Lessons learned: Life after frontline - Marine Ivan Havrylko's journey and the questions we shouldn't ask veterans

"I sometimes sleep for several hours a day. In my dreams I can smell things. Smells of blood, gunpowder, rotten human flesh. I can hear it. Sounds, colours. Although they say that only schizophrenics have colourful dreams," says Ivan Havrylko, a marine who was wounded three times during the full-scale war.

Ivan, a geologist by profession, was mobilised in 2014. A year later, he returned to his children and wife, but he worked through the psychological problems caused by the war in the civilian world for many more years. And this was despite the fact that he did not take part in heavy fighting.

A month before February 24, 2022, Havrylko signed a contract as a reservist with the 503rd Marine Battalion to ensure that in the event of a full-scale war, he would be mobilised to his preferred unit, not just anywhere.

We met with Ivan in his Lviv apartment to talk about flashbacks from the war, his "state of a snail", depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. About what usually remains behind the scenes in heroic accounts of Ukrainian struggle. And what all the soldiers and their loved ones can expect when they return home.

"I want to go home"

Once Ivan published a social video about a veteran of the American army on his Facebook page . The video shows a happy family on a walk, in the car, at home. The wife and children are smiling, but the husband is sitting off to the side, wearing a bulletproof vest and a mask. He is constantly imagining explosions. This video was meant to show that returning to a peaceful life takes time and support.

"Story of my life," Ivan commented on the video at the time.

At the end of the video, the soldier is no longer in uniform, happy with his family. And the slogan appears: "Turn the hardships of your past into the strengths of your future."

Ivan himself is uncertain about his future, as well as the future of hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

"It will turn out that sooner or later they will say: ‘We didn't send you there’. I've already been through this," Havrylko says.

His supervisor once told him this. Then, after his demobilisation, Havrylko asked for an additional two-week leave, which the law guarantees for all combatants. But in response, he heard that he was "disrupting the work of the department", and his superiors had not sent him to war to give him leave for it.

"The first time I had a desire to slap that person was when, immediately after returning to work from the front, I was asked why I was so stupid that I couldn't bribe his way out of the call-up and went there," he recalls.

Ivan now works for a private company. He is still an active serviceman, but he still comes to the office. Because of his injured leg, he walks with a cane. He holds it with his left hand because his right hand does not work well yet - his radius is broken and permanently fused with a metal plate.

In the coming weeks, the military medical commission will finally decide whether to demobilise Ivan or return him to the army. He has already been returned to the front line twice after previous minor injuries.

"I want to go home. I want to continue to live a civilian life," Havrylko says about his expectations of the conclusion of the military medical commission.

"When you come back to an empty home..."

In his kitchen, there is a detailed sign on the fridge with the duties and responsibilities of each family member, including children.

But now Havrylko lives alone. His wife and sons went abroad after the start of the full-scale invasion because they were afraid of the sirens. And there is a military unit near their home, which is an additional source of risk.

If the family were here, perhaps routine childcare would help distract him from obsessive thoughts.

"On the one hand, there is less to do when there is no one at home. On the other hand, you come home from the office to an empty home, and it's a bit heartbreaking, depressing. Because I'm used to the noise and hustle and bustle, the dog barking, the cat meowing. They run after each other. And then you come back to an empty home, and sometimes it's so sad. I still sometimes routinely buy food for the whole family," he says.

"I would call it the state of a snail"

Ivan has many friends, especially from the Plast National Scout Organization community, who are ready to visit him almost every day. But he is not always ready to receive them.

"I would call it the state of a snail. Something comes along, and you're like: everything sucks, the kids are far away, the wife is far away, the country is at war, it's a shit hole — and you start feeling sorry for yourself. You don't want to see or hear anyone. It happens. Sometimes you just want to cry," Ivan admits.

While we are talking to him, a neighbor who lives on the same floor comes in. He visits often and jokes a lot.

"I have an extremely pragmatic interest. I'm a fisherman, and after the first injury to his shoulder, Ivan experienced pressure surges. This is when the fish are not biting. I called him a barometer. I call him: if his arm is aching, it means he shouldn't go fishing," the neighbor laughs.

