Paul Bass Photo
Adrian Bonenberger with bracelet given to him by daughter of one of the Ukrainian men he trained to resist Russian invaders.
“Clear!” members of Alpha team called out.
But that’s all they called out.
Otherwise, Adrian Bonenberger had them use hand signals.
The scene was an abandoned factory earlier this month in Lviv, Ukraine.
Bonenberger was in Ukraine, on a two-week vacation from his job editing the Yale Medicine magazine in New Haven, on a double mission.
One mission: He and his wife traveled to rescue her parents from Kyiv. (It worked; click here to read more about that in a story by the Register’s Ed Stannard.)
Mission two: Bonenberger and fellow U.S. military vets Ben Busch and Matt Gallagher drew on their combat experiences in Afghanistan and Baghdad to train a group of civilians to resist Russian invaders if the war on their nation came to their doorstep.
It was a challenge. Most of the men — teachers, bus drives, welders — had never handled weapons before. One subgroup called themselves the “Alpha team.” Some of their weapons came from a nearby museum’s collection of World War II-era Soviet tommy guns. CHECK They had enough bullets for each participant to take 10 shots.
In the abandoned factory, Bonenberger was showing the soldiers how to move in as a team to enter and clear a room where the enemy might be lurking inside. He had learned how to do that during one of his U.S. Army stints, as a rifle company commander of the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan. Bonenberger drilled the Ukrainians in radio brevity codes, hand-and-arm communication, avoiding speaking out loud except to announce, “Clear!
In fact, the team would if anything end up inside, not outside the room if the Russians arrived: Bonenberger was showing them what they would be fighting against.
For two weeks, the civilians drilled in sub-freezing temperatures, from 9 a.m. to 5 or 6 p.m.
And they learned.
“These were some of the most motivated people I ever trained,” Bonenberger, who’s 44, said in a conversation on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
He returned home confident in this prediction: “Russia cannot defeat Ukraine.”
Tempered with this understanding: “They can do a lot of damage.”
And left with this hope: That, when it’s all over, the “easy solidarity” found in times of war can transition to a “meaningful peace” and “viable democracy” in Ukraine.
Until then, he’s keeping on his wrist a bracelet he received before departing Lviv. It was a thank-you gift from a member of Alpha team, a construction worker named Vanya. Vanya’s daughter made it. Bonenberger intends to wear it as long as the Ukrainians keep fighting.
Click on the above video to watch a segment CNN’s Anderson Cooper hosted about Bonenberger & company’s training sessions in Lviv.
And click on the above video to watch Bonenberger describe the experience and talk about his path from Yale to the military to a successful writing career, on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.”