Babies, Bombs, and Bibles

We joined another evac team one day and went to a military hospital to drop off food. We had gone with a military chaplain and were taken to a room that was filled with a dozen injured soldiers. We spent time with them, gave them Bibles, and prayed. The looks on some of their faces were awful. Hollow, vacant eyes and faces creased with shock and trauma. One guy started crying and left the room as we prayed with them. He said his friends were still out there fighting on the front lines. It seemed like his personal battle was disappointment and pain that he could not be with them while they were still in the middle of the fight. When we were done there, we went to the front lines, where we had an evacuation request for a few people. There was heavy fighting going on, so we weren’t sure if we would be able to get in to get the people. We decided to push in as far as we could and soon came upon a Ukrainian tank firing artillery shells at the Russian military positions on top of the ridge in front of us. As we passed the tank, it shot another shell. The back blast hit the two guys in the front seat and cracked our windshield. The driver thought the vehicle was hit by a bomb, and it took him ten or twenty seconds to realize that we had not gotten hit. We continued on our way and soon came to a Ukrainian checkpoint. They gave us permission to continue and we soon found ourselves in an area with explosions and burning buildings on four sides of us. There was machine gun fire 250 yards (228 m) to our left. We stopped because something didn't feel right. We parked in the chaos and spent five minutes discussing it before returning to the last Ukrainian checkpoint. At the checkpoint, we were told there was a Russian ambush between the place where we had turned around and the place where we had been going to pick up our evacuees. They told us it was impossible to go during the day but that they could provide an armored escort after dark. We ended up canceling the operation since the shrapnel on the road would have probably punctured our tires, as well as the danger of ambush and intense fighting between us and our destination. Most houses in the city were either destroyed or heavily damaged. It was a strange feeling to drive through the rubble and the fighting and know hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians, surrounded us, huddled in their basements, desperately wishing for a way out.