The constant turns remind me of a joke about the poor conditions of the roads in Ukraine, especially due to the mud during the rainier seasons.
Giant potholes — pits, really — litter the path ahead, especially in the eastern parts of the country closer to the frontlines
Here's the joke, relayed by a friend:
“Usually you drive straight when you’re sober… And you swerve when you drive drunk.
But in Ukraine, you drive straight when you’re drunk – and swerve when you drive sober!”
Here's the joke, relayed by a friend:
“Usually you drive straight when you’re sober… And you swerve when you drive drunk.
But in Ukraine, you drive straight when you’re drunk – and swerve when you drive sober!”
Being in West Virginia brings back a lot of memories for me. I spent close to five years as a combat medic in the West Virginia Army National Guard.
State motto: “Mountaineers are always free.”
It didn’t always feel especially free to me! I remember it as a difficult, taxing experience.
There was a time when I was working FT at NPR, spending weekends/summer drilling in WV – while writing a book about the NRA and volunteering for COVID testing in Washington, D.C.
The second song is ‘Wagon Wheel,’ by Old Crow Medicine Show. And that’s more of a painful memory.
My favorite lines of the song are its opening: “Headin' down south to the land of the pines / I'm thumbin' my way into North Caroline.”
I found myself belting out those lines every time without fail.
The reason it has unfortunate undertones is that I had joined the Army to become a Green Beret, a Special Forces soldier.
WV is home to troops from the 19th Special Forces Group, which I had aspired to be a member of.
I never did become a Green Beret.
And it's something I regret to this day.
On a brighter note, I wanted to tell you a story about why we charge eight dollars per month for paid subscribers.
A few weeks ago, when it became clear I’d need to start looking for a new way to support my journalism, I reached out to a reader in California
This reader was a twitter.com/hashtag/DogsofWar superfan. She was an avid ‘Kyiv Remains In Ukrainian Hands’ stan.
This past winter, when it was freezing in Ukraine, she took the effort to personally knit me a hat – “green, so you won’t be shot by Russian snipers!” came the explanation.
And subsequently it occurred to me…
…That while I never did earn an upper-case Green Beret, our reader had knitted me her own version — a green beret I really, really treasured. And maybe this was the green beret best suited for me.
If you haven’t paid to subscribe and join us yet – what are you waiting for?
Paid members get access to the comments, exclusive posts, and our regular chats!
And you help support compelling, human interest and investigative journalism from in Ukraine!
A war correspondent's open notebook, reporting live from Kyiv. Compelling human stories that illustrate what’s happening during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Click to read The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
Tim Mak