God and we're not omnipotent and we're not omniscient, our narratives are imperfect. And so the key to life is to try to shape ourselves and our minds and tap into this true narrative of things. And I think when you're able to do that, then you're able to go with the flow of the universe, you know? And this doesn't really mean getting everything you want, but it means wanting everything you get, I suppose. But how do we determine what's real? How do we determine what story is real and what What stories are real and what stories are fake? Since meaning only exists while something is existing, the narratives that bring us to eternity are the ones that are the most true. The more temporary a story, the more ephemeral it is, the more false it is.

[00:24:48]And so the archetypes that last forever and the stories that last forever and the stories that help you last forever, the more that you adhere to them are the ones that are the most true. For the world to be a better place is for people to do their best to make the world a better place and especially people from privileged positions and I've been very privileged in my life. So, I felt like I just had I received more so I felt I felt like I had to give more. So, yeah.

[00:25:12]Thank you all for listening to my ramblings. Have a good day my friends.

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