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For two weeks in March, at an abandoned chemical warehouse in Lviv, we taught civilian volunteers how to defend themselves against the Russian invaders.

Locals tell an old joke about the Ukrainian city of Lviv. A man emerges from a train at the railway station there, glad to have finally reached the faraway east. Across the platform, another man steps down from another train. He takes in a breath of air in the strange, exciting west. Lviv is a gateway, a cipher, a place caught between. Refugees, aid workers, idealists, and goons gather there now because of the war, some coming, others going. It's become a haven for those fleeing the horrors to its east while a staging ground for those bound for the same. They call it the City of Lions, and it would be difficult for even the most obtuse visitor not to connect their chosen symbol with the emerging national will that's so fierce it seems to belong to a past century.

In early March, a few days after Russia's multifront invasion of Ukraine, I joined a small group traveling to Lviv to help advise and train a city defense force of local volunteers. I'd gotten on the plane there mostly thinking I was going as a journalist. Once we landed I knew that one more writer looking for a story was the last thing Ukraine needed. My friends, though, sought a third trainer. So I said I'd do it. They didn't pressure me. The moment did.

We are all American combat veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We went on our own volition, representing only ourselves. We brought tourniquets instead of guns, experience instead of Javelins.

We taught basic urban-combat tactics and survivability to teachers, bus drivers, IT workers. Deceit marks any war, and the information battles in Ukraine have become case studies in real time. Yet I never got one whiff of duplicity in the confines of our training compound. These people were who they said they were, which is to say they are regular folks who want nothing to do with any of this but find themselves forced to act.

How do I know? If you've ever seen a middle-aged lawyer try to bound across an open field for the first time, you just do.

Then that lawyer does it again, and again, and again, and then, all at once, he's capable. Because he must be. Every woman and man there said they'll defend their homes if the war comes to western Ukraine. I pray it doesn't, but they'll be ready if those pleas go unheard. During our two weeks together, they gave our group their trust, their commitment. It's a heavy thing, to pick up a gun in war. The choice, if it does come, belongs to them alone.

One trainee was a twenty-year-old student I'll call Roman. (Ukrainian names have been changed to conceal their identities.) He proved a natural, kicking down doors and moving through rubbled terrain like a guerrilla. Still, he'd never fired a rifle before we took the Ukrainian civilians to a weapons range. After he squeezed the trigger a few times, putting rounds on target, I asked how he felt.

"There's going to be a human being on that end," Roman said.

"And that human being will have come here to shoot me," he said.

Okay's the right conclusion, I think.

Was Lviv safe while we were there? Yes. The city was, and still is, calm enough to quarter an entire brigade of foreign journalists in its hotels, all chasing the same whispers about arriving international legionnaires, trying to share the handful of translators who haven't yet been snatched up by the local government. Don't let the performative Kevlar helmets trotted out for TV fool you. Even the alcohol ban's been lifted.

Was it also dangerous? In its way. No one who knew anything of the war was talking, and anyone who was talking knew nothing. Everyone watched the latest combat porn on their phones, via Telegram, Signal, YouTube, for morale, for something like proof. Distrust and paranoia crackled most everywhere we went. Was that helpful man on the bench a spy or Good Samaritan? How about that woman at the corner, saboteur or patriot? That person in the idling black car: special police or special police? And then there's the sky. It could spit out death from above at any moment—Lviv's become a target for Russian cruise missiles fired from the Black Sea—and no amount of tactical training can prepare for that.

War-adjacent life comes with its edges. Nothing was simple. Nothing was clean.

A night curfew and the insistent howl of air-raid sirens could only suppress so much, though. In Lviv, you can walk under a gate designed by an Austro-Hungarian architect, dine in a café once favored by a Polish duke, wander museums housing discarded Nazi weaponry, gaze at sections of Soviet-era cityscape still gray with old doom, and find at every bus stop frankly excellent propaganda posters lauding the new Ukraine. Even as it mobilizes for war, Lviv exudes the virtues of hard-earned peace.

Meanwhile, the racket organizes in the shadows. One truth of any war is that many civilians will suffer and die. Another is that opportunists of all stripes will profit in its midst. Some of this work will indeed further the greater effort. Some.

Putin has rolled the iron dice. Nothing less than Ukraine's legitimate sovereignty and the order of the post-cold war world are at stake. Those are top-down certainties. There are some bottom-up ones, too, moments and glimmers of regular lives forever upended and changed. There's power to bearing witness. There's also futility.

