☕️📖🕯
Howitzer Nuggets part 1
My time farming in the Donetsk region could be characterized as a practical course in homesteading across the fence from a busy football stadium. You might be hoeing your patch of corn, or milking the goat, but your emotions are all tied up in the football game. You cheer when your team makes a good pass or tackle. You get angry when the other team scores. Only for me, the football game was more like cops and robbers, good versus evil, a matter of life and death for the players. And instead of throwing a football several yards, they were throwing high explosive fragmentation shells several miles.

What didn't seem fair was that the enemy team would get to do a lot of throwing before my team got possession. When my team got to throw, sometimes they seemed to think that I might want to catch too! But that was okay, I was still in a good mood because at least they were doing the throwing. When the other team had the ball I could get mad enough to bust.

To be continued...

Howitzer Nuggets part 1

☕️📖🕯
Howitzer Nuggets part 2
One time the enemy team got a bit careless and dropped the ball where I could go and fetch it. I really wanted to throw it back at them and hit their quarterback, but it didn't work out so well. Those of you who are familiar with war probably know what I'm taking about, but for those of you who have been blessed not to see war up close, let me explain. The quarterback I refer to is a self-propelled howitzer. It looks mostly like a tank but instead of so much armor, it has a bigger gun that shoots farther more accurately. For most of this war, it has been the most deadly weapon in Ukraine's arsenal in terms of casualties inflicted on Russian troops.

A large portion of Ukraine's self-propelled howitzers are M109's, made in the USA(frown). For many months, one of these M109 guns drove back and forth through our village, and fired from positions just outside the village limits. For a time they even made a habit of parking it for a half-hour or so in the village center.

One evening while walking my dog, I noticed some kind of dark blue nuggets strewn on the sidewalk where the howitzer had been parked. I had a feeling I knew what it was, and grabbed a couple pieces to take home and test burn. They burned like weak gunpowder! This was the explosive that they use to shoot their deadly payload at my friends! What could be more perfect but for that howitzer to get blown up by its own TNT?

I went back that night and gathered up enough to make a small bomb, at least enough to knock the howitzer out of service temporarily.

To be continued...

Howitzer Nuggets part 2

☕️📖🕯
Howitzer Nuggets part 3
After doing some more testing with the TNT, I decided that it must be wet. That night I set a small portion of it in my oven and set it to minimum heat with the door open.

About an hour later, already in bed, I heard a noise that had just begun to become familiar. You guessed it, somehow the powder had gotten too hot and began to burn slowly. Slowly for only about two seconds, then all hell let loose. I had just enough time to open the nearest window and jump out before the room was filled with smoke. Scorching hot air singed my hair on my way out.

Fortunately the fire was not only hot, but also shortlived. I was able to close up the house tight, and the firetruck came on time to save half of the house from irrepairable damage. The other half, closed off by a door, was untouched by the fire and didn't even smell like smoke.

To be continued...

Howitzer Nuggets part 3

☕️📖🕯
Howitzer Nuggets part 4
Call me crazy, but I went ahead and finished the mechanical part of the bomb. I didn't use it though because my Russian contacts convinced me that it was an unnecessary risk.

The M109 continued to visit us, shake our houses when it shot, and kill our Russian friends.
I went back to praying that the howitzer would miss every time I heard it shoot, or at least told myself that it probably missed. Mostly I just learned to ignore it. Or at least I thought I had learned to ignore it.

After liberation, I realized that I hadn't really succeeded in ignoring the howitzer's bark. No, I had just stifled my reaction to it. All the same it made me more and more and more angry all of those two years. Day in and day out, night and day. That anger and frustration got so bad that for the last few months, my behavior changed radically for the worse.

After liberation I was still angry, but without all of the distractions and activities to help be forget about it. I couldn't even sleep. At first I didn't even know what was eating me. I was carrying a very heavy load of desire to get revenge, but as soon as I took it to the Lord in prayer, He lifted that burden. Now I'm happy again, even happier than before this war!

Recently the news broke that legal proceedings against Trump have been concluded. Director of communications for Trump's transition team called it a significant victory for the rule of law.

Sorry to burst anyone's bubble, but this has nothing to do with law and justice. It's just the end of yet another show in the D.C. circus.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2024/11/26/why-is-us-prosecutor-jack-smith-dropping-charges-against-trump

Leaving aside who is right/ wrong in a given conflict, all assertions that the bad guys are doing this or that because it's in their blood or genetic – this is nazi ideology! The truth is our genetics and blood are all the same – we are all equally human, disposed to sin! Hatred or even distrust for a certain ethnic group as a whole, puts you very close ideologically to being in the same camp as Hitler and Goebbels. This is not what the world needs.

