Shell-Shocked, He Died Two Days Later

What does it mean to die from being shell-shocked?

Photo by John Torcasio on Unsplash

An acquaintance from St. Petersburg ‘WhatsApped’ me the other day to see how I was doing. After a few minutes of pretending life was normal, we inevitably chatted about the war.

“Remember Sasha, the guy you almost got into a huge brawl with at The Penalty Bar way back?” Of course, I remembered Sasha. That brawl was almost the end of me even though not a fist was thrown.

“He ended up on the front because his son went. He went to make sure he would be okay. He was fighting right next to him. Died the other day. Shell shocked.”

Death by shell shock

I know nothing about this form of death. All I know about it is that men from World Wars I and II suffered from it and as my aunts and grandmother would say, “He came back from the war and was never the same. He didn’t talk much and never married. Loud noises would make him hide.” That was one of my uncles who used to sit near the door in the front room and endlessly read the newspaper. His name was Fritz.

My aunt would call down to him, “Fritz, you want some lunch.” He always wanted lunch but he would make a show about whether or not he wanted it. Everyone played their role, “Just sit down and I will put out a plate of soup,” my aunt would say. “If you don’t want it, just leave it.” He would eat everything in sight and mumble about having been hungry. Then, it was back to the papers. I used to try to imagine what was going on in his head.

It seems that Sasha had been out in the trenches. There had been a day or two of non-stop shelling coming over from the Ukrainian side. Sasha didn’t seem injured but was led back to the rear by his son. For two days he was there, went to sleep, and never woke up.

“At least he didn’t suffer,” my acquaintance wrote.

After I read that, I immediately reached out to Google. If he wasn’t suffering, then why did he die? It seems that the scarring in the brain of veterans according to a study done in the U.S. is similar to that seen in boxers and football players. There might have been nothing out of the ordinary that caused Sasha’s death but it was just the months of being on the front and the force from so many explosions that just turned his brain into mush.

Long thought to be a psychological problem, military doctors and then civilian physicians looked but never could find any brain damage — just like doctors couldn’t find anything at first in the brains of football players. They weren’t looking in the right spot. After all, if a soldier comes home, or off the front line showing no obvious injuries but just seems to be a bit shaken up from so many explosions, it’s hard to then say, “Ah, it must have been from the blast waves.”

An explosion is a complex event that unleashes multiple mechanisms of injury. The primary blast effect is the shock wave, a balloon of rapidly expanding gases that compresses surrounding air and advances outward from the detonation faster than the speed of sound. This shock wave is what enters the brain, passing so rapidly that it has come and gone before the people hit have even had time to move their heads.

Just how a shock wave enters the brain is still not understood. Some believe entry is through the natural openings in the skull: the eye sockets, ears, nostrils, and mouth. Another theory is that since shock wave pressure hits the entire body, not just the head, it’s transmitted into the chest or abdominal cavities and surges to the brain by way of the body’s vasculature (Shell Shock).

I never knew much about Sasha. I didn’t know his last name. I saw him once with a little boy in the metro and I assumed it was his son. I never knew his age but I could imagine him being around 50 or so when he died in Ukraine. I wouldn’t even have recognized it if I saw before the war.

It was always Sasha shouting at me from a distance and that is what made our “friendship” so oddly special. He imagined me to be warrior-like as he said that day in The Penalty Bar, and I imagined him as being fair and also someone whose calm insistence on fighting me scared me. I kept thinking, “This guy has to be some black belt or something and that is why he wants to fight me.”

It’s so un-Sasha-like to die from something like shell shock, I thought at first.

The soccer matches

A long time ago, in another life back when St. Petersburg, Russia was still part of post-Soviet Russia, I went to the soccer games at the old Petrovsky Stadium on the Malaya Nevka River, an offshoot of the Neva. It was in that stadium that the very mediocre local club, Zenit, played.

Always ending the season at mid-table in the Russian league, going to the matches was more about drinking a lot of beer, and getting your hopes up only to have them crushed by a late equalizer or winner by the visiting club. The moment Zenit became a part of the Gazprom empire and money flowed in with foreign players, I lost interest. It became fashionable among ex-pats; people went on dates to the matches and the nouveau riche flocked there to be seen.

From 1994 to 2000, the years we used to go with a group of friends, it was a gritty, barely civilized experience that was a cultural as well as an anthropological study of the Russian people. Those miserable matches always ended up in clashes between fans and the OMON — para-military police most of who were returning vets from Chechnya. Fights were so common no one paid attention except the fighters and their immediate groups.

The bathroom would be so crowded that the beer-swilling crowd would form a line along the river’s embankment to urinate as fast as possible. The cars driving across the bridge to Vasilievsky Island would honk their horns to warn of the approaching police.