Lviv is a place caught between peace and war, past and future, east and west. These are some notes I kept for fifteen days while working in this ancient city of cobblestone streets and church domes, relatively far from the front yet still possessed by an infernal war edging its way closer. I once wrote a book of another war that avowed that easy, straightforward accounts can only serve fixed agendas. The real stuff, as it always has, lies in the long and crooked.

The void of midnight, bus from Krakow rumbling east through a dark forest toward the border, snow flurries abound. March 1, 2022, in Eastern Europe, sucker.

We pass a fox with a white tip on its tail. Later there's a warning sign for bears. Not the Russian kind.

Adrian put out the call only forty-eight hours ago. We're arriving with the vanguard of all sorts of war aid and business interests. Flew in with various contractor types, most wearing the civilian uniform of their ilk. Frumpy khakis, dress shirts, nice watches and shoes.

There was a loud British man at the airport claiming to be there to volunteer to fight. Upset there was no trumpeter to greet him, let alone transport. To shake him, Ben told him we were tourists.

Adrian and Ben are friends, fellow scribes. Two combat tours each, Adrian with the Army to Afghanistan; Ben, the Marines, Iraq. Straightaway it's clear Adrian's the visionary and heart, Ben the force, the hammer, the subject expert. I'm way more generalist than specialist on these matters. But I'm here, we're here, there's a need. As far as we know, at least, which is not much.

Border crossing takes a few hours. Hard to make out the refugees going the other way through the night. There's a lot. Thousands. Walking. Driving. Kids draped across their parents' bodies every which way. Empathy is a ration. It's vital. It's also perishable.

On the bus, we talk about why democracies are bad at anticipating but good at reacting. There's a moral clarity that comes with defending, I think, not that my generation of American warfighters know much about it.

We ride alongside a group of Ukrainians coming home to join the fight. They include four teenage boys who'd been studying in Sweden. They keep to themselves, laughing in hushed whispers. My, my, the courage of youth.

Two others round out our crew: Adrian's wife, Iryna, and his old friend Adam. Iryna is Ukrainian, a prominent journo here before moving to America, returning to facilitate aid relief and also get her parents out of the country. They're currently stuck in a suburb near Kyiv; things are fraught. Adam's here to run logistics but he cuts an enigmatic figure; people seem to assume he's a spy. We'll learn there's value in letting people think that. It's a slapdash bunch but a serious one. No one's here for adventure.

Across the border, our first moments in Ukraine: potholes first, then bunkers and checkpoints with barrels of fire licking the night. Large military convoy going the other way, toward Poland, for resupply.

We reach a small village. Loudspeaker in Ukrainian reminding folks there's a national blackout. Pass a tiny church with a mural of Jesus holding a faded, glowing candle. I blink and I blink but it stays with me long after we pass.

Miss my sons already. It's a hard ache. Didn't have kids when in Iraq, in 2008. This hits different.

More snow flurries, none seem to stick. Something else my generation of desert fighters know little about: fighting in snow.

Forest gives way to farmhouses, farmhouses to apartments. Lviv emerges through the window, dimly lit, a city of tumbling angles and hills.

It's the empty hours. Get to lodging past 3:00 a.m., a loft owned by a Ukrainian-American businessman contributing to the cause. Trudge baggage up many flights of stairs. Been traveling thirty-six hours from Oklahoma to here. Claim mattress in one of the rooms, promptly zonk out.

Actions always carry unintended consequences. Still, things need doing.

Wake at noon, a groggy dog but alive. Get the word from Adrian: meeting at community center later with local power brokers. Consider it an interview, he says.

Towel warmer in the bathroom. What a delightful contraption.

Dark, nervous edge to the city. More a sense than anything. Only dopes would smile at strangers here. Don't.

Old Town: important statues wrapped and taped in case of shrapnel; millennium-old churches sandbagged. The outer rings of the city seem an endless parade of halted construction. Both past and present put on hold.

One Soviet-era vestige: For many years, Lviv's tallest building was the headquarters for the equivalent of the IRS. Capitalism and communism, shake hands.

Arrive at community center. Meet Nykolai, our connected, mysterious liaison who will remain connected and mysterious throughout our time in Lviv. Says he's a civilian. Maybe. I'll soon learn he's one of the most watchful readers of character I've ever known.

Two twenty-something translators with experience working with spec ops and NATO trainers, both named Nazar. I'm sure the American military hasn't changed too much since you got out, one says. I ask if he's calling us old. (I'm thirty-nine, Adrian forty-four, Ben fifty-three.) He laughs.

