06/09/2026
Translating Friend Dylan’s story:
I just stuck my head up a bit and the bullets pierced the ground in front of my face.
We needed to carry them out and we didn’t have the carriers but the group behind us did. We found two heavily wounded in a trench. So I started working on one of them and told my guys to take care of the other heavily wounded to his chest person. One of my guys said: “We’ll get killed here”. I replied that we got here for a reason, that we exist here for a reason, that we needed that wounded person and that person laying there was counting on us and we need to save him by all means.
At the time when I was running into a trench I felt a push into my back and my legs stopped working, I got paralyzed from the hips down and I just fell into the trench straight down breaking my ribs on the way.
I understand that I was hit by a sniper. A brother in arms who saw how I just fell into the trench grabbed my clothes and, shocked, pulled me into same sort of shelter.
I was laying there and I was told that this was a very dangerous sector and there was no opportunity to send an evacuation group in there. You know why - because I was that last evacuation group. So my only choice was to self-evacuate.
They stood me upright as some sort of mummy, as my legs just started regaining a bit of feeling in them. And in a place where everyone was glued to the ground under enemy fire I walked out on my straight legs.
When I sat down on an evac vehicle, my guys pulled next to me on the carrier the wounded brother in arms who I got out of the trench in the first place. I looked at him and saw that he recognized me. A tear ran down his cheek and he squeezed my hand. He was laying there and I was sitting there and with the sounds of screams, red light inside and machine gunfire around we got to the evacuation zone and were evacuated.
Wars should not happen. They must be illegal. Every leader who starts an invasion must be deemed a criminal responsible for every death caused by that war. In the world of today there’s no need for people to suffer through a war and no possible excuse to starting it. We are civilized enough to resolve matters peacefully but once a war was started we have to have laws against it and must make sure to punish war mongers to the extent that would ensure preventing more wars in the future.
