https://medium.com/@sp4uR(...)tnessed-e3b804eb03c4The following is a transcript of an interview with an American Legionnaire who fought in Bucha and Irpin Ukraine in March 2022. These are his own words and unedited except to remove filler words and repeat words. This is an account of what he witnessed happen to civilians.
Interview Two: What he saw in Bucha and IrpinDriving past the bodies on the streets. Just bodies being on the streets. Like there’s nothing you can do to help them. You just kind have to keep pushing past them to push the Russians out. So you’re just leaving like an old, elderly, 76 year old guy? He’s already dead. It just feels wrong to leave him there like that. You see, like a 60-year-old woman who was probably just trying to go to the store or get to a shelter. And for some reason, the Russians just shot her.
It feels horrific. Horrific is probably the only word to describe it, because it’s again, it’s just an elderly woman, elderly man trying to… I mean, none of them were young kids, fighting age males. They were older, elderly people just probably trying to go to the store, trying to go shelter. And they were either hit by a sniper or hit by a mortar.
One the biggest things is when we got to Irpin. I was already fighting. There was a bunch of elderly people. None of them were younger than 50. So just all elderly people, men, women. And, you know, we had brought three or four days’ worth of food on us because we were going to be out there for four days. And this little elderly woman, she was probably in her seventies, could barely get down on the ground and she drops to her knees in front of us and is begging for food. So we all start pulling out our food. And then she’s trying to kiss our boots and we’re like, no, no, no. We’re picking her up. We’re trying to tell her, you know, Slava Ukraini, we’re here for you kind of thing. And that was probably one of the biggest things that stuck with me is seeing how bad these people were treated and how much they want help. Like, they didn’t even have food. And this is a 76-year old lady. Like in other countries she would be on Social Security and she wouldn’t even have to worry about any of this stuff. And here she can’t even get food.
Once Irpin and Bucha had been liberated, we had pushed the Russians back to the Belarussian border. Russia was on an all-out retreat pretty much. We were able to walk around and people looked at us like like heroes. And I don’t say that’s what we were looking for. We just wanted to go out and get a simple coffee. And me and some guys, we went in a coffee shop and we tried to pay the lady, but she wouldn’t take our money. She refused. She would not do it. We would go to cross streets and people would just want to shake your hand or take a picture with us. Some people just wanted to talk to us, just ask us, do we need anything?