We make our pitch: two weeks of basic skills, focused on self-defense and urban resistance for beginners. We present our backgrounds, our proposed areas of concentration. Ben: weapons use and urban tactics. Adrian: small-unit leadership and logistics coordination. Me: street defense and information gathering. It's suggested, though never outright stated, there are other camps with more specialized training. We want the blank-slate trainees, Ben stresses. That's why we came.

Forgot how bizarre it can be to converse through a translator. They talk for three minutes. One of the Nazars says, "He says he understands."

One cultural difference emerges: They want help identifying leaders. One technique they mention: bringing folks into a room, having them exercise, then sneaking up behind with a plastic bag over the head to determine fight-or-flight instinct. We smile politely and say we'd prefer to use a more American technique of evaluation under regular training pressures. Leaders are made, Ben says, or they rise. He points to Zelenskyy as proof.

Big need right now: body armor. Tell your friends, they say. Send the good stuff, not crap.

Others in meeting: two members of the city council. Excitable Territorial Defense commander who clearly isn't sure about training civilians and bristles at Adrian's gentle critique of some of the city checkpoints. A young Ukrainian civil affairs officer who's lived in the States and speaks fluent English. Says to call her Daniela. She's fresh from the front, having survived a largescale artillery shelling. This is her new assignment.

Meeting ends. They'll let us know.

Street trams like arteries. Gray austerity of worn imperial buildings. One little speck of sunlight. Flatcar trains saddled with old tanks. Grocery shop. More loud goons with their backpacks there. Back at lodging, Adam makes a three-course meal for all. He used to own a restaurant in Paris. Spooks can't cook like this.

First pair of nighttime air raids. Everyone gathers in the entry hall away from windows. Try to keep mood light with gallows humor and wine.

Fitful sleep. Wake at 4:00 a.m. or so. Phone keeps pinging with texts about the firefight at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl. There were initial reports of a possible radiation leak. Tell folks we're fine and faraway. Then check Google Maps to determine exactly how far.

Until my last day on earth, I will always remember turning around at hard dusk, deep in an abandoned Soviet-era chemical warehouse, to find fifty or so stone-faced Ukrainians looking to us for guidance. Men and women, old guys in their sixties, a handful of teenage boys, stout and thin, checkpoint uniforms and camping gear and exercise clothing. They came because we'd asked them to. Saddle up, cavalryman, it's real now.

This is crazy, my brain keeps saying. This is crazy. My voice says hello. My name is Matt.

It's very cold, in the twenties and feels lower. Most of us are bundled up in jackets. Ben is wearing a Game of Thrones "House of Stark" T-shirt. It's not performative, either. It's leadership.

Just an introduction tonight. We demonstrate a basic fire-team stack and room clearance. You'll learn how to do this right, Adrian explains, so you know how to better kill the Russians who'll do it wrong.

Two older women—babushkas in the local parlance—have been assigned to mop up the three inches of grime from the floor. They do not acknowledge my smiley, boyish gratitude. I hope I didn't bring on a curse because of it. Another babushka hangs in the hallway, an "employee of the month" poster left over from the '80s. The electrician's coming tomorrow, Nykolai says. I got a logistics guy.

We break the Ukrainians into three groups, one for each American trainer, and then into fire teams. I ask for a squad leader and Petro steps forward, a middle-aged, bespectacled geography teacher. He's no soldier but he understands the importance of command presence, I think. He'll do nicely.

We send the trainees home, tell them to be ready to work the next morning. The first of many jokes about asbestos and cancer are made; Covid masks now have another purpose. The babushkas keep swabbing at forty years of factory grime. Nearby, we find a group of welders doing their part. Hundreds of anti-tank hedgehogs and tire spikes and stoves for checkpoints fill their garage.

Morning block 1: door entry/stacks/room clearing. They are not good at it; there's a lot of confusion on who gets what corner of the room and when. Stress over and over again: This is about being fluid, this is about adapting, each situation will be different. Start my group over and walk them through, hands on.

Morning block 2: Ben and Adrian go through hand-and-arm signals. Now we repeat them, Ben says. And repeat them. And repeat them.

Lunch at a nearby soccer-hooligan bar.

Daniela explains the generational aspects of the war. We came of age with the Euromaidan demonstrations in 2013 and 2014, she says, the Nazars agreeing, Nykolai nodding in his silent way. They know it wasn't some CIA conspiracy because they were there. They were the college kids and blue-collar workers who helped initiate it. Eight years of life in a free-ish, democratic-ish Ukraine may not seem like much to older folks or foreigners. But for the young in Ukraine, it's been their entirety. This is why we fight, she says.