Then he ironically adds that after the next wounds, "the barometer finally broke": "Now he is always in pain."

"Yes, my leg hurts 24-7," Ivan admits. He is constantly taking paracetamol for the pain.

"The guy who came out of the encirclement with me is now in a psychiatric hospital"

There are enough wounds on Ivan's body to give a tour of the geography of combat. On his left shoulder, there is a bruise and a hollow in the muscle. This is the first injury he received on March 10, 2022 in the village of Yevhenivka, Mykolaiv Oblast, when his unit was trying to unblock Mariupol.

"We were already leaving the village, and the Russians' positions were two houses away. A tank attack started, and I got hit. One of the guys who came out with me is now, unfortunately, in a psychiatric hospital. He wasn't wounded, but he couldn't bear it, it was very hard for him, too many events. And he is 23 years old, he is a child," says Havrylko.

Ivan realized that he was injured only a few hours later, because due to the extreme exit conditions and multiple layers of clothing, he did not notice that he had a wound on his shoulder.

"I felt something hurt. But there was no massive bleeding. As I was told, a little later I started shaking. They packed me into a car and took me away as a shell-shocked patient. At the hospital, we saw that there was such a huge hole - you could almost put your hand in it," Ivan recalls.

Havrylko underwent surgery in Vinnytsia. They forced him to shave his beard (so that it would not interfere with the oxygen mask).

"It was a moment of slight humiliation. Almost everyone in our battalion wears beards. Marines are brutal men, masculine. Firstly, a marine must be handsome, and secondly, he must always know where he is. If he doesn't know where he is, he still has to be handsome," Ivan laughs.

"I thought I was already dead"

His second injury occurred in the summer near Avdiyivka, when a mine hit his trench. Before that, Ivan and his comrades stormed enemy positions. Then they pushed the enemy back 200 metres.

"I do not rule out that it was friendly fire. A mortar attack, I got hit in the spine and a few shrapnel in the buttocks. At the time, it seemed that I was a goner. There was smoke everywhere, it was dark. I thought I must be dead. You couldn't see anything, your eyes were as if blindfolded," the soldier recalls.

Eventually, Havrylko, who was a medic in the unit at the time, began to rescue his brother-in-arms who was bleeding to death.

"He was very badly wounded in the leg. I bandaged him up, he was swearing, screaming, cursing that I had put too much pressure on the tourniquet. But at that moment, it seemed to me that his artery was punctured. My head felt twice the size after a concussion, and here you see blood and heavy bleeding. I'm not a medic, I'm a corpsman. Another fighter next to me had an artery torn in his arm. Another guy bandaged him up. Then we walked another two kilometres to the evacuation point," says Havrylko.

"I lost it, threw the tourniquet and started praying"

He was wounded for the third time two weeks later, when he returned to the front after treatment. It happened in October between Vodiane and Opytne near Donetsk airport.

"We were going to storm the enemy positions. They engaged the entire square with artillery, along with their own. The guys all dropped down, and I hesitated for just a second - maybe because I hadn't been at the front for too long after my second injury. My radius bone, popliteal artery and vein were broken. I crawled into a hole. As a corpsman, I had a carload of turnstiles. However, even though we had trained many times to apply them with my left hand, I could not do it. I already had whitewashed vision. I lost it, threw the tourniquet and started praying. I was reading Our Heavenly Father, singing this prayer. And then my colleague came and said: ‘What are you lying there for, get up, let's go’. I said, ‘I can't, I have this’. A drone was still hovering over us and dropping bombs. He fired back at it," the infantryman says.

After his surgeries in Ukraine, Ivan was treated in France. There he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He returned home in February.

The path to antidepressants and art therapy

"I don't remember anyone coming up to me in a Ukrainian hospital and asking if I needed psychological help. Well, there were guys who were obviously depressed, and psychologists came to see them. Perhaps I was asked too, but I don't remember this episode," Havrylko says.

