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There’s a guy you can call?
“Ukraine announced that there was an international force on Feb. 27 and I started looking into it on Feb. 28 … I called the Ukrainian embassy in Washington and I said: ‘Hey, I want an appointment.’ They were a little slow, so I just went down there and put in my application. The guy asked if I had combat experience and I said ‘Yep.’ Then he looked at my application and said, ‘You’re on the team.’”
That’s Malcolm Nance, a former military and counter-terrorism expert on MSNBC, telling Michael Harriot of The Guardian that he decided to join Ukraine’s International Legion of Territorial Defense — Yep, that’s what it’s called. Glorious, ain’t it?— after his friends in Donetsk wrote to say they wouldn’t survive the night from Russian bombing.
“I’m done talking,” he told interviewers who asked why he felt the need to don full-camo military dress, carry an assault rifle, and stand under a tree in some other country’s war.
“It’s time for action.”
I remember Nance, a former Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer — he specialized in cryptology — from those MSNBC days, talking with Brian Williams about “The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West” and his other books — excoriating Trump along the way — and explaining what’s at stake in the battle for America’s soul. He, like other patriots, took Trump’s unapologetic coarseness personally.
Then there was the matter of Nance’s wife, Maryse Beliveau-Nance.
“I’m a widower [Maryse died of ovarian cancer in 2019], which means I understand grief,” he told Harriot, “which is a powerful motivator in this instance. It was the thought of all of the grief this country was taking in that invasion. And I just thought, this is, this was completely uncalled for, this is insanity. To think that I could go to bed and wake up, and these women would just be massive piles of dead bodies and body armor, it just upset me.”
The personal is the communal is the universal.
A decade before they married, she adopted three children in the span of two years (1991-1993) … from Russia. You lose your wife to cancer, a wife who adopted Russian babies, you carry the weight of anguish — your own, your friends’, a country’s — and Vladimir Putin really starts pissing you off.
There has been criticism — and Harriot brings it up — that Nance went to fight in a place inhospitable to people like him.
“The Ukrainian army is 250,000 people,” Nance says, “who are mostly white and mostly male. You know where I can actually show you more Nazis?”
He mentions Kremlin-backed mercenary groups that are filled with them.
And of course this.
“I traveled around this country … and I’ve seen fewer Nazis than I’ve seen in America.”
The criticism, he says, is rooted in racism.
“What upsets them the most is that I’m Black. It’s not about how we view the rest of the world. It’s about how we view ourselves in that world – as free people. And that’s what upsets them the most. People have a problem with believing African Americans have ideals and that we stand for what we believe.”
He may be overstating it.
But maybe not.
He talks of Eugene Bullard, the first Black pilot to fly in the first world war — for the Lafayette Flying Corps in France because, wait for it, as an African American, Bullard wasn’t allowed to fly in the service of his own country.
When Major League Baseball celebrated the 75th Anniversary of Jackie Robinson playing his first game in the majors, that noted civi rights activist Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) sent out a tweet: “75 years ago, Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier as the first African American Major League Baseball Player. Today we honor him and his lasting legacy.”
One wonders, now that discussing the systemic warts in our own history is impossible — thanks in part to people like Cotton — the question is not whether children in public schools will learn about the walls Bullard and Robinson had to scale but about who erected those walls.
“There is a tradition of African Americans fighting in defense of democracy,” says Nance, who served for 20 years. “I’m sure we could find some in the Spanish civil war, but Hemingway didn’t write about that.”
And here’s the money shot.
“African Americans have always fought for the freedom of others, even when they didn’t have it themselves.”
Seeing color is not the problem. Contextualizing it is.
“For almost 15 of my 20 years, my middle name was, ‘I need a Black guy who speaks Arabic’. When I was at NSA, I was being loaned out everywhere, so I’ve seen a lot and conducted missions behind or near enemy lines. If I was a white guy, I would be a hero. But with some people, it’s just as simple as: ‘You are Black; you can’t have done anything exceptional in your life, nothing.’ They can’t imagine that I’m here for altruistic reasons … “This is just who I am. I’m African American, but by God, I’m American.”
This, too.
Since the Russian invasion on Feb. 24, more than a thousand Americans and other foreign nationals have signed up to go and defend Ukraine.
That is also the sound of people who are done merely talking.
Barry Friedman is an essayist, political columnist, petroleum geology reporter and comedian living in Tulsa, Okla. In addition to “Funny You Should Mention It,” “Road Comic,” “Four Days and a Year Later” and “The Joke Was On Me,” his first novel, “Jacob Fishman’s Marriages,” a book about the worst love story ever, was published by Balkan Press in February. See barrysfriedman.com and friedmanoftheplains.com.