There's a Rolling Stone journo following us around, and he shares some criticism of what we're doing from someone he interviewed back in the U.S., a cable-news squawker. "Leave it to the professionals." I get the point, I guess, but still, leave it to the professionals? Not the lesson I personally took away from the Global War on Terror.

Lethal aid, the new, hip euphemism for weapons. What are we doing, then? Lethal charity, Adam says.

Afternoon blocks. More room-clearing exercises. Then an introduction to rally points.

Find an old book in a desk in one of the rooms. Healing Roots, by a Mykhailo Horbunov. A poetry collection. Sounds beautiful, I say. One of the Nazars flips through it. It's about the USSR being the best place on earth and how America is trash, he says.

Make the mistake of checking Twitter during another air-raid alarm. A lot of well-intentioned people in the States sounding absolutely batshit insane about the war here. Adam cracks open another bottle of wine. I suppose we don't know much more but at least we're not being hysterical about it.

Bad day at the compound. Shit is disorganized. People walking in with new uniforms, and guns, and ammo. Folks trying to record our classes with their phones. My hot-blooded side comes out and, over noodles in a dormant strip club, I make demands. Professional security posture, for one. No phones during training, for another. Afternoon classes are canceled; maybe it'll help scare people right, flush out any bad actors. Nykolai nods. No problem, he says. I'll handle it. The Ukrainians say they know and trust everyone there, but what the hell does that mean? Everyone tells me to my face they're glad someone said it. Maybe that's true, maybe not. The guilt of being so strident comes later, but I push it away. I didn't come here to be a fucking cautionary tale.

Better news at our billet: Iryna's parents arrive, safely evacuated by her brother via car. They're exhausted, worn down, about to leave their home country perhaps for the last time. The mom suffers no fools. The dad was part of the emergency response team to the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Neither speaks any English, and though it makes me a bad friend, watching Adrian get yelled at by his mother-in-law in Ukrainian cracks me up.

Iryna's on another phone call, trying to find aid-relief pallets she's shepherded here that've gone missing. Her brother Illia will head back east soon. For work, he says. We drink vodka with him, and he shows us the latest videos of Ukrainian farmers hauling off Russian armored vehicles.

Missed my eldest son's first swim lesson today back home. My wife sends video. He looks so happy, so proud.

Things look, feel, right today. Nykolai said he'd handle it and he did. Large men with faces of concrete posted at multiple positions, some ensuring all weapons contain no ammo, others collecting phones in bins during training. Others just being there and seen. They have new walkie-talkies to communicate. There's a heater for the main classroom. A quiet man with a beard watches on, vaping, asks me how things look. I say good and decide not to ask for details. All that matters is we can work with our people now and not worry about the war beyond the compound.

Until an air-raid siren howls through the day. It's break time, anyhow.

Ben and I spend this time hunting the compound for basic obstacles, tires and plywood and beams and bricks, so many bricks. In addition to being a writer and a farmer and an actor and a rock singer, Ben knows masonry. The state of these bricks hurts his brain.

Morning blocks 1 and 2: Room defense (theory) followed by room defense (practical.) It's much harder to be coming through the door than being in the room, one of my trainees says, a law student named Symon. He's quick, had some cadet training during his education. I have him explain why to the squad.

Daniela leads a combat-medicine class. There's a doctor in the group but he quickly admits he's a general physician, this is different. When Daniela gets to the parts of a tactical medical pack, other trainees balk. Where's the morphine? they ask. Too many American movies, Daniela says. Adrian discusses more modern replacements, such as ketamine. I've had that, one of the Nazars says with a sly smile.

Short evening, the initial rush has worn off, people are managing themselves now. Body hurts, knees and lower back in particular. This is not the writing life, though there are a couple similarities. The importance of repetition. The craving need for improvement.

Have stopped taking my duloxetine. Just while we're here. It's to curb "hyper-alertness." Which seems helpful here. I feel fine now and that's what matters. The body is a machine.

Trainees are tooling up, beginning to bring their own kits, new cammies, their own assault rifles. The ones who don't yet have any are borrowing weapons from a nearby museum … hunting rifles, old Mausers, Soviet burp guns, even saw a 1943 tommy gun poking around a building corner. Also they're not called "Molotov cocktails" here. They're "Bandera smoothies." The Ukrainians say they don't need a class on them. It's been handled.