☕️📖🕯
Unwelcome Savior part 1
Today let me introduce to you one of the volunteers that I met along my journey who probably was not purely civilian. He had his mission, I had mine, but we just so happened to meet.

At first he seemed a bit suspicious of me, asking to see my passport, and wanting to know if I had informed the US consulate about my residence near Ugledar.

He even insisted on seeing where I lived. He walked behind me as I led him back to my house giving me the feeling that I was being hunted. Maybe I was actually sensing HIS fear. Perhaps he thought I had set an ambush for him.

Before he left, I seemed to have gained his trust. He even hinted that if I was to come close to being captured by Russians, that American special forces would come to save me. I could tell it was going to take a miracle for me to be liberated given this guy's apparent determination to "save" me from my friends.

To be continued...

☕️📖🕯
Unwelcome Savior part 2
On that volunteer's second visit to see me, he introduced me to an elderly couple who lived relatively close to me. He needed me as an interpreter to communicate with them. He had brought medical help for this couple and some other neighbors. That was in the fall of 2023.

In the beginning of 2024 that volunteer began regularly putting pressure on me to leave. My excuse for staying was that I didn't want to leave while that elderly couple, our mutual friends were still in danger. My other justification for staying was that I had lost my passport not long after he had examined it in summer of 2023.

I was almost convinced that I had dropped it somewhere, and that some local had picked it up, planning to use it to prove to Russian troops that I am an American spy. "If only they knew", I thought to myself.

This volunteer did everything he could to frighten me into leaving. One time he seemed to accept that I was going to stay, but demanded that I send him my parents' contact information and address. Why? "So that he could ship my body back to them".

That got me thinking, I should be wearing something to identify myself too. I recycled a Ukrainian's dog tag, punching my own info into it. There were days and weeks when I wore it everywhere, even to bed.

☕️📖🕯
Unwelcome Savior part 4
Of course not! How could I go into hiding while my neighbors still needed help evacuating? This made a ready excuse for not evacuating myself, but when Russian troops advanced even closer, I knew no excuse would satisfy my unwelcome savior.

I told him that I was leaving and sent him this photo as proof. Over the next week or two I was supposedly hiking with my goats out of Donbass.

I actually just moved myself and all my animals to a different farm nearby. I'm not 100% sure that he believed me, but if he did send a team to extract me, I wasn't "home". I can only imagine what he thought when he saw my press conference in Moscow!

A large part of my decision to move to another farm was that I ran out of hay for my goats, and I needed a different barn to rescue some cows. That's a wild story that deserves to be told too!

☕️📖🕯
Save the bovines part 1

In September 2024 another wave of locals fled. On one hand I was glad to see them leave. At least they would be in relative safety. On the other hand, saying goodbye was painful. My secret hope was that we would all get to see the Ukrainian military driven out, and then celebrate liberation together.

Seeing my neighbors, the dairy farmers leave was one such blow. They had seemed so brave and resolved not to abandon their cows. Alas, their nerves finally gave way and one morning they had suddenly disappeared. They had packed up what they could in one small car and fled.

They had let their cows loose, but hadn't taken time to lead them down to the river. That would have been alright on a regular year, but this year it hadn't rained practically all spring and summer. There wasn't any standing water anywhere. I helped another neighbor to drive one of the abandoned cows home. The other three cows would have to fend for themselves somehow. I wanted to take them home, but I didn't have any more room in my barns, or anything to feed them!

My main focus was on saving people. How could I let some cows distract me from that mission. But then an Idea came to me that would turn this dilemma into a blessing. I had a friend who was constantly putting himself in grave danger while drunk. How to distract him from his alcohol habit? What better than this sweet, intelligent heifer that was in need of a new home?!

The next morning I tied the heifer to my rototiller and off we went. When we sputtered to a stop, my friends looked at me as if I was crazy. Really they were right, drones were already actively attacking cars and soldiers, and artillery was making movement over open ground very risky. I had just made a very easy target out of myself for about 15 minutes walking through the most dangerous part of town. Still I hadn't really been worried because I knew that I was doing something that I wouldn't regret no matter the outcome. My adventures with trying to save cows had just barely begun...