Mercy by Nolan Cathal J.;

Author:Nolan, Cathal J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

It is not only uniformed medical professionals who go to war. Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) has treated tens of millions in war and natural disaster zones since 1971.48 In 2014 the White Helmets civil defense organization was founded in response to war in Syria. It conducted urban search-and-rescue and treated civilian victims in almost impossibly violent conditions. It also documented, photographed, and provided testimony about war crimes, including chemical weapons attacks made by Syrian and Russian air forces.49 It was targeted, and some of its people killed. As Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the government in besieged Kyiv put out a call to raise a foreign legion. Western veterans and less experienced volunteers headed to Ukraine to join the fight.50 Moscow declared that foreign volunteers would not be accorded military status but treated instead as mercenaries, and thus subject to summary trial and execution as illegal fighters. Never mind that Putin’s regime sent Wagner PMC, Chechnyan, and Syrian mercenaries into the war.51 Moral consistency is not an imperial or propaganda virtue.

Some volunteers went to Ukraine for shallow personal reasons. One graduate student, who first tried to fight in Syria in 2019 but was turned away, said about leaving for Ukraine: “Everything here [Virginia] is just kind of empty and it doesn’t seem like I’m doing anything important.” But also numbered among the volunteers was “James,” a retired medic who saw his first combat in Iraq in 2006, after replacing another U.S. medic who was killed by insurgents. He saw so much horror and death that back at peace for 10 years he remained traumatized, attending regular therapy sessions at a local veterans’ hospital. As he watched Ukrainian civilians shelled mercilessly by Russian artillery and missiles, he could no longer stay at home. He left for Kyiv to try to help: “Combat has a cost, that’s for sure; you think you can come back from war the same, but you can’t. But I feel obligated. It’s the innocent people being attacked, the kids. It’s the kids, man. I just can’t stand by.”52 Meanwhile, the brutality of the invaders even toward their own emerged as Ukrainians drove them back from early gains. Bodies were left behind or disposed in mobile crematoria, concealing from worried mothers the extent of the carnage in the Russian Army.

Starting in the 1990s, British national David Nott served as a volunteer surgeon in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Chad, Liberia, Iraq, Libya, Gaza, Yemen, Syria, and Ukraine. What made him go? First, seeing the film The Killing Fields (1984) about the 1970s Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, then watching news footage from Sarajevo. One image especially moved him: “There was this man on the television, looking desperately through the rubble for his daughter. Eventually he found her and took her to the hospital but there were no doctors there to help her. I thought, ‘Right, I’m off.’ ” In 2019 Nott recalled his first experience in a combat zone: “As a young man, jumping off the aeroplane

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