Cold as balls today, in the high teens with wind. Snow flurries. No one complains when we're outside learning building-to-building movement in fire teams. Some relief, though, when I say we'll AAR (after-action-review) in the warehouse.

One of the Nazars and I talk foreign policy during break. He believes there's a lot of gratitude in Ukraine for President Biden's public sharing of American intel regarding Russia's buildup along the border prior to the invasion. It united the Ukrainian people, Nazar says. Helped us prepare for the moment.

And Trump? We do not like Trump here, he says.

Absolute surreal lunch over pizza with a retired general. Alpha warrior-king shit. He's fresh from the front, having returned with the bodies of native sons killed in action. His voice is hoarse, rasping, a martial Don Corleone. He tests us with pronounced eye-staring contests, and once we pass muster, we're given a tour of his personal headquarters. On a mannequin, he displays the uniform of an enemy sniper he personally disarmed years back. He poses in front of his own portrait, a conquering hero both in oils and flesh. His statements and memorabilia convey a glorification of regional military history that's hard for amnesiac American minds to grapple with because it embraces the conflicting ideologies and dark history deep-rooted to this part of the world. Whatever that is, here, for him, it's unapologetically pro-Ukrainian.

The general's returning east soon. "Do you want to go to the front?" he asks us, not without some menace and challenge behind it. We do not.

The first morning block is devoted to more building-to-building movement outside. It's starting to click. A pair of twins in their early thirties move with particular quickness and violence; we call them the Towers of Power. Then there's a large, brash man with a booming voice and natural authority. We call him RoboCop, but later we find out he's an attorney, and the courtroom is where he cultivated his sense of presence. A quiet, baby-faced teen becomes Battlemouse. There's Law Dog and Danger Rabbit. And so on.

Just as we're taking to them and their personalities, they're taking to ours. Ben's throbbing arm muscles and T-shirts and long, rocker hair earn him the moniker Wild Man. Adrian's the cerebral professor who holds court on leadership and organization, and me, my best class so far was probably the information-gathering session where I laid out how anyone can contribute to a resistance effort, even if they choose not to pick up a gun. Being of Irish descent seems to be of some help with these lessons. For effect, I lean into my people's history of societal obstinance.

One of the Nazars gets a call: More Americans have arrived to join the international legion. There are a lot of pretenders walking around downtown Lviv, but anyone serious about it seems to be whisked away from the city itself to a nearby base to be vetted.

The other Nazar gets a call, too. His brother's a military helicopter pilot and was shot down. He's alive but may lose his arm. That's all anyone will say. Nazar stays at work despite us trying to send him home.

We give the trainees the afternoon off. They're not used to beating up their bodies like this. Neither are we. Adrian explains we have a meeting in Old Town, anyhow. Need to meet some folks who might serve as replacements.

We walk by a large aid-distribution center for refugees. It's hard not to stare at the desperation, then even harder not to numb to it, all in the span of a minute or so. Everyone stays in line. Which is remarkable.

Soldiers everywhere, lot of presence patrols. Bemused-looking journalists everywhere, too; we take to hand-and-arm signals so they don't overhear us speaking English and presume we're potential legionnaires. Ben, ever the renaissance man, draws and paints, too. The war propaganda here is so good, he says, pointing to a poster of the Ukrainian badger ripping off limbs of the Russian bear. And it is.

Meeting goes well. People who know people will be in touch, people with the right connections that go well beyond our literary-veteran network. With Adrian focusing on the details, I turn my attention to a Georgian dish, khinkalis, dumplings that can be eaten by hand.

Dinner at one of our trainees' houses. He owns a few restaurants in the area and cooks us steaks. A friend of his, a judge from Kyiv, joins the table. He wears melancholy like a cloak and talks geopolitics with Adrian and our training with Ben and asks what kind of law my parents practice back home. After dinner our host takes us downstairs and shows us the 1938 Macallan Scotch he's going to open when Ukrainian victory is declared.

The surprise of a sunlit day.

All-day lane rotations between trainers on urban movement, dismounted recon ops, and advanced room defense. They're getting better. Petro's a leader. So is Symon, the law student. So is Ivan, a regional manager of a clothing company. Adrian, Ben, and I chat. It's time to start becoming more hands-off, we agree. Train the trainers.

Some of the trainees show us text messages they've received and been forwarded. People claiming to be American special-operations veterans offering security and exfiltration services for the low, low price of two grand a day. We're the only suckers here losing money, Ben says, but he says it with pride, with honor.

