April 15, 2024 Issue

Two excellent pieces in this week’s New Yorker: Eric Lach’s “Trash, Trash Revolution” and Luke Mogelson’s “The Assault.”

In “Trash, Trash Revolution,” Lach tours the complex world of New York City’s Sanitation Department. He talks with the City’s Sanitation Commissioner, Jessica Tisch. He describes Tisch’s new program: “Bags off the sidewalks. Clean highways. Citywide organic-waste pickup. Beefed-up enforcement of sanitary laws.” He accompanies two sanitation workers on a midnight collection route in the West Village. He visits the Sanitation Department’s garage in South Brooklyn to discuss illegal dumping with the Sanitation Police. In my favorite part, he rides with Tisch on a trash barge to Port Elizabeth. He writes,

One day, I rode with Tisch on a trash barge to Port Elizabeth. Only after we set off did Tisch ask an aide how long the trip to New Jersey would take. A hundred and forty minutes, the aide said. “A hundred and forty minutes?” Tisch yelled, in disbelief. Ed Whitmore, the owner of the tugboat pushing the barge, went to consult the captain, then returned. “Good news,” he said. With the tide moving the way it was, we could make the trip in about an hour. Soon, white spray was shooting off both sides of the barge as the tug chugged through the water, pushing a thousand tons of rotting cargo across the harbor.

“A thousand tons of rotting cargo” – that’s a lot of garbage! And, as Lach points out, it’s only a fraction of what New York City deals with. He reports that each day the City disposes of twenty-four million pounds of waste – “enough to fill more than two dozen Statues of Liberty.” That’s a disgusting amount. There must be ways to reduce it. Lach doesn’t say. I’d welcome another piece by him addressing this issue. 

Luke Mogelson’s “The Assault” tells about his recent experience embedding with Ukraine’s 1st Separate Assault Battalion in Tabaivka, a settlement in north-eastern Ukraine, less than ten miles from the front line. The purpose of the 1st Battalion, as Mogelson explains, is “to rapidly deploy to areas along the front that are in danger of collapse.” It is one of Ukraine’s most skilled fighting units, led by a cunning and audacious commander named Perun (his call sign). 

The heart of this riveting piece is an assault by a team of 1st Battalion members on an underground root cellar in the backyard of a farmhouse where a number of Russian soldiers are staying. Here’s an excerpt:

They needed to hit the cellar entrance. Kyivstar’s companion had left him behind and was walking there alone. His call sign was Wolf. He was a welder from a rural village in western Ukraine who, when the war started, had been working in the Czech Republic, sending money home to his wife and their young son and daughter. He’d been with 1st Battalion for about a month, and this was his first mission. Sever hadn’t intended to bring him to Tabaivka, but Wolf was filling in for the soldier who’d broken his leg when their truck crashed into the crater. At the house, Wolf had struck me as the team’s most timid member, sheepishly observing Sanjek and Noah’s shenanigans. When the stormers were leaving for the operation, Banker had scolded Wolf for guzzling a tall can of energy drink, which would make him have to urinate. In the cargo van, right before Banker shut the door, Wolf had said, “Fuck, I forgot my ballistic glasses. Oh, well, whatever.”

He was now doing something inexplicable. Instead of sneaking up to the cellar entrance, he was approaching it openly—revealing himself to anyone who might be watching from inside. “He was confused,” Kyivstar later told me. “I was yelling at him, trying to get him to come back.” He added, with frustration, “There was no need for him to go ahead by himself like that. It was like he was going there to die.”

In the operations center, Perun yelled into the radio, “No! Don’t cross in front of the entrance!” But Wolf couldn’t hear him. He kept walking until he reached the open door. For several long seconds, everyone in the operations center watched as he stood there, motionless. Then he crumpled.

“They got him,” Perun said, not loudly, and not over the radio.

The root cellar withstands the attack. But in the ensuing siege, many Russian soldiers are killed. Mogelson writes,

For the rest of the day, a steady stream of small groups of Russian infantrymen—between two and six soldiers each—walked to Tabaivka from the east. Few made it across the three-hundred-yard gap. The snow had relented, and Boyko easily stalked the groups with the surveillance drone. Perun bounded between the panel and the radio, shouting himself hoarse, calculating azimuths, and correcting the aim of his stormers, snipers, and machine gunners. It was madness: Russians kept marching down the same paths, to the same spots where their comrades had just died. One 1st Battalion machine gunner later told me he had fired his weapon so much that it had kept him warm in his frigid dugout. He couldn’t see the men he was killing. But since they kept reappearing in certain places, he memorized different branches below which he could point his barrel to hit specific coördinates up to a mile away.

Unlike the machine gunner, those of us in the operations center had a bird’s-eye view of the Russians on the receiving end of the barrages: men running and stumbling as they fled the bullets and the shells, crawling after being shot or hit by shrapnel, hiding behind tree trunks and under bushes. At one point, the monitor displayed six Russians hurrying up a road toward the safety of a dense forest. Two of them were helping along a limping soldier who had his arms draped over their shoulders; two others were dragging an injured or dead soldier across the snow on an improvised toboggan. Perun called in cluster munitions on them: a smoking warhead that scudded down, followed by a dozen impacts all around the group. Another 1st Battalion drone pilot was attacking Russians with F.P.V.s. Footage from one of them captured two infantrymen diving away, too late, in the split second before the F.P.V. detonated and its video feed cut out.

“The Assault” is a tremendous piece of war reportage – another in Mogelson’s extraordinary series of dispatches from the front: see, for example, “Trapped in the Trenches” (January 2 & 9, 2023) and “Underworld” (May 29, 2023).