The wall of urinating fans — of which I was often one — would squeeze out as much as possible before the baton of the approaching police landed on the groin area; cut the flow and run from the embankment with your pride in hand. As the cops moved away down the line, you hurried back to finish — then they would come back from the other way and the same wave would ripple down the line. If lucky, you could finish peeing in one or two such waves. Looking back now, it was a magical time but then it all felt so raw — and so real.

Sasha and I met at a soccer game in 1998. I happened to be in a mixed group of loud-speaking foreigners and Russians. Sasha’s group didn’t like that we were there and made comments to the Russians in our group that we should leave. Feeling obligated to stand up for Russian friends who were not fighters at all, and because I spoke the best Russian out of the foreigners, I became the center of the turmoil.

They were a group of 25 and ours was only 12 or so. Realizing that we would be killed by them, I continued to talk big while building in small outs from the brawl. I threatened but also sought to make amends for our invasion of their beer bar on the edge of Vasilievsky Island not far from the stadium.

Finally, in the middle of the drunken scrum of testosterone-filled soccer fans, stood Sasha and myself. My “friends” by this point had slowly filtered through the crowd and stood on the edge of it ready to make a run for it. Alone against a few dozen, Sasha took pity on me and suggested that just he and I fight. Back and forth we negotiated but I never believed that the rest wouldn’t jump in — I was also afraid he would kick my ass.

After a while, we lost any idea as to why we wanted to fight and we shook hands and went back in to drink beer together. From that day forward, we would drink with them at the bar after the matches.

For years afterward, I would see him going up or down the escalator in the metro and he would shout, “Hey, Kean,” he always thought my last name was my first. Then I would hear him tell whoever he was in the metro with about our near fight: “He stood there and never backed down even though there were 30 of us. His friends were gone. He’s okay.”

Sasha never knew how I too wanted to run but just couldn’t. The Irish in me forced me to stay there and talk my way out of the mess or get my ass kicked. As I pondered the death of yet another Russian who should have been anywhere in the world but in Ukraine killing Ukrainians, I realized that there are thousands of Sashas on both sides, just normal guys who shouldn’t be going through all of this bullshit. For what? To protect the extravagant wealth of a sick and cowardly loser like Putin?

I often write about the cowardice of the Russian men. I don’t change my opinion but I will tell you that Sasha was not a coward. He went to the front not because he had to but to protect his son. If that is true, then I regret never once finding out more about him, never inviting him over for some pizza on a Friday night.

This blast damage reaches its spider legs into different regions of the brain: the frontal lobe, which controls attention span and emotional control; the hypothalamus, which regulates sleep; the hippocampus, responsible for the formation of memories. The symptoms resulting from damage to these areas are exactly the kinds of symptoms often attributed to PTSD (Shell Shock).

What I realize is that when Sasha was led to the rear, and I don’t know if he was on a stretcher, walking, or crawling, he was no longer the guy I once kind of knew cheerily yelling the length of the eternally-deep metros in St. Petersburg. Because the city is built on a swamp, the metro is one of the deepest in the world.

The deepest escalator if it were stood up end on end is 226 feet deep (69 meters). Sasha would be yelling back at me telling me things and asking questions from the moment he saw me. Thanks to the odd echo in the escalator tunnel that sometimes makes voices seem as if they are right over your shoulder, often I wouldn’t need to yell but just speak in a normal voice and it would carry to him.

Photo by Mehrnaz Taghavishavazi on Unsplash

It seemed odd to me when I was told that Sasha had made it back to the rear and two days later just fell asleep and never awoke. I thought he had to have suffered some other injuries but my friend said that it was “just” shell shock. Wow, I thought, that’s odd. But it’s not odd. Not at all.

I tried to imagine what the guy I barely knew but knew so well was feeling before he died. According to the study done in the U.S. on eight veterans:

They had endured headaches, anxiety, depression, insomnia, memory and concentration problems, seizures, and chronic pain.

One was a Navy SEAL who conducted explosives training exercises and lost his coherence of thought; he began to jumble his speech and became overwhelmed by such routine tasks as driving or even packing a car.

Three of the men had acute brain injuries and died shortly after exposure to the explosion, suffering burns, fractures, and hemorrhage. Four of the remaining five men who had chronic blast-induced brain injury died by suicide or from drug overdoses. The cause of death of the eighth service member was not determined(Shell Shock).

When I read such a description part of me almost felt relief for Sasha.

It almost makes me think about the tens of thousands of men from both sides of this war who will be experiencing similar problems for the rest of their days.

Really, though, it makes me sad for everyone involved in this tragedy. Sasha should be growing old, grilling meat at the dacha, and enjoying watching his son become a man. Instead, he is dead.

All of this caused by a billionaire coward who hates people, especially his own.