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Writing Legends of Ukraine

Travis Hightower • Apr 07, 2023

Today I welcome author Travis Hightower as he shares about writing legends in Ukraine.


We are blessed enough to live in a nation where we don’t worry about invaders rolling through our town, kidnapping our children to indoctrinate them, and shooting whoever gets in their way. We don’t have air raid drills or loss of power in the winter because a cruise missile blew up our power company. I think even though many of us are thankful for the freedom and security we enjoy, we still feel distant from a nation and a people like Ukraine, who fight for their very survival. If we did not have this distance, you would never see anyone complain about their “tax dollars” being sent to aid a nation fighting desperately to keep what we experience without threat. Although the reality of how much of a person’s taxes get used for a purpose is seldom understood by people who complain about it, as an author I was more interested in telling the stories of Ukraine which inspire me and make me feel connected to their situation every day.

Most non-fiction journalism on Ukraine is surface level, and the true deep dives into the battles, the heroes, and the atrocities are either incomplete, or not digested by an easily distracted western audience. War is an ugly business. There is very little that is sexy about it to sell. With nonfiction you can make a person’s heart break much more often than you can tell an uplifting story of hope. And this is why propaganda and legends can be a force for good—especially the legends. Legends never die out. They stay with us and keep us striving for the better world. I have written an anthology of three legends of the Ukraine conflict. They are as follows:

 

The Ghost of Kyiv – The story of the real life Mig-29 pilot Stepan Tarabalka exaggerated into a viral legend from the opening days of the war. The original legend started amongst gamers on Discord and then circulated as a meme. The meme credited a single unknown Ukrainian pilot with six kills in the first two days of the war, to include a Russian Mig-29, Su-27, and two SU-25 aircraft. Most difficult to believe were the claims of downing two SU-35 aircraft—an upgraded version of the SU-27 with far more advanced avionics and weaponry than anything in the Ukrainian Air Force. And yet people believed it and the legend spread. I write a scenario where two pilots accomplish six kills in a plausible way, and then show how the legend spreads. But beyond that, I focus on Tarabalka and what I was able to find out about the real man to humanize a legend of the skies. This entry also includes heavy United States involvement, as the first half of the story covers the real-world training event in 2018 involving an F-15 squadron from the California National Guard. My aim is to show how Ukraine as a nation has been tied to ours for decades. One of my beta readers called it Top Gun: Ukraine, and I accepted the compliment.


Snake Island – The phrase “Russian warship, go *bleep yourself!” is now famous worldwide. It was a spicy topic in the opening days of the Russian invasion. Originally, it was believed all the defenders of the tiny Snake Island were killed. This turned out to be incorrect, as Russia revealed almost all of them had been taken prisoner. Skeptics and those looking to be critical of Ukraine pointed to this as a deception in favor of propaganda, but they were also mistaken. This novella tells the plausible story of Roman Hrybov, the man behind the famous defiant insult. It gives the reader a taste of what his time in Russian prison would have been like, and how difficult it would have been to adjust after he was returned home in a prisoner exchange. Then I take the liberty of involving him in the mission to sink the warship Moskva, destroying and sinking the ship that once bombarded Snake Island, and freeing the shipping lanes of the Black Sea. By the end, I compare his resilient words to the flag being raised on Iwo Jima and show how legends becoming propaganda can be viewed as a force for good.


Charcoal -  In the opening months of the war, a female sniper only known by her call sign “Charcoal” issued a statement as propaganda meant to inspire the fighting forces of Ukraine. She was being called the new “Lady Death” and as far as any information I could fins she is still fighting. She is said to be responsible for at least one of several successful sniper assassinations on Russian leadership. To humanize Charcoal, I use an amalgamation of several Ukrainian female snipers fighting in this conflict. I name the character Yulia Shevelyov. When her younger brother goes to war in 2015, he becomes one of the legendary “Cyborgs”—a group of around a hundred Ukrainian soldiers who occupied an Airfield and held onto it in separatist territory near Donetsk for more than a year before they were finally overrun and captured. Yulia is a journalist in the city who wants to stay out of the fighting until she sees her brother paraded through the streets by her own people. This is the story of how the ordinary citizen becomes a warrior when freedom is on the line, and how the victories of such people inspire the cries of Glory to Ukraine, Glory to the Heros!”

 

These novellas will soon be on submission, so look for news on my website www.travishightower.net for their inevitable publication deal. Thank you so much to Donna for allowing me to be a guest on her blog, and I am sure I will do this again sometime.

 

About Travis:

You can catch up with Travis online at https://www.travishightower.net/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hightowerdreamland

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