From the outside, Ivan's image of a charismatic maverick is that of a positive and morally unbreakable man.

"The Marines cultivate the image of strong guys who are not afraid of anything. Although in reality, only idiots are not afraid," the soldier says.

In 2017, in addition to a psychologist, Ivan also turned to a psychiatrist. That was the first time he was diagnosed with PTSD and prescribed antidepressants.

"The ones I take are considered mild. Now I take a pill a day. In Avdiyivka, I took four of them because I had obsessive thoughts and panic attacks. I just took a pill in the morning so I wouldn't have to run around the trenches in the afternoon and shout that we were all f**ked," Ivan says ironically.

Along with medication, he tried equine-assisted therapy, a treatment based on human interaction with horses. And he quickly felt a positive result.

But it was art therapy that drew him in the most. He started painting with acrylic paints. Although he had no passion for painting before.

"My therapist advised me to do it. Just paint anything. That's how I get my emotions out on paper."

After his first injury, Ivan returned to the front with a drawing kit. In the house where they lived near Avdiyivka, he painted pictures on the plywood that covered the windows. He could not cut them out and take them with him because the house was struck by a shell.

After returning from France, Ivan already knew how to help his mind, so his experience before the full-scale invasion was not in vain. Now he has a psychotherapist, is undergoing treatment, and takes antidepressants.

"When I was demobilized in 2015, I didn't know what was happening to me at first. Then I was very embarrassed to see a psychologist because of stereotypes in society. I thought I would wait and be patient and it would go away. But it didn't, because it's like a broken arm. If you let it go, it will fuse up crookedly or rot, so these things need to be worked through," Ivan shares his experience.

Ivan says there were times when he wanted to go back to war. He believed it would help his psychological state.

"Although I realised that it was complete nonsense at the time, because there were enough guys who were there. But there is such a feeling of constant support, a friendly shoulder. The feeling that you are always needed, no one will leave you, you are a respected person. And here, even though I was a civil servant, I felt constant pressure from the management," Havrylko admits.

How not to harm with the desire to help and what not to ask veterans

He collects his paintings in a pile. On the walls hang landscapes by his favorite artist Bohdan Saliy. Havrylko also has a small collection of side arms.

"The last time I used this knife... Actually, it's not a knife, it's a stiletto, you can't cut lard with it..."

"Whom did you cut with it?" I interrupt Ivan. He looks up and lets me know that I’ve said something stupid, even if it was a joke.

"Nobody. Never ask veterans such questions. What other questions are annoying? ‘Whom did you cut up? How many did you kill? How did you feel when you shot at the enemy? What did I feel? I felt the recoil!’ The most annoying questions are ‘How is it over there?’ and ‘How many Muscovites did you kill?’ You do not perceive them as people there. They are a target, a threat that rushes like a rabid animal, and they need to be eliminated. No one humanizes the enemy on the frontline, because they will start to hesitate and be killed," explains Havrylko.

Ivan also asks not to feel sorry for the soldiers and not to coddle them. He admits that he feels uncomfortable when an older woman gives up her seat on the tram. In response, he pretends that it hurts to sit and refuses. However, when his leg hurts badly, he does sit down.

"The best way to communicate with veterans is on an equal footing. I have a brother-in-law (my wife's brother - ed.) who was seriously wounded. He has already been written off. No one can talk to him, but I can. I take him out of the house, we solve some household problems together, and we keep in touch. I am worried that he might start abusing alcohol. If he really wants to, I suggest that we sit down together and drink wine." 

Havrylko believes that Ukraine could use the American experience of quarantining soldiers after the frontline and having them monitored by psychologists. Although he is sure that the state will simply not be able to help everyone after the war. There will be too many veterans.

Ivan lights a candle. He always does this when he sits down to paint. The collection of his own works is growing.

"I painted this from a photograph of my friend who now lives in Japan. This is the Torii, a Shinto symbolic gate on the way from the world of the living to the world of the dead."

Ivan painted his last picture already after our meeting. There are bloody traces with rural landscapes in the background. The title of the work is "Flashback. Yevhenivka, March 2022".