January 2 & 9, 2023 Issue

The New Yorker starts the new year strong with a riveting war piece by Luke Mogelson. Titled “Trapped in the Trenches,” it’s an account of Mogelson’s experience embedded with a team of Ukraine’s International Legion as they carry out various high risk operations in the Donetsk region, where the trench and artillery warfare is intense and unrelenting.

The team of Legion members is fascinating. Mogelson identifies them by their code names – Doc, Tai, T.Q., Turtle, and Herring. They’re volunteers. They’re there in the hellmouth of war because they want to be there. After a particularly harrowing experience – pinned down in a front-line trench by withering Russian tank fire – Mogelson asks Turtle what’s keeping him there at the front. Turtle says, “In the end, it’s just that I love this shit. And maybe I can’t escape that – maybe that’s the way it’s always gonna be.” 

Mogelson accompanies the team to the front line:

As we headed to the front in two dilapidated vehicles, we passed one building after another that had also been destroyed. Incinerated cars sat on the roadside. Missiles and rockets had lodged in the fields, their protruding metal tubes resembling strange bionic crops. We parked in the dystopian ruins of a coal mine whose silos, conveyors, and concrete warehouses had been severely shelled. Another soldier from the 72nd then transported us in a van to a wide tree line running toward the gray zone, where an air shaft led into underground tunnels.

He describes going on a night mission with them, moving along a tree line in the “gray zone” – the no man’s land between the Russian and Ukrainian fortified positions:

In the grainy, green world of the phosphor screen, the stars gleamed like bioluminescent plankton. Herring and Rambo moved deliberately between the black silhouettes of trees, many of which had been splintered and contorted by artillery. I was looking at a tilled field to our left when a shimmering tail arced overhead, collided with another streaking light, and radiantly detonated. Herring said that it was a Russian missile intercepted by an anti-aircraft weapon.

And, unforgettably, he describes hunkering down in the root cellar of an abandoned house as the Russians hammer the area with tank rounds, rockets, and artillery:

It was pitch-black in the cellar. Even when three of us sat with our knees drawn up, the fourth person could fit only by standing next to the ladder. In the claustrophobic space, I could feel Herring debating what to do. He was lighting a cigarette when a loud whooshing noise, like a cascade of water, roared toward us. “Down!” Herring barked, though there was nowhere farther down to go. I bowed my head and pressed my palms into the dirt floor, which quaked as three successive impacts left a ringing in my ears.

Mogelson is accompanied by photographer David Guttenfelder. Some of his pictures illustrate the piece. They’re transfixing! The whole piece is transfixing – an early contender for Best Reporting of 2023.

Photo by David Guttenfelder, from Luke Mogelson's "Trapped in the Trenches"