Drop Baby Drop

Winter arrived this weekend with a couple of suitcases in tow. If I were Margaret Renkl I would proceed to write about crisp mazes of frost on the grass crunching underfoot, snow-flecked sparrows gathering at my backyard bird feeder like hobos around a barrel fire—does Renkl write “hobos?” Maybe not. Anyway, after a few hundred words of this sort of Keillor-nouveau Thomas Kinkade kitsch confectionery I’d finally arrive at a heartwarming story about how winter always sparked the growth of a warm, green tendril of childhood in my breast despite the black skeletal forms of trees and the gunmetal gray skies. But I’m not Margaret Renkl and frankly I find winter to be a big pain in the ass, particularly in the South, where the season is mainly just wet and cold and dark—we don’t even get the saving grace of massive snowstorms. Years ago, living in Boston, at least two or three times each winter we would wake up to discover we’d run out of heating oil, which meant taking icy showers in an apartment that was already cold enough to hang beef. I’d stand in the tub, as far from the shower head as possible, shivering uncontrollably as I waved my extremities through the stream of freezing water, fighting an internal battle between the sensation of knives flaying my flesh and the desire to not go to work covered with sticky soap residue. It was horrible, but at the very least, once you were finished with this unholy torture, you could step out into a wintery wonderland instead of Mordor.

Still, a winter spent mostly on the couch eating crackers and cheese until it’s time to crawl into bed and eat crackers and cheese until it’s time to go to sleep isn’t the worst way to pass the season. I know this because one of the strange bequeathals of modern life is the tidal wave of grenade-drop videos that go along with being obsessed with the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. What I really want, when I open up my laptop, is to hear and read intelligent people telling me all the ways this could work out well; how Vladimir Putin fell and cracked his head open in the bathtub and all the evil ran out and destroyed the porcelain; how Alexei Navalny—as I write he has been reported missing—has arrived by train at Finland Station in St. Petersburg with a panoply of angels wielding golden swords at his back. Instead what I get is grenade-drops.

Remember when drones were fun?

There’s a bottomless well of war videos out there for your entertainment, of course. The flurry of helmet-camera and drone footage from Ukraine is a veritable TikTok of horror—from first-person trench assaults, eerily reminiscent of video games, to the technicolor detonations of scores of Russian tanks and other vehicles, turrets spiraling through the air like hummingbirds. But it’s the grenade-drops that come back, unbidden, in the silent hours of the night.

If you’re not familiar, congratulations. Fairly early in the war Ukrainian soldiers began strapping grenades to drones, to be dropped from directly overhead Russian trenches and dugouts. From these humble DIY beginnings an industry has emerged, on both sides, and drones are increasingly armed with more and more sophisticated weaponry. Drones are the ultimate mortars—an indirect fire weapon that preserves the concealment of the attacker, but without the need for spotters and target bracketing and math and all that nonsense. Just get the drone directly overhead and let go the charge. The operator can do this with great precision using the drones’ cameras, and a digital tail is left behind to be posted to what are effectively leaderboards, so that the rest of us can enjoy the plays of the day; that grenade that drops right through the open hatch of a BMP-2 full of high explosives; the one that lands in some poor sod’s coffee mug.

Grenade-drop videos are the saddest artifacts to emerge from this war, and they just get sadder as the weather grows colder. Almost invariably the target is a lone Russian soldier¹ curled like a fetus in a dark hole in the snowy earth. Occasionally the victim will attempt to roll away from the explosive; as often as not they seem unaware of their predicament until the puff of black smoke dissipates to reveal shredded limbs, bellies, faces. Sometimes they lie still; sometimes they move sporadically; sometimes they finish the job themselves.

I really can’t imagine such an ending, even though I’ve seen it more times than I wish I had. Many of these people are evil—the Russian ranks are flush with convicted rapists and murderers—but most of them are simply unlucky. Unlucky to have been born outside the Moscow-St. Petersburg axis, somewhere in the distant east—the rump of the Russian state, from which the elites mine their resources, whether material or human, with rapacious energy. Often pressed violently into service, in a matter of weeks they move from whatever domestic situation they inhabited to the frozen trenches of eastern Ukraine, fighting for the subjugation of a people who mean nothing to them, for purposes that are entirely orthogonal to their daily lives. They live amid heaps of detritus—spent weapon casings, empty ration boxes, the corpses of comrades. The cold is relentless and grows worse by the day. Rotation never comes. They simply await the day they are called upon to facilitate the expenditure of another round of Ukrainian ammunition. For that is, ultimately their purpose—the “meat waves” the Russians send at their targets may seem like a foolish tactic, but it is cold, hard math: the most efficient way to deplete Ukrainian stocks of artillery shells. Quantity, in the formulation of Stalin’s, is its own quality.

Watching grenade-drop videos, however, is like viewing the war through a straw. They typically depict single soldiers, maybe two or three. Stalin also said that the deaths of millions is a statistic, but in these short clips we see, with the relentless oppression autoplay provides, the tragedies of individuals. It’s shockingly intimate—the last moments of these strange white-faced ghosts, tiny but palpably human. The brutal cold leaks through the smooth glass surface of one’s phone; the loneliness of these grubby deaths in empty fields and amidst piles of rubble comes across with shocking immediacy.

This needs to end—you don’t need me to tell you that. But the window of opportunity is closing rapidly. Ukrainians must have our devoted and overwhelming support, and we must approach the task with the understanding that they must win, decisively. There are dangers in victory, but there are greater dangers in allowing the thing to run on endlessly. Wars are unpredictable things, and the longer we allow this one to metastasize, the greater the risks we run that events will take some unexpected turn and spiral out of control. This winter will feature a bumper crop of grenade-drops, as well as whatever other horrors are in the making. Some future winter could well find many of us poring over grenade-drops in search of a brother, a father, a son.

Book update: I’ve been getting into gear pretty slowly to be quite frank. Doing research mostly, and working out a very high level outline. My plan is to refine the broad outline until I can write short summaries of each chapter, and more fine-grained outlines for each of those. Once all that’s done I should have enough to enable more targeted research and perhaps to begin writing. Is this a good plan? I have no idea—I’ve never done this before. But we’ll see how it goes.

In the meantime, I still don’t want to give away any secrets, but I will tell you that the book will be set—mostly—in 1303. So you put on your history cap and think about that a while. Speculations in the comments, please.

1. Videos of the war from the Russian perspective appear from time to time but are much more rare and are more likely to depict Russian officers armed with sticks beating the living shit out of a bunch of helpless conscripts.