Follow Your Passion: A Seamless Tumblr Journey
Heroyam Slava - Blog Posts
tomorows headlines have to be better
Thank you.
These were taken at the private military ceremony a few days ago. Everyone in her company I've spoken to so far has nothing but the highest praise for her, her attitude, her morality, her courage, her loyalty, her caring nature, and her indomitable will.
She was flawed. And she was perfect. And she was mine. My everything. My companion. My partner in crime. My love. My Valkyrie. My muse.
Thank you. Дякую.
And another one of us (foreigners fighting for Ukraine) is gone... He wasn't in my unit and I didn't know him really but I remember I briefly met him in Kyiv in the early days of the war. Seemed to be a nice guy. RIP.
According to Wikipedia (here, scroll down to "Foreign fighters and volunteers") at least 313 foreigners have been killed in Ukraine, but I know for a fact it must be much more, because about a third of the people of whom I personally know were killed in combat, because they were in my company in my battalion, don't show up on any lists and or in any media. The ones who are made public are the ones whose parents/family take initiative and bring their kid's or brother's death to the public's attention, like recently in case of my friend Jeff who died in Bakhmut:
[I'm just seeing this for the first time... "Even though Jeffrey Jones suffered a concussion in 2022 while working as a medic in Ukraine...", haha that's funny. Hey, Jeff was a great guy, and please don't tell his family, if they would ever ask me I'd swear he got injured "working as a medic", but just between the two of us, he suffered this concussion during training from a kind of play-fight with our unit leader at the time, who threw him over his shoulder on the ground and Jeff's head hit the concrete so hard he was passed out for literally 30 minutes. I was the first medic to help him, because I was watching while it happened, and was worried his skull cracked, but luckily he recovered. Only to come back to Ukraine a few months later and get killed in Bakhmut...Fuck, I wish he had stayed home]
The media doesn't mention that for some reason, but fyi, he was with 204th Bn TDF. That's not very well known but yes, there are also foreigners in the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Force. He died in a trench in Bakhmut area from shrapnel wounds, together with another foreigner, a Brazilian named Antonio whom I didn't know.
This is Jeff:
And then there are the many foreigners who died here who never make it public because they have no family to care about these things. Like my friend Sebastian from Poland, whom I served with last year at the Izyum Front. Shot in the head in Bakhmut, died a week later in a hospital in Poland. If you google him you find nothing, if you google him via image search the only thing that comes up is this Reddit thread:
(Sebastian is the left one)
Sebastian was genuinely one of the best soldiers and just generally greatest people I've met in Ukraine. And I'm not saying that because he's dead but it's true. I was devastated when I heard about his death, because he was really one of the best of us in every possible way. Here's Sebastian sitting in front of the house that we both lived in last year in summer:
And then there are the many (more than killed) whom you'll never hear anything about, because they go home with serious, permanent injuries. But they're not dead, so no media is interested in their stories. Like my friend F, a former Marine who was in my unit almost since the very first day of training, who got shrapnelled in the head over half a year ago on one of the exact positions I'm still working at today. I visited him in the hospital in February after his brain surgery:
He's back home in the states for a couple months now, but his life will never be the same. And there are many more like him.
Don't forget about us. Not all heroes in Ukraine are Ukrainians.
