On Duty

Champion ballroom dancer and Dancing with the Stars alumnus Maksim Chmerkovskiy arrived back in the US this past weekend. On a professional engagement in his native Ukraine, he'd been initially stranded there at the start of the Russian invasion, but was able to make it home via a tortuous route involving a train to Poland and a Finnish airliner.

In a sad, disgusting and unfortunately predictable turn of events, the feedback sections of many news pieces reporting his adventures have been inundated with comments accusing Chmerkovskiy of cowardice and of fleeing with no regard for anything but his own skin. If I were so inclined I could predict, with a very high degree of confidence, that the number of these armchair resistance fighters currently en route to Ukraine themselves to sign up for whatever foreign brigades may be deployed to fight the invaders is at or close to zero. However, that would be petty (though somewhat satisfying). It would also be beside the point.

I chose my words carefully when in my first paragraph I stated that he had "made it home". Maks Chmerkovskiy is an American citizen. His parents emigrated from Odessa to Brooklyn when he and his brother were teenagers, and the US has been his home for over 25 years. His wife and son are here. His family are here. Notwithstanding the decree put in place in Ukraine prohibiting men aged 18-60 from leaving, he has no obligation to remain there. He did not shirk any sort of duty, and there would have been nothing noble about him staying to fight.

So, as a foreign national, it was his decision what to do. And he chose his family. The me of a few years ago might not have sympathized with this. In high school I took German literature, and acquired a solid grounding in the work of postwar greats like Max Frisch, Siegfried Lenz and Alfred Andersch, and their emphasis on society's collective responsibility to resist evil above any consideration of personal safety. Their messages are powerful, compelling, steeped in the open wounds of recent terror, and perennially relevant. I am sure that Maks did not make his decision lightly.

And yet - now that I am a parent, I entirely get why he chose to come home. If - heaven forbid - anything like this should happen in the UK while I was visiting there, my first thought would be to get home to my wife and daughter in California. Unless the enemy was literally at the end of the street and I was left with no other option but to pick up arms to defend them, I wouldn't consider it my place not to do everything I could to keep myself and my family out of harm's way.

None of this is to detract from the courage and bravery of those who have stayed in Ukraine to fight. The videos of fathers making their tearful farewells to children and spouses, not knowing if they will ever see them again, are heart-rending, and these men deserve our utmost respect. They are doing their duty too. In most cases, it's because they believe they have no choice. Their kids deserve a dad, but they also deserve a happy and safe place to grow up, and they won't have that if their homeland is overrun by an unsympathetic occupying force.

But it's not noble. War sucks more than anything else humans have invented. In almost no account of warfare (outside jingoistic propaganda) will you find soldiers expressing love of country or cause as their primary motivation in combat. Duty? Yes. They certainly think of that, but not in the way the politicians back home or the generals safely ensconced dozens of miles behind the front line do. To soldiers in battle, the foremost duty is to their comrades, and next to that, their loved ones. Patriotism comes way down the list, if it's even a consideration at all when you're face to face with the enemy. So when people from the safety of their computers thousands of miles away excoriate a Ukrainian-American man, whose story they'd know nothing of if he didn't happen to be a TV personality, for coming home to his family and not staying to "do his duty", it doesn't sit well with me at all.

It not being a choice I've ever had to make, and hopefully never will, I cannot and will not blame Maks for getting out, and I'm happy that he's safely back home with his family. He decided this was his primary duty. Others decided theirs was to stay and fight. The decision was theirs alone and we should respect it whatever it was. It's not any keyboard warrior's business to decide for Maks or for anyone else and then complain when the person doesn't do what they would have done.

Or, you know what (one final dig), I don't reckon Captain Internet would have done any such thing. As I said: do you see any of these clowns jumping on a bus to Kyiv? Not likely.