One of Ben's trainees broke his hand falling from a pallet yesterday. Great job, Ben. The guy shows up with a cast, showing everyone how his trigger finger remains unaffected.

There are a few women in class, a couple of them young, in their twenties or thirties. They watch and learn and don't look away. They're there for the same reason the men are, to learn skills they never thought they'd need or want. Still, we're bashful Americans not used to this directness. It can unnerve. So everyone gets three seconds of eye contact. Look for Petro, look for Petro … ahh, you gorgeous man, found you.

Another stare: Daniela, the civil affairs officer, occasionally, when left alone, has the thousand-yard variety going on. She doesn't say it but she must still be thinking about the shelling she survived. How could someone not? I gently suggest she should talk to someone when she's ready. It helped me after Iraq, I say. Of course I will, she says. After the victory.

It's tense at the lodging: Illia's returning east the next morning. The rest of us eat a quick dinner and stay out of the way. The family deserves this time to themselves, with their son and brother.

Adrian's sick with … something. Per her mother's instructions, Iryna rubs vodka on his chest and back, then he puts the rest down the ole gullet. We are not young anymore; there's a lot of talk of sore backs and body stretches.

With the war racket pouring in come the goons, and with the goons come the weirdos. A Canadian in Lviv touches base: He'd like to teach a class on social justice and "collaborative conflict resolution." Important matters, certainly, but perhaps not the time and place.

A gray cat wanders the compound, watching the training with casual interest. The trainees joke about it being part of the exercise, an unwilling resistance member they must convince. Loud, ornery birds scatter the premises, too, some crow-like thing the shade of midnight blue. I figure it a bad omen. Later I determine they're magpies. So crow cousins. Not as bad.

The Ukrainians move in squads now. Not well—the squad-leader position is especially new, and chaos arrives with any sort of pressure or mission change—but that's okay. Progressional, Ben says again. Deliberate.

Daniela leads a class on tourniquets, when and why to use them, then how, putting hands on each arm and leg to make sure they've done it right. Then she has them do it again.

Daniela and Ben are the two bona fides in this operation, I write in my notebook. A lot of good people have done good things during this, will continue to do so, but it's because of these two foremost it's proving successful. They're the ones taking good intentions and turning those intentions into quality training.

Still no new information on Nazar's wounded brother. Nazar doesn't want to talk about it much.

Adrian and Iryna are the ones who got us here, gave us this purpose, are providing the strategic-level bona fides. We go to a meeting that evening at a hotel where Nykolai plies me with energy drinks. Pretty sure he thinks I'm diabetic. He's got cryptic blue eyes and strands of white in his sandy beard, and he's begun to allow himself to laugh a bit around us. He also has three cell phones. That you can see, he says, glimmer in his eye.

After the meeting—about fundraising, about finding the right Americans to replace us—some of us break away to see more of the city. The pubs remain closed but the sky is open and vast and black as paint. Homemade anti-Putin posters are in plentitude. We come across an Armenian church dating back to the year 1363. Then a memorial to fallen service members, little Ukrainian flags tucked into corners of the wall, holograms of the dead flickering against the night.

Iryna's been offered the position of press secretary for the international legion. She's tempted, but she needs to get her parents to the States and check on her teenage son there. Then? She shrugs. Who knows? Things change so fast. Then her phone rings again. The pallets with relief supplies have been located.

A crisp air-raid siren at 4:45 a.m. No point in trying to fall back asleep.

Pretty much everyone but me and the Nazars is sick now. Can't blame the asbestos. Protect me, mighty Covid mask.

Begin the day showing recent viral videos of what not to do, courtesy of the Russian light infantry, who seem to have received even less training than our civilians have. It's hard not to empathize a wee bit with the clueless teenagers bunching up and shouting in terror and confusion. Though they're not invading my country.

Ben parses through the Russians' amateur failures with the exactitude of a master. What would you do here, squad leader? he demands of chosen trainees. How about now? And here? And here?

Conduct more urban movement in squads with barriers and obstacles the rest of the day. Return to lodging, pop some Advil. Check Twitter. Just surreal being here, working with normal Ukrainians all day, then seeing American experts holding court online. I try to be understanding, they want to help, are trying to help, we all need different coping mechanisms, what would I be doing if I hadn't happened to be pals with Adrian?

