DETROIT – The last time I talked with Detroit-area native Laura Eisenhardt, she wasn’t sure exactly where she was, except that it was at a field hospital in a war zone in Ukraine, and she was freezing.
“IT’S SO (expletive deleted) COLD I AM HYPOTHERMIC!” she wrote. Eisenhardt, about whom I wrote a column last March, has been on the battlefield most of the time since Russia invaded Ukraine in February. She didn’t have to be there; she took a leave from her very good job as chief operating officer of the American Institute of Minimally Invasive Heart Surgery in The Netherlands.
Nor is she that young; at 58, she is easily old enough to be most of the soldiers’ mothers. But she was trained as a critical care nurse long ago, and when the war began, she knew she’d be needed. And she has been. Except for a couple brief breaks to visit Michigan and her dogs and her pregnant daughter in Amsterdam, she’s been there.
Sometimes she provides expert nursing care, sometimes she boosts morale, and more than once, in a life-and-death situation, she’s performed surgery herself. She also talks to everyone.
“When they find out I am an American, I am hugged tightly, kissed, my hands kissed and the gratitude is palpable,” she told me earlier this month. “I have had men say to me, ‘I take bullet for you. For any American, but especially for you.’
“That’s sweet – but the important part is that they see us not as liberators, but as partners enabling them to fight their own fight.”
That fight has gone on for nearly a year now, and the destruction is beyond words. At least 20,000 Russian soldiers and 13,000 Ukrainian ones are thought to have died, along with unknown thousands of Ukrainian civilians. Many are freezing in their homes because systematic Russian bombing has destroyed much of the power grid, and things may soon get worse.
Vasily Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s top general, told The Economist that he expects a new major Russian offensive to begin within weeks. The Kremlin is calling up vast numbers of new troops. Ukraine expects another assault on Kyiv. But Eisenhardt isn’t worried.
“I’m telling you, Jack, the will of the Ukrainians is hard to articulate. Old, young, fighters or not, they won’t give up until every inch of their land is (back) under their control,” she said.
That includes the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia forcibly annexed in 2014. But that was before Ukraine, a country long plagued by corruption, had Volodymyr Zelensky as its leader. Ever since he brushed off an offer of evacuation by saying “I need ammo, not a ride,” the country has seemed utterly united against the invader.
“There is no negotiating, and the longer it goes on, the more dug in they become,” she said.
Hopefully, Laura will be back in Amsterdam for Christmas; her daughter is about to have twins, who are tentatively going to be named Sylvester and Stone (to their grandma’s horror.)
While helping her daughter, Laura Eisenhardt plans to meet with the International Criminal Court to give information about Russian atrocities. “I have unfortunately personally discovered evidence first hand,” she said. “I’ll be on loan to the ICC to sort through data, dates, evidence to document and add proof for the war crimes,” trials that she hopes will happen.
Russia doesn’t scare her, though she has been wounded more than once during the war. But Marjorie Taylor Greene, the controversial Republican Congresswoman from Georgia, does.
During the last campaign, Greene vowed that if Republicans controlled Congress, “not another penny will go to Ukraine.” Though Republicans failed to take the U.S. Senate, they did win a very narrow 222-213 majority in the House.
U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, (R-CA), now the minority leader, badly wants to be the next Speaker of the House, but is facing opposition from the party’s far right wing. “We are concerned that because of McCarthy’s unquenchable thirst for power, he will let her and her ilk run amok and jeopardize our progress.”
That seems unlikely now; Ukrainian President Zelensky is Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, and a new Washington Post poll found that more than two-thirds of Americans support continued heavy military and economic aid to Ukraine. But feelings can change.
Few would quibble with Time’s choice this year. But I think we also should think this Christmas about people like Laura Eisenhardt, who grew up in suburban comfort and left a nice life in Amsterdam to huddle in a cold ditch and try to save the lives of soldiers fighting for their nation’s freedom. She is also a worthy person of the year, at least to me.
