Sometimes, just before beginning to write, you hesitate, knowing this is going to hurt. That’s where I am just now, as I set out to remember a good friend of The Musical Innertube and a longtime friend of Don’s and mine. He was our guest several times, talking about being a volunteer soldier, medic, and instructor in Ukraine. We were pleased to have him on. He gave our listeners and viewers information, stories, and insights they couldn’t have gotten anywhere else. The ideal podcast guest, he brought his energy – often tearful – his stories, and his pleas for help, donations, and prayers.
Wary of retribution, he asked that on mic we call him Mikhaylo, even though he was American, as American as we are, as American as Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana, California, is, where all three of us were students together from 1967 to 1971. Mikhaylo was how he was known in Ukraine, among those he taught, worked with, and even perhaps fought alongside, and so here, as I write, I’ll continue to call him that. Yes, his fate is now a matter of public record. But it’s best just to keep honoring his request.
Reports say Mikhaylo died in Kyiv in a “traffic accident.” These reports are surely not first-hand, and to be honest I’m not sure what happened. What kind of accident? Was it or was it not connected to the grinding, savage Russia-Ukraine war? As of this writing, we don’t know. We can’t tell. Perhaps it was “only” your run-of-the-mill smash-up in the often-bombed capital city of a country at war, a country that as of this moment – dare I say it? – is not winning. But which do you think would be more ironic? That a volunteer soldier like Mikhaylo would die in a car crash unrelated to the slaughter and destruction, or that his “accident,” whatever it was, did have a connection, was itself an act of war?
Like many others who knew Mikhaylo, I’d long been afraid for him. He was my age, 71, when he made his last trip out. He’d been taking these long trips to Ukraine since 2014, when Russian troops moved in and annexed Crimea. He was 57 when he started. What? A senior citizen, flying to Ukraine on his own dime to fight against Russia?
Well, if that sounds crazy, you don’t know Mikhaylo.
Why did he go? Believe me, I have been running and re-running that question ever since we learned. The news came as a shock, but beneath it ran a subterranean current of unsurprise. As Hamlet says, “My prophetic soul!” – as in “I knew it.”
So let me think aloud about why he went.
At Mater Dei, Don, I, and Mikhaylo took many of the same classes and had many of the same friends. We even wrote short stories together, critiqued one another’s work, even sent stories out to see if anyone would publish them. No one would. It was an era of argument. All three of us took part in hundreds of long, winding discussions. We talked about Vietnam; the civil-rights movement (was it was criminal or justified?); women’s rights (a national movement only a few years old) and all that came with them, issues of privacy, reproductive rights, fairness, equality under the law, equal pay, and patriarchy. As in any high school, we talked about sex (what’s it like?), drugs (what they were, who took them, what happened to you when you did), and popular music, from the Beatles to the Doors to Stevie Wonder to Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, to Joni Mitchell, James Brown, and many more, many, many more. We were all scared, all transfixed, all looking around.
I might add that I and Mikhaylo were also in the marching band together, I on flute and Mikhaylo on clarinet. Too many stories there. Let’s move on …
Mikhaylo was Catholic, as we were, a somewhat tortured, questioning Catholic, and he hated the Communist threat. He cared, he really cared, and he argued about almost everything as if his life lay in the balance. Stocky, high-spirited, he was a gifted, longtime gymnast. He used to come to my house and, well, show off. He was the first person I ever saw who could stand on his head and from there do push-ups. Once he did it with one hand free.
Even then, he was in training. He dreamed of joining the Navy Seals. I had never heard of them. He explained: they were one of the most advanced, selective, and exquisitely trained fighting organizations in the world, sent on hazardous, often top-secret jobs requiring impossibly talented men to do impossible stuff to fulfill the assignment, either with the latest weaponry, or if not, then by hand and tooth. I used to imagine training: getting dumped at sea with nothing but a knife and a belt. You had to swim miles, reach a beachless coast, climb all-but-perpendicular cliffs, and hike days across desert wastes, finding food and water if any. If you survived, you didn’t automatically pass. You had to survive with flair, with something left – because you might have to do the same thing again. Right now.
