The doctor of the Azov brigade about how he once worked in the circus, and now saves seriously injured fighters
I am glad (although there is little pleasant in this situation) that my brothers are here with me. I will do everything to get them to the station. I work with them, and the guys feel that confidence. They say that when I'm around them, it's much easier for them. I do not feel pity for the guys, because at those moments I feel like an older brother who needs to take the younger one to kindergarten, and he is stuck with his knee somewhere.
Morally it is difficult when you hear on the radio that someone is “yellow” or “red”, or the guys convey that they are under fire, and you understand that the next message may be about a wounded person. After all, your brothers are sitting there, you are very worried about them and you can not help anything. It is very exhausting.
At times there were a lot of injuries: my UBACS and pants were soaked with blood so much that when I went to bed, it seemed that, for example, I smelled the blood of one fighter from this hand, and from the other hand the smell of the blood of another. This is already something at the level of psychosomatics. All blood smells the same. It's all self-hypnosis.
The first experience of helping the wounded was in the Orikhiv direction. We were driving from positions and came across two fighters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine who got lost after one of the assaults. One of them had a shrapnel wound, and the other had a twisted leg.
There was a case when the wounded were unloaded from the car and I did not know what exactly with them, no one answers about the condition of the wounded. I began to pull the injured man by the leg, and the leg was already torn off and barely held on to the skin. At this point, it was my first acquaintance with severed limbs. But I quickly got used to it.
I work with the guys in the forward positions, or I am at a platoon stronghold. I perform the duties of an infantryman, and when someone gets injured, I help him. If it is not possible to deliver the wounded to the WPO, then I go to where the injured person is. So it was with the guys from the mortar department, they were in positions, they were seriously injured, so I ran to them to stabilize their condition before evacuation.
No matter how much you want to help, nothing will save you from artillery. Even well-dug trenches. If you are beaten, they will be beaten. And the assault, in general, is a cool topic: you yourself came, you see who you kill and you yourself influence the fate of your comrades. It all depends on your skill, and our skill in marksmanship is much better than that of the enemy. I'm talking about Azov now. It's better than sitting in a trench and waiting.
What Azov likes is that here everyone is responsible for their position, for professional skills. It is not that today you are a medic, and tomorrow the machine gunner needs to be replaced. Although in the case of active combat or assault, I am the same shooter, because everyone has a rifle base.
Before the war, I was an office worker, and before that I worked in a circus as an assistant artist. Hence my call sign — “Circus”. He had a public organization, trained children in Thai boxing, took them to competitions. With another organization, we were engaged in charity, helped orphanages.
When the full-scale invasion began, I tried to get to Azov immediately. I had a friend who was an Azov. He died in Mariupol. When there was a set for the deblockade, I thought that this was not the “Azov” at all, you need to somehow officially get there, go through the BKB, earn a chevron. Then it dawned on me that now there are slightly different circumstances and this may not be the case. I tried to get to the deblock, but it didn't work. I decided to go to one of the units in Kyiv.
I decided to become a doctor when I went for an interview. Some guys wanted to be gunners, snipers, scouts. I do not see myself in this, I am interested in medicine and RCTs. Everything else disappeared at once. I thought I would do medicine not directly in the infantry. But here it is also cool, but there are also disadvantages. I had no medical experience before the war. I didn't even know what a turnstile was. I started to study it, I liked it. When I chose my military profession, I thought that being a combat medic was cool: you help your own, and if possible, you also destroy the enemy. I have not destroyed any enemy yet, but helped our guys.
National Guard of Ukraine