Then again, this is Lviv, not Donbas. The compound can feel notional and pretend, too. It's training, which means it's only simulating combat. Then we take a break and people access their phones and we get the latest on the actual war, the latest death tallies and front-line exploits. There's a rumor about Russian jets maybe bombing a Belarusian village as a false flag, the grisly results of the missile strikes on nearby Lutsk and Ivano-Frankivsk, another rumor of a possible terrorist attack plan on Chernobyl. It's all so disorienting and jarring there's nothing to do but drink coffee and get back to the grind.

I'm not a natural at this but can't lie: There's something primal and soul-rousing when you look out at a large group and say, "Are you cold, tired and sore?" and fifty voices say Da! as a chorus with enough force to echo in the room. "Good training," you continue. "See you tomorrow."

That was hard-core, man, Ben says in the car. Let's go charge a machine-gun nest.

Missing another swim lesson today. And my youngest can pull himself up on his feet now. So there's that.

The cities in the east are getting pounded with artillery and missiles. Some look annihilated, apocalyptic. Mass shelling unlike anything the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan produced, with the possible exceptions of Mosul and Aleppo during the ISIS phase. It begs the question: Is what we're teaching these people applicable to what might come their way? It's worth considering. They're not meat Popsicles now, though. They'll have a chance and that's not nothing. And remember, Adrian says. We're the beginning of this, not the end.

A maps class. Adrian covers the basics but eventually Petro takes over. Tough to beat a local geography teacher born and raised in Lviv. Train the trainers.

One of the Nazars seems shaken. I ask what's up. He's just learned a childhood friend was killed at the front. I ask his name and we say a short prayer together.

We spend the first afternoon block doing more urban movement in squads. My group looks sharp, moving and communicating with genuine stealth. I have two, maybe three potential squad leaders and twice as many ready as fire-team leaders. Roman, a quiet twenty-year-old who's really emerged these past couple days, says he doesn't want to be squad leader; he wants to be where the action is.

We go back inside and rehash room clearing and room defense. It's a mess. It's been a couple days since we did this, but still, no excuse. I'm tired and cranky and I yell at my group of Ukrainians like they're privates. I feel like a jerk, but the worst part is, it works. We start over and they're much smoother this time.

Big meeting this evening with the local power brokers, at a restaurant owned, inevitably, by one of the trainees I chewed out an hour before. Fucking Irish, Ben says. You all just can't help yourselves. It's a beautiful night, families are walking through parks, the cobblestones charm and rumble. It's almost like there isn't a war on at all. Then we drive by another packed aid-distribution center and it all comes back in an invisible wave.

"What is the future of our cooperation?" This is the vital question to be discussed this evening.

At dinner, Nykolai praises our work. They hold their weapons with dignity now, he says, an interesting thing for someone who says he's a civilian to say. Daniela explains why we suggest tiers of leaders, to have both planners and tacticians. The background on her phone is part reminder, part declaration, written in English: "Success is a Decision."

Hey, Matt, you want juice? Adam asks. I shake him off. You want juice, Matt, he tries again. I shake him off again. He stares daggers at me. Oh, yes, please, I say. The wine is tasty.

Adrian and the power brokers reach an accord, the details of which deserve privacy. This thing has bones, Ben says.

The Rolling Stone article publishes. We're anonymous in it. There's chatter online about it by chatterers. I think the article is fine, but the headline is dumb. Writers always think headlines are dumb. Some readers like what we're doing, others don't. Some think we come off well, others don't. My sister-in-law texts rapid fury intended for the writer, and I read these missives aloud in the loft to the group, which includes the writer. It makes things awkward for a stretch. Now would be a good moment for Adrian's mother-in-law to yell at him in Ukrainian, but she's already asleep.

Of course the air-raid siren we sleep through proves the close strike.

Yavoriv, a military base twenty-nine miles to Lviv's west, was struck by more than thirty Russian cruise missiles. At first, we heard one person is dead. Then ten. Then thirty. Up and up it goes. They hit the cafeteria, someone says. And the barracks. And a command building built by NATO, to send a very specific message. Truth in the immediate aftermath of this attack is impossible but so is waiting around for some.

One sliver of truth available: We'd tried to get a rifle range there for our trainees. Would we have been there exactly then? Likely not. Still. The ghost of what-if is messy and haunting.

Were international legionnaires at Yavoriv? Sure seems that way. Were international legionnaires killed at Yavoriv? Sure seems that way, again.

Today's the final practical exercise. Urban movement to an observation post. Dismounted recon ops. Advanced room defense. We rotate our groups through. Each one has its strengths and weaknesses, but they all look good. Not perfect but good. Perfect is the enemy of good, Petro helpfully explains, repeating one of my own axioms back at me.

