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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
The army is, perhaps, the best way to get to know a country.
Pre-war journalistic experience gives a false sense of being well-informed. You get used to thinking you know the moods, understand the trends, and understand people. Your phone has the numbers of half the Cabinet, you personally know people whom others only see in the news and on social media — and all this breeds a fair share of capital-city urban snobbery.
And then you join the Armed Forces. And it turns out that both of your higher degrees don’t compare to someone else’s ability to pull a cart. That adaptability, lack of fuss, and ability to work with your hands are more important than a PhD in philosophy. That your comrades from villages and district centers can be far more useful to a unit. The army is the perfect test that checks what you’re capable of beyond social status and social connections. Snobbery seems to be blown away with the first wheel that falls off in the fields within FPV range.
The Armed Forces are the best way to step outside your social bubble. It’s a kaleidoscope of biographies, age groups, life stories, and practical skills. Your previous experience matters here only insofar as you can apply it.
The army is a million people, and generalizing about us is like generalizing about Lviv, Dnipro, or Odesa. No one judges a city by a few acquaintances. No one takes responsibility for the moods of all its residents. For this reason it makes no sense to ask us what the army thinks on various issues. The vast majority came to the army as adults — bringing all their life experience, worldview, and mistakes. We are united by the years spent in service and differentiated by everything that came before.
From the outside it may seem that everyone in the Armed Forces works toward one shared goal — to defeat the enemy. In reality that’s not true. One wants to fight and get adrenaline. Another wants a position and a rank. A third wants to be forgotten and left in peace. The fourth dreams of earning money. The fifth simply goes with the flow. The sixth seeks revenge for fallen friends. The seventh recently fell in love and only thinks about the wedding. The eighth works for results because that’s all he knows how to do.
And between all of them — like between droplets — you make your way with your own task. Knowing the Statutes is, of course, important, but understanding psychology is more important. Because outwardly we are an institution, and inside, of course, we are people. Your effectiveness depends on your ability to understand others’ motivations.
There are many motivations, and the only thing that allows us to be generalized is the uniform. Under it we are all different, which is why talks about a “party of the military” sound so strange. “Genius, playboy, billionaire, philanthropist” — in our case that’s not one person but four different people. Behind the army identity there can be diametrically opposed views of the future. Some want to see Europe all around, others want Warhammer. Some aim for a business career, others for a political one. Some want decorations, others want children and a dog.
Also, the army is a place where you can’t fix a personnel mistake. If you decide to promote a good performer to sergeant and he fails — you won’t be able to demote him back to a soldier. If you made a sergeant an officer and he botched the job — congratulations, you now have one more helpless officer. The system works like a nipple — you can get a rank, but it’s practically impossible to lose it. The convoluted demotion system makes a rank something that doesn’t get reset and narrows the list of positions you can assign its holder to. If you need to get rid of someone’s personnel mistake, the only way out is to send that person up the ladder. Negative selection in action. This is what shocks anyone coming from business.
Army bureaucracy is ruthless, but not senseless. It resembles old computer code written fifty years ago in the punch-card era. Documents move, decisions are made, and papers are processed according to that code. At some point you begin to understand it, to see its inner logic and structure. All this is the first step toward Stockholm syndrome, when you start describing what’s happening by saying “well how else could it be?” This army code can’t be repealed — it can only be rewritten. So far no one has managed to do it.
The army lives by its own laws. They’re called the Statutes, approved by parliament, and in many ways still don’t differ from Soviet originals. The procedure for amending them is so complicated that few have tried. Each Statute is decades out of date, doesn’t take battlefield realities into account, and therefore any effective commander is doomed to break them. If anyone wishes, an inspection will always find violations, so every commander is forced to do a split. The more invulnerable he is to punishment, the more vulnerable his soldiers are on the battlefield. And vice versa.
Our army deserves respect not because it’s made up of extraordinary people. It deserves respect precisely because it’s made up of the most ordinary people. That’s why conversations that say only motivated people should fight are laughable. That compulsory mobilization is useless — they say. Probably all those people think motivation is like eye color: something unchangeable for life. You come to the army clumsy — you return clumsy. That’s not so.
Motivation can be acquired, motivation can be lost. Over 4,5 years of full-scale war many of those who stood in lines at enlistment offices simply burned out. Health ran out, problems accumulated, resources were exhausted. And the fact that someone came motivated does not make motivation lifelong — and vice versa.
A unit’s combat capability depends on its dominant culture. If the majority are professionals with values, unmotivated conscripts quickly get pulled into the army movement. But if you decide to form a new brigade entirely from busified recruits, their internal moods will digest the few professionals you mix in. Ratio decides everything.
However, talks about “motivation” are not only excuses for those who don’t want to serve. They are also an attempt to condemn those already serving to indefinite service. For this reason such reasoning makes no sense. In the fifth year of war the army has earned a format of honorable demobilization. When the homeland shakes your hand and says your watch is over.
Today you can enter the army with honors, but you cannot leave it with honors. You have to buy yourself a medical commission. Arrange a fake caregiving situation for relatives. Go into long-term service. But all of the above deprives you of the right to be proud of the experience you lived through and the sacrifice you made. The lack of service terms turns the main experience of your life into a scenario in which you can only lose. A ticket home is disability or disgrace — make your choice.
Those who went to defend the country have the right to a third scenario. Not a six-month deferment under new contracts that looks more like unpaid leave. But a full-fledged future in which they will have the right not to be ashamed of themselves. There are enough people in the rear who can replace them.
Over the last four and a half years I have come to know the country much better than in the previous twenty years in the profession. I have met people who the country will later make films about. I really don’t want every such film to be prefaced by obituaries for the main characters. But for now the country is doing everything so that after the war it has no living heroes left.
It seems to me that the army does not deserve this.
Photo from open sources
(Source).
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