Editor’s Note: Marlow captures some of the emotion flying around. Some of the Salts have tried to follow the ground combat in Europe. It is a horror.

– Vic

Author’s Note: I spent the better part of the past several days reviewing longitudinally many months of Ukrainian-Russian battle maps, video war footage and reporting imagery. Television and computer flickering video of heavily armed soldiers fighting in shelled cities provoked no sense of impact on Westerner lives except for the recent brief fear of Armageddon.

In the vacuum of our silence — our eyes, ears, noses, and fingertips senses have been dulled while this distant disorder grew and spread.

This slow, relentless imagery over time anesthetizes us from that ultimate threat’s pain. Still the growing spread and depth of the devastation benumbs.

There seems to be something wrong with us. With all of mankind. Something evil that makes us ignore and/or enjoy what we or others do. Some hideous flaw. Consequently, we cull or are culled. Deservedly or not.

What I fear or should one say what we should fear is a slow rising tide from these streets of calls for vengeance, purification, or spiritual restorative.

– Marlow

Wild No More

We settled old ones find ourselves in a changing land. Out of step, out of place, and desperately running out of time. Suddenly, a mature, more familiar Western peaceful land has emerged underneath our wild-no-more feet. Suddenly, it’s sundown for distant, young, Eastern men. Suddenly, their day appears nearly over. Suddenly, the Eastern skies are bathed in blood. Like a shootout at a bank robbery. With no cavalry riding to their rescue.

We Western aging gangsters of government authorized violence can no longer fit into our military uniforms nor jauntily march, sail, or fly into town to save the day. We’re just harmless hornets who based on our age and times of prime service barely escaped with our lives from these current maniacally crawling red anthills in the distant East. Over here, we eschew all local assemblies of assorted temperance unions.

For the most part, we successfully hide from the cancelation crowds of bounty hunters lurking about the internet and networked society at large perched atop and among the digital rooftops of our housing units.

We smirk and chortle when we hear, watch, or observe these pure as the driven snow Leviticus’s warn about drinking and sharing wine or strong drink, lest we die.

Does anyone really think that is the price of a drink?

Not us profane buzzards.

Those groveling heaps of muck not far removed from being two-bit redneck peckerwoods who abstain from all distilled, fermented malt liquors including wine, beer, and cider will clear out, when the going gets tough and violent. Digital role-playing simulations are their game with special effects of pounding heartbeats, rock music, and automatic pistols in their digital hands with endless reloads at the pressing of the correct handset controller button ever fully combat ready.

No fright for our whole sick crew as we watch real glass shattering in the televised and podcasted raging shooting that comes in bunches as the combatants run in and out of rooms and scenes killing, scoring hits as their rising body counts are highlighted with blow backs and bodies falling from roof tops.

We old ones have scored comfy high up seat shelter overlooking the battle, its spasmodic shooting and the intemperance parade’s armor riders treading straight into innocent people. As our views swing quickly through streets and towns, we observe:

Crazy apes blowing stuff to hell.

Dead bodies in the streets, people running in each and every direction possible.

“Soldiers” taking old women and small kids as cover.

People in the streets running, dying.

Gatherings at riverbanks hoping, perhaps foolishly, to cross.

Folks wanting to shoot but their guns are empty.

Wild crazy-assed bunches crawl, run, and rocket through side and main streets. not finding good shooting positions but short shooting-safe periods to gather and decide where next to head, shooting only at imminent threats to preserve dwindling ammo.

Huge problems getting men and situations under control. Tough when they’ve cleared out from their favorable positions. No plan B or C it seems.

Stingerless-scorpions atop burning Ukrainian anthills.

Running away is like putting straw on the flaming anthills as their pursuers put more on. It become a hog killin’ and fat-renderin.’

Meanwhile looting dead bodies increases.

Careless killing apes.

Look at the size of those bullet and shrapnel wound holes.

Perhaps the next time, they’ll plan their massacres more carefully. Oops, nevermind, they’re Russians.

Well, they shouldn’t have run.

Innocent people are dead — outrageous, says the press. So what say the troops.

Women and children dying, buried in rubble, and mangled because generals use civilian-only towns as their mindless battlefields.

Who’s going to pay for this loss of blood? Nevermind — foolish question — that bill’s being paid.

Some say we should catch these bands of outlaws. We the West should lure them into traps.

The media has been blabbing on about a big paybacks for weeks, claiming they represent humanity and the law! Meanwhile we see formerly innocent children on the street, running and playacting the shooting.

We old ones nod as we see once again how quickly the dear dead departed are forgotten.

These boy soldiers mostly want to move on, and not stay to give their fallen comrades decent burials.

No one thinks let alone says aloud He was a good man. We should bury them. They’re dead!

We old dudes know these all too recently innocent boys are right.

Even a hymn or two isn’t in order.

No church suppers. Certainly, no choirs!

Those who do think so are crazy bastards, all of ‘em!

Meanwhile they all are moving on.

These cherry greenie greens might do what their superiors initially tell them, but they do better, longer and appreciate liquor nightly.

Some do what they’re told since they don’t want to go back to prison, ever again.

We wonder how these troops might feel, if they were getting trained, equipped, paid, and fed for soldiering. Their REMF bosses get paid to sit back and order their killings with ancient regime weapons. How can they feel so damn righteous? Dirty sons of bitches. Judases actually.

A-crossing the border . . . .

When will they start thinking beyond their guns, we old ones think.

Those days may be closing fast.

We also consider that we spent most every second of our time and money getting ready for this cretinous and ineffective adversary!

They spend their time and money as running and pillaging whores. We who watch these scenes shake our heads in disbelief far away at a safe time and distance and wryly laugh.

Being sure was our business. Now we’re not.

Hopefully this is going be our last one to watch but war clouds grow in the Far East. We ain’t getting around any better. Is the West?

We’d like to see the good guys in the East make one good score, then back off. Mercy and all that being what it is.

Back off to what is the question none of us has an answer for – also why learning from being wrong doesn’t seem to be in effect.

An issue for us in the West: when you sided with a man, you stayed with him back in the day. If you couldn’t do that, you were no-account animals.

Winners need trained men, not recruits, not this gutter trash Putin’s moving forward.

Standoffs at/over bridges?

Yes, sir.

Road sign shield at the bridge: You are leaving Ukraine.

While the Russians cross the bridge homeward bound, someone is lightning the fuses.

While retreating troops roll haltingly along the bridge, partisans on the either side of the bridge open fire. The bridge explodes and the Ukrainian wolves fall to their task of savagery. The Russian soldiers look slack jawed as they fall.

Towards a showdown . . .

Standing there with guns ready. Soldiers rise from their seats, some raising their hands, most just looking. Some still have guns in their hands. The whole scene takes place under the arcs of a long-ruined church, only the arcs remain with small shacks built inside various spaces that previously were holy.

Soldier wearing a child’s sombrero dying.

Soldiers dying in the explosions of grenades

Russians die in bunches.

A recently-arrived-at-the-front mobilization Russian conscript soldier in the middle of many dead corpses firing his dead Lt’s revolver wildly at a machine gun continues shooting. He’s shredded to bits and pieces.

There’s a lot of dying every day, but technically let’s put it this way: the
battlefield is not objective, but subjective. We never truly see what actually happens, but what one believes that happens. So, to our distant observer point of view, every shot scores.

Taking stock as another cruel Ukrainian winter’s arrival fades the shooting, we expect to see dead bodies all over, women in black babushkas and soiled dresses praying, vultures sitting on pock marked walls made of raw stones and plaster often fallen down.

What or who will prevail?

So far, the sociopaths.

Who shall perish?

TBD.

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