This was Mikhaylo’s dream. He wanted to fight Communism. And was he ever competitive. Several times a year, he’d come over to my house for what he called the “Non-Olympic Games.” It was no contest. Mikhaylo was muscular, hair-trigger, ever about to leap right out of his shoes. No athlete I, but I did run a lot, all over the place, partly because I drove people crazy and needed something to slow me down a little. He had us “compete,” quote-unquote, in 10 events. Most were non-events. Anything that required the use of muscles, which I did not have galore, Mikhaylo won with ridiculous ease, laughing all the way. The only field event I ever won was the high jump – but I did tend to win the track events. Mikhaylo hated that, trained hard for the next time and the next. He beat me flat. I’m proud of it. We climbed mountains with two other classmates who also dreamed of being Navy Seals.
Mykhaylo went off to do the impossible, and Don and I went off to university. One story from our highschool days will paint a proper picture of him. A powerful swimmer, he enjoyed diving for abalones off the California coast. On one such outing, he discovered a sea anemone, wide-open in a tidepool. He dared me to stick my tongue inside, to feel what it was like to get stung. Nope, not me! I may be stupid, but I’m not crazy. With too little hesitation, Mykhaylo stuck his tongue right in there, and for the next hour, told us what he was feeling – that is, until his tongue swelled up too much for him to talk. It was reckless, but still today I think it was cool.
In the next five decades, Mikhaylo would master a range of subjects, weapons, languages, and skills. His military life, I believe, may have interfered with his marital life, but without question he displayed drive and genius, first in the Navy, then in the field of emergency medicine, where he became an EMT and an eminent teacher. He was also an accomplished long-distance runner, running both marathons and ultramarathons. And Christianity came to mean everything to him.
In 2001 after the Twin Towers attacks, Mikhaylo challenged his way back into service. That’s what you did, in Mikhaylo’s book, when you were 48 and the United States was attacked by terrorists. Later he joined private contractors working in Iraq, where at least part of the time he was a munitions expert. I fear that meant he gathered weapons, stuck them in big pits, and blew them up.
Perhaps now I needn’t explain further why, when Russia took Crimea, Mykhaylo decided he had to go to Ukraine. As mentioned, he taught battlefield medicine and guerrilla tactics, and it is not impossible that he partook in front-line activities. I base that statement on things he told me, never confirming or denying very much, but there were little lapses, slips in the conversation. … This last time, he told us he wouldn’t go near the front lines now. “I’m too old for that anymore,” he said. He concentrated on raising money and collecting equipment for Ukraine, including new technologies to assist in tracheostomy, revival, and the treatment of massive injury. If you listen to our last podcast with him, August 27, 2024, you’ll hear him talk about the needs of his fellow soldiers in Ukraine, his efforts to support them, and his plans once he got there.
Mykhaylo, toward the end of his life, was becoming Ukrainian. He was well along to learning the Ukrainian language, and he was thrilled by the country’s culture and the people’s fierce pride in it. One night, a friend insisted on taking him to an opera in the country’s oldest opera house. Not an opera guy, Mykhaylo nevertheless was moved by the talent, the beauty – and the crowd’s tearful, defiant joy. He wanted to live there someday – after the war (as he dreamed) was won. Listen to our podcasts with him, and you will hear him break down as he tells his stories. He cared.
You don’t need to tell me there are other sides to all this. Mykhaylo was the kind of person who prompted a range of feelings. He himself often told me he’d had struggles, that he’d hurt people in his life, that he knew his fervor and certainty could create problems, that he’d blown important chances. Through the years, folks have wanted to tell me what they knew about Mykhaylo, why I was wrong, why I’d been misinformed. With love and blessings on them all, I want to say, look: I was an opinion-page editor for a long time at a big newspaper, and if there’s one thing I know well, if I learned anything at all from that experience, it’s that I am often wrong, often clueless, naïve, blind, ignorant, pick your adjective.
In that light, let me limit myself to what I know for sure. In his tenth year of service to Ukraine, Mykhaylo was killed in the streets of Kyiv. I can’t believe it, and yet I can. He lived life to the full. Courageous and dedicated, he was a believer in God, in righteousness, and in the absolute necessity to fight on behalf of the oppressed. This multitalented, flawed human being was a pain to some people, I guess, but also the kind on whose shoulders the world turns, the kind who runs toward the shooting. I personally hate shooting of any kind, and I surely did not agree with Mykhaylo on everything, but when people put themselves on the line in my name, or in the names of humanity and freedom, I must be silent and thankful.
I hope you’ll give a listen to our shows featuring Mykhaylo. Time for me to be quiet before the fact of loss.
