Of the moment

A story about a timely matter.

6 May 2024

Warren Stoddard II —

Early Spring In Poland

The train station at two AM was hungry. It was bitter, bitten by a smoldering morsel of anger and absolution and disbelief. Men slept disheveled on the floor with their backs leaned against the wall and women huddled in the corners of abandoned storefronts that had been fashioned into makeshift refugee centers with paper signs in Ukrainian pasted to the front windows that read Біженці вітаються. Refugees welcome. They were two of maybe a dozen words I could read in Cyrillic.

            My shoulders were heavy laden with a pair of bags stuffed to bursting zippers filled with what my life savings had become: a plate carrier and a pair of uniforms and a new set of boots and a good knife and several tourniquets, chest seals, clamps, quick clot, bandages and a slew of other medical equipment, binoculars, and a spare set of civilian clothes and a burning question in my head of what in the actual fuck I was doing.

            Sitting opposite a sleeping man on the marble floor of the station I looked at the refugee center and thought of the previous month of the war. I thought of all that I was heading toward and of all the things that had driven me here. I thought of the invasion of Hostomel and the shelling of Kharkiv. I remembered the images I had seen of the pillaging of Mariupol and the news of an uncovered atrocity in the vicinity of Kyiv. I thought of a red sedan nosing timidly down a street before the barrel of a tank flashed and the sedan detonated. I took my phone from my pocket and connected to the station wi-fi and saw many of these things again, then I checked my three-dollar bank account and wondered when midnight would hit on the east coast—when the royalty checks for the books I had written and the articles I had penned would hit—and I would be able to finally check into a hotel and wash the grime of air and rail travel from me and drink a beer for breakfast and finally collapse asleep.

            I hefted the bags back onto my shoulder and emerged from the train station into a modern and deserted shopping mall. Escalators took me up and I walked out into the first morning of April in Poland, where stubborn spring snow spat and the sky above had just begun to illuminate itself violet from the east. Streetlights glanced off the gothic facades of Krakow. Signs glowed. I wandered the cobblestone alleyways alone.

            Then I laughed and remembered how things had been four years before in a dusty airport in Kurdistan, where I had hidden in a bathroom stall and ciphered the digits of a phone number from underlined page numbers in a paperback copy of The Grapes of Wrath. Instead, I now sent a simple text: “Landed.” Would this border crossing too be very different? Then I had been smuggled across Iraq in the back of a chicken truck and ferried across the Tigris in rubber dinghies under the cover of night to Rojava. Now? It seemed as if this would be much simpler.

            I only hoped sickly that all that had come after would be the same. To move across the country and eventually meet the enemy someplace where, as Hemingway said, “finally only the names of places had dignity.” And I remembered it then and hoped that I still held within me the capacity to efficiently take another human life. As I had in Hajin. As I had in Ash Sha’fah. I wondered about the names of the places I would soon stand, ignorant then to the gravity of Mykolaiv, of Oleksandrivka. And I grew fearful recalling the burst of a wall beside me and the numb heat of a bullet lancing through me, and I wondered whether I could summon enough hatred in me now at 27 to do what I had done then at 24, and I wondered whether the wounds of this war should run deeper and more scarring than the first, and I was afraid of who I might soon again become. I became afraid of everything then. But soon the money hit with dawn, and I checked into a hotel, and I drank a beer for breakfast, and I moved through the fear. That was ever the only thing to do.

Following his graduation from Texas State University in 2018, Warren Stoddard II traveled to Syria to volunteer with the Kurdish YPG, where he was later wounded in action against the Islamic State. He then volunteered in response to Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. He is currently a student in the MFA program at San Diego State University and is the author of two books: No Birds in Yesterday and A Good Place on the Banks of the Euphrates.

Photo by Susan Cohen