American medic’s war poem bridges battlefields and memory
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On an October evening in Kharkiv, the Kharkiv Literary Museum hosted a poetry night in my residency apartment at Slovo Hause — the same building where the Ukrainian avant-garde once lived, wrote, and later died under Stalin’s repression. This time, the readers weren’t academics or professional writers. They were soldiers of Ukraine’s 2nd International Legion — men and women who fight by day and write by night. Their poems were raw, sparse, often unpolished — but honest.
Among them was Glenna Manchego, known by her call sign BabyDoc. At twenty-five, she has already lived a life that few novels could contain. Born in Tooele, Utah — a small town in a big state, as she puts it — she arrived in Ukraine just days after the full-scale invasion began. She had both medical and military training and, watching the war unfold on TV, decided she couldn’t just donate or repost hashtags.
“I sent my resume and licenses to the Ukrainian consulate in California,” she told me. “Two weeks later, they wrote back — ‘You’re accepted.’ I sold my stuff, bought a ticket, and flew to Warsaw. It was that simple.”
Her journey to the front began with a walk. Literally. She arrived in Poland, misunderstood the geography, and found herself stranded without transport. So she started walking — all night, from Lublin to the Medyka border, dragging duffel bags under a cold sunrise. “I was one of the only people walking into Ukraine,” she said. “Everyone else — women, children, elderly — were walking out.”
There’s something archetypal in that reversal — a lone volunteer moving against the tide of exodus, stepping toward the danger everyone else is fleeing. It’s the image of moral gravity reversing itself.
In the months that followed, Glenna became a combat medic, serving in Donbas, then Kharkiv region, and later in the Kursk operation — one of the most daring cross-border missions in modern Ukrainian history. Her view of war is both clinical and deeply human. She speaks of the rapid evolution of technology, of drones that went from civilian toys to predators in a matter of months. “A few years ago,” she said, “we could get a casualty to a surgeon within two hours. Now, it can take days. The drones have made the sky itself hostile.”
But what stays with her isn’t the machines. It’s the birds.
Her first poem — the one she read that night at Slovohaus — is called “The Birds Still Sing.”
The Birds Still Sing
by J/Sgt Glenna “BabyDoc” Manchego
Amidst the roar, the fire, the blood,
I stand in silence where the wreckage floods.
The skies are torn with fire’s might,
Yet still, the birds take wing in light.
I hear them call through the smoky air,
Their songs a prayer, a sweet despair.
How can they sing where death does creep,
Where soldiers fall and mothers weep?
In the midst of screams, in the shadowed haze,
I bandage wounds, I heal, I gaze—
At skies so clear, so far from pain,
While earth below is torn in vain.
Through shattered glass, through burning flame,
I wonder, do they feel the same?
That in the evil, in the tears,
A song can rise above the fears?
I carry souls, both near and far,
Underneath the moon, beneath the stars.
And as the shells and bullets ring,
I hear the birds, and still, they sing.
In that room — once inhabited by poets executed for believing in freedom — her words felt like a reincarnation. The same defiance that once lived in Khvylovy’s manifestos now spoke through the voice of a young American soldier who decided that democracy is worth defending not as an idea, but as an act.
Glenna doesn’t romanticize the war. She laughs easily, speaks precisely, and has the composure of someone who has seen too much to dramatize it. When I asked why she came to Ukraine, she answered without hesitation: “If you just sit and watch, you’re siding with the aggressor. Doing something — anything — means you’re taking a stand.”
Her belief is pragmatic. “I don’t think Russia will stop at Ukraine,” she said. “If we don’t stop them here, one day they’ll roll tanks into Warsaw.” She calls herself “grateful” that her government doesn’t restrict citizens from acting on their own conscience. “If I were still in the military, I couldn’t be here. But as a civilian, I can — and I am.”
She doesn’t want U.S. troops in Ukraine, only consistency. “You can send all the tanks you want,” she said, “but if you don’t send the shells, it’s just an expensive car.” That kind of unsentimental clarity — born of experience, not cynicism — defines many of the Legion’s foreign fighters.
And yet, beneath the soldier’s discipline, there’s still an artist’s eye. Glenna loves Kyiv’s boulevards, Georgian restaurants in Kharkiv, borshch and Napoleon cake. “I joke that my favorite Ukrainian food is Georgian,” she said, laughing. “There are so many Georgian places here.”
When I asked about her future, her voice softened. “In February, I start my application for Ukrainian citizenship. I hope to get dual citizenship and go back to university. Before the war, I was studying neurology. I want to finish and live here.”
That night in Slovohaus, as her poem ended, silence filled the room. The audience — soldiers, writers, volunteers — sat motionless for a moment before clapping. It felt as though the ghosts of the Executed Renaissance were listening. Because in Glenna’s voice, the purpose of Slovo — the word — had been restored.
The poets of the 1930s believed that language could save a nation. The soldiers of today prove that it still can.
Author's note: Glenna’s unit — the International Legion team I wrote about — was hit by an airstrike a few days ago. Their field repair workshop and several vehicles were completely destroyed in the explosion and fire. They’re now raising funds to rebuild, replace tools, and repair what can still be saved.
If you’d like to help, here’s the link to their Facebook page and fundraiser.
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