Another air-raid siren during all this. We seek appropriate shelter. Tensions are high because of Yavoriv, but as I look around at our charges, I realize how far they've come in our short time together. They're mulling dos and don'ts with each other, talking in the pointed, rapid patter of, well, soldiers. They have their own acronyms—say, Shoot, Move, Communicate—have their own inside jokes, know how to rally point and bound and what to do if there's an enemy sniper in the area. For the first time, I realize we're leaving these people. Something hard wrenches in my chest.

CNN comes to do a story. Anderson Cooper, live and in the flesh. He's quiet, observant. We try not to let it dominate the afternoon. We went back and forth about putting our faces and names out there and settle on doing so as a group. We have reputations, mostly for the good, I think. We're not spooks. We're not clandestine operatives. We're Adrian, Ben, and Matt, and this is an important group of regular Ukrainians we worked with. That's it. The beauty of honesty is not having to worry about anything else.

We get dinner on a second floor under dim lighting with our potential replacements. They say their credentials. They are good credentials. They'll offer the trainees something different than we did, which is appropriate. More than anything, we stress that these people need more weapons training. Ben worries they won't be hands-on enough. It's a fair concern.

Air-raid siren: 2:20 a.m. Air-raid siren: 5:42 a.m. Air-raid siren: 7:43 a.m. The war pushes west.

Rifle-range time. For some folks, it'll be the very first time they'll fire live rounds. Ben and I arrive early to the area. There's honest-to-Christ sunflowers growing out of dirt piles. Sunflowers are of course the symbol of Ukraine. Nykolai put those there last night, Ben says. For the essay you're going to write.

One of the power brokers brings in a local expert on the Kalashnikov rifle, a man near seventy wrought from leather who served in the Red Army and carries himself like someone who will hold off an enemy advance from a pass in the mountains for months on end, all by his lonesome. Even his watch cap is rolled up in the most exact guerrilla way. He tells the group he's probably fired two million AK rounds in his life.

Ben asks the Red Army veteran about rifle lubricant. Why would you need that? asks the old man, incredulous. One last cultural difference.

Our trainees shoot. It's exhilarating for some, another day for others. Roman is struck by the power of the bullet, what it means regarding life and death and everything in between.

We say our goodbyes. Gifts are exchanged, kindness expressed. We helped in some small way; I know that. What I don't know is if it'll be enough. An open, dark question.

We have dinner that night at our loft, with Nykolai, with Daniela, too. She dresses up for it and I'm touched by this act of normalcy on her part. For Iryna's parents, it may well be their final night in Ukraine. They've spent their entire lives here. We toast to Ukraine. We toast to resistance. We toast to doing something.

Another small act of normalcy: Iryna's dad wears a suit to travel. People don't do that anymore, I say to Ben. That's classy. That's of another generation.

When one makes a run to the border from a war-torn nation, it's best to do so in style. And so we do—two SUVs arrive at the curb, driven by women in their twenties wearing formfitting jumpsuits and colorful, sharp nails I can only describe as dancer chic. Men can't leave Ukraine under martial law, so they'll be our shepherds to Poland.

As we leave, we see parts of the city we never have before. Half run-down, half being reborn. A place I'd like to take my family someday on vacation, when it's not so grim, when it can return to the Lviv of books and songs. I squint my eyes at the Old Town cityscape. May I see it just like this again, I think, all the while knowing neither the world nor memory ever works that way.

We are dead exhausted. Gaunt and quiet on the way out, a strange darkness under our eyes. The checkpoints we pass through are tighter, stronger than they were when we arrived. The city's preparation continues. Stashes of bottles for Bandera smoothies mark them all, too.

We're going 130 miles per hour, switching lanes, and I'm almost certain this is the closest to death we've been in Ukraine. The car's alert system saves us from one crash, then another. Of course, I'm in the spot with the broken seat belt. In the back, Ben and I alternate naps on a large bag of something that very much feels like paper currency.

At the border, among the sea of refugees, there's a boy, about four, same age as my eldest. He's being so good for his mom, and sweet. He giggles and smiles and listens. I focus on them to avoid all the rest and somehow that makes the tragedy of this stupid, vile war even more pronounced. The power of an American passport whisks us onward but not before I see that mom and son cross into Poland. They will be safe. Some of his innocence will be spared.

Then comes Krakow, and its kitted-up war dogs and dough-faced contractors and loud, brash pretenders. But that's another story, for another time.