Why I Write About War
Mitzi Perdue writes from and about Ukraine. She is the Co-Founder of Mental Help Global, a philanthropy that uses AI to support mental health
I met a bereaved mother in Bucha, a town of about 37,000 people that’s about half an hour north of Kyiv. It was shortly after Russia’s full scale war, and when I met her, she was standing outside her modest home beside a car pockmarked with maybe 30 bullets. Russian soldiers had shot her son while he was in that car. They had done it randomly, for no reason. The anguish she was feeling as she told this story was heart-lacerating.
Thinking about her, I ask myself yet again, “Why, as a journalist do I choose to write about Russia’s war on Ukraine?” It means writing about people who’ve endured the grief and horror of bombings, bullets, torture, amputations, or the death of beloved family members. Given that the stories I cover often involve some of the worst that human beings can do to each other, why do I keep doing it?
The answer that I come up with seems to have two sides. I can explain the sides by mentioning again the mother in Bucha.
I wanted to interview her and tell her story partly because both she asked me to, and both she and I wanted people to know the horror that the Russians had visited on her. That’s half of my motivation for reporting on war crimes like what she had endured.
The other half of my motivation is, the interaction I most often have with the individuals I interview feels like an extraordinary privilege. They are allowing me to peer into some of the most central parts of their existence. Often, they give me the feeling that having a chance to tell their stories is at least in some small part, healing.
When I’m listening to an individual who’s endured the unthinkable, I get to communicate to them that you matter, your pain won’t disappear into the void. I feel like what I imagine a physician feels when he or she has eased a patient’s pain.
There are interviews that haunt me and that I want to communicate the stories so more people are more aware of what war means. Examples: the wife whose every hour is consumed with the hope that her missing-in-action husband might still be alive and the fear that he isn’t: the teenage girl who watched soldiers machine gun down her parents and saw them bleed out; the office worker who, while being forced to dig trenches, would be casually raped by her guards whenever the mood took them; the young woman kept standing and immobile for twelve hours in a coffin-sized box called the stoyka, trembling with claustrophobia and terror.
I guess I keep writing because I feel that our profession is one of civilization’s defenses against amnesia. In writing about war, we get to say: This is what happened. This is who did it. This is the cost.
Ideally, I want readers to care about people they’ll never meet, and equally, I want survivors to know that strangers half a world away care about them.
That’s why I continue writing about war crimes, but it’s not the end of the story. From getting to know the individuals I’ve spent time with, I’m aware that there will be invisible scars that last long after the War ends. By some estimates, as many as 95% of Ukrainian people are enduring at least to some degree, issues like insomnia, depression, anxiety, panic attacks and a whole host of mental conditions resulting from severe and prolonged stress.
I’m now spending my non-journalism time supporting an organization that I helped found, Mental Help Global (MHG). Its goal is to use artificial intelligence to help bridge the gap between the millions in Ukraine who need mental health support, and the very few mental health professionals available to meet the need. MHG is trained by Ukrainian psychologists on Ukrainian-approved material, and it’s designed to be culturally sensitive to the needs of Ukrainian people.
The delivery system is people’s smartphones. Most people in Ukraine have access to a smartphone, and they will be able to access our AI Companion via Starlink. It’s free, 24/7. We’ve been piloting it in groups of 20 and are about to begin testing it with groups of 100.
Why do I write about war? Perhaps it’s because of Santayana’s timeless truth: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Bearing witness is a way of preserving memory. Without knowledge, there can be no remembrance—and without remembrance, the tragedies of history may be doomed to recur.