When I came back to Ukraine, I didn't have any illusions that I was coming here as a tourist. I knew what I was getting into (or rather, getting back into). And I did it willingly, even eagerly. For those of us who have been in life-and-death lines of work before, especially those where combat was part of the job (ex-cops, ex-military, ex-corrections, etc.) it's not that hard to walk into it again. "Incoming drone? Screw it. Bills gotta be paid, classes gotta be taught, work's gotta get done." Granted it's a little bit of an adjustment realizing that you're doing a regular, everyday job (meaning your brain tells you that you ought to be in your civilian headspace) but still always on alert because death could come flying out of the sky at any moment and lives are riding on your ability to react in an instant (meaning you're in you're combat headspace), but it's an adjustment we make without too much of a fuss. It's like something in our brain says "oh, okay. This time death came to visit us, instead of us going to visit it." So we adapt. At least, we tell ourselves we adapted. Air-raid sirens, explosions, machine-gunfire, the unmistakable lawn-mower-esque sound of a Shahed within half a kilometer... we come to accept these things as "the new normal." Like the youth in Crane's Red Badge of Courage, once we've looked death in the eyes and seen, after all, it's only death, we get used to it. It's all part of the plan. Danger is something we expect to face. Something we expect ourselves to face.
But then, there's the sound of children playing outside.
And for me, that's when my brain, unable to grasp that the "here is war" reality settings and the "here are children" reality settings are in fact running simultaneously, cycles through a sequence of possibilities. "No, it's not that the sounds of the war are a nightmare and the children are waking me up. No, it's not a hallucination. No, it's not some sort of prophetic vision. That really is the sound of kids playing on the playground, with a war going on around them." And every instinct in me, the parent, the teacher whose job is to give students a better future, the ex-CPS officer whose job was to protect children from danger, all wants to grab the parents by the collar and shake them and ask "are you crazy?!"
The sirens sound off again. The warning app on my phone joins in this time. "Attention! Air Raid Alert! Proceed to the nearest shelter... Don't be careless. You're overconfidence is your weakness!" (And I'd really love to meet the geek who decided every notification from the air raid app should have a Star Wars quote in its English translation; the "all-clear" notification even ends with "May the Force be with you.") And the children go right on playing. One or two of them walk up to their nearby parents. "What's the incoming?" One of them asks. "Shaheds? A Kinzhal?" His voice shows no more alarm than if he were asking 'what's for dinner?' "Drones," his mother answers, checking her phone. "Shaheds, on the border between Sumy and Kharkiv. Nothing to worry about." Oh, is that all? It's just a Shahed. It's just a 3 meter by 4 meter flying bomb capable of leveling a house, with a robot brain programmed to seek out civilian homes. That's all. And the few kids who looked up at the sound of the siren go right back out onto the playground. They all keep laughing and playing, like this is completely normal. And then, that's when it hits me. This is normal for them. Because as surreal as it sounds, there's no other alternative. It's easy to say "take shelter every time there is an air raid threat," but the reason they can't comes down to math. There are 24 hours in a day, and the entire oblast spends an average of 23.8 of them under air raid threats. Everyone here has developed a definition of "safety" and "danger" that is a little different from the rest of the world. "The siren went off? Keep an eye on the phone. If you hear the S.A.M's firing, that means there's something within a few kilometers. Time to get inside. When you hear the AA guns firing, that means something is REALLY close and it's time to get in the hallway behind an extra wall." And we catalog that list of protocols in our mind without dwelling on the fact that the moment the siren went off we knew we were all in immediate danger... or the fact that if a drone hits head-on, that wall won't be enough to save us. That's why there's already an adage here in Kharkiv. "If you're going to run to the shelter every time there's incoming fire, you might as well make it your permanent address." It's the kind of mindset any soldier or cop can recognize. The work we do puts us in the company of death, so we learn to carry on like it doesn't frighten us. It does, but if we acknowledge that then we'll never get anything done.
And this is exactly the mindset the children have here in Kharkiv.
...You know, I've never woken up in a panic from the sirens. Or the explosions. When I was in the middle of teaching an online lesson in front of my window and a drone struck the apartment across the street from me, I didn't freeze up. When the sirens interrupt my class and I have to move twenty students from their classroom to a bomb-shelter, I don't have a moment's hesitation; I just go. When I was in Dnipro and had the dubious "luck" to be there when the much-overhyped-and-underwhelming "Oreschnik" woke me up by its first Re-entry vehicle hitting within a kilometer of where I was sleeping, My only thought was "whatever that was, I'd better find my phone so I can get footage of it." Why should I be afraid? The worst they can do is kill me, right? But when I'm awakened by the sounds of children playing outside, or when I'm dozing off in the breakroom at work and I'm awakened by my students laughing on their way to class, any time I'm jolted from sleep to consciousness by the sounds of children, that is when I start to panic. Because I know I'm in the middle of a damned war zone. I'm constantly aware of that inescapable fact. And my brain is screaming at me, "these kids are not supposed to be here! Get them out of here!" And it isn't until my brain finishes rebooting that I realize, "actually, the war isn't supposed to be here. They are."
Because here, danger is not something temporary that they can just hide from for a few minutes, or a few hours, or even a few days. It's all day, every day. Death can come flying out of the sky on wings any minute (and it's quite, quite, QUITE well-established that Russia loves hitting targets filled with children). We get used to the idea that we ourselves are in constant danger. That's easy. But here, the children, children for God's sake, have had to get used to the same reality. And if the children hid from danger every time it raised its head, they'd never play. So, they play. They run around. They climb on the monkey bars. They push each other on the swings, or the merry-go-round. The older ones play basketball. They do what you'd expect children to do: laugh and play like they don't have a care in the world.
And they do this, with death all around them, under constant fire from a lunatic who openly declares his intention to massacre them. Because in the world they are growing up in, that's just the way life is. It's their normal. The constant presence of death is their "normal."
And that's not the way it's supposed to be for children.