Register reporter Phillip Sitter tells the story of his trip to Ukraine during war

Editor's note: Phillip Sitter first told this story on stage at the Des Moines Storytellers Project's "Travel." The Des Moines Storytellers Project is a series of storytelling events in which community members work with Register journalists to tell true, first-person stories live on stage. An edited version appears below.

In October 2022, I felt more peace sitting in the apartment of one of my best friends, the day after his birthday, than I had the entire year leading up to that point.

He had just turned 31 — only a couple months younger than his country’s independence.

It had taken almost a quarter century for us to even realize we each existed, for me to meet one of the best people in my life.

But there I was in his and his wife’s apartment and being there felt right.

There were so many well wishes between us that weren’t intangible anymore as instant messages. They were warm hugs now.

I’d brought a “Happy Birthday” banner that decorated the front of his living room shelves.

I had also brought him as many Dungeons & Dragons birthday gifts as I could pack, and tourniquets, emergency rations and a water filtration bottle for him and his wife, and body armor.

Even the missile that exploded outside that day that rattled the apartment windows stronger than thunder and changed the air pressure in my chest didn’t really change how I felt — it only made leaving harder.

My friend wasn’t alone in all that and that’s what mattered most to me. All those instant messages were one thing, but your presence — even if just for a few days — can mean a lot to someone.

I am not a military veteran, or a war correspondent, or an aid worker. But I have traveled to war, once, briefly, in Ukraine — my first time in both. As a civilian. As a friend.

I met my friend Oleksii Furman in grad school 10 years ago, while he was a Ukrainian Fulbright scholar.

What I remember most from that time is us at a Halloween party. Oleksii was a Jedi from Star Wars and I was Captain America from Marvel. Oleksii most remembers another time, a group of us friends playing video games at my place and having dessert in my kitchen.

He was a photojournalist then and had documented Ukrainian veterans adapting at home after they had been wounded fighting against Russia’s initial invasion in 2014.

We kept in touch after grad school, but not as much as I would have liked, in hindsight. He moved from photojournalism into storytelling using virtual reality, and I supported a project of his documenting the 2014 Euromaidan protests, the Revolution of Dignity.

Oleksii mailed me the photobook for the project, including some of his photos.

In February 2022, I was looking at that book and holding it on the night that the news of the first Russian missile strikes in their full-scale invasion of Ukraine started coming in.

Within that first week, I messaged Oleksii three times what I knew might be the last things he ever read from me or any other person. But he and his wife, Sofia, safely got out of Kyiv and he went back and got his mom out too.

A group of grad school friends and I sent Oleksii the money to buy a car after that.

The car let him travel for work, too. The war pulled him from his job then in video game design back into photojournalism. One of the first things he shot was the funeral of a friend who had been a soldier, killed at the front and brought back to his hometown to be buried.

It wasn’t long after I saw those photos that I made up my mind early that March that as soon as it was possible to go to Ukraine and have a reasonable-enough expectation of being able to get in and out alive, I would do it. I told Oleksii as much.

I didn’t promise him it would be that year, but that I’d like it to be. Not that it would be in Ukraine, but that I’d like it to be.

I knew I didn’t have to do that to be a good friend. But I’ve always been the kind of person who would.

And that was before he started photographing the scenes in liberated suburbs of Kyiv as Russian forces were pushed back.

Those are pictures that will haunt me for the rest of my life.

That’s because they’re not just evidence of what happened to the people in them. They’re evidence of what could have happened if Russian tanks had been able to drive just a few more miles into Kyiv.

It could have been my friend in a mass grave or with his hands tied and shot on the side of a road somewhere.

Oleksii showed me some of those places later when I stood there with him in October. The site of the mass grave in Bucha. Burned apartment buildings in Borodyanka that had been hit by an air strike. But I saw them months later, not when people had still been buried beneath them.

I didn’t want Oleksii to be alone in what I could only imagine he was feeling. He told a newspaper later that it felt “like total darkness reigns.” He would take pictures, drive, sleep, and do it all over again. But nothing was normal — no matter how much he and other people tried.

For me, after everything the previous few years had taken, in a tornado, the sudden death of a co-worker, the pandemic and all the rest, I wasn’t about to let one more thing, one more person, be taken from me, so long as I had any say in it.

Everything Oleksii photographed in the months as I prepared myself only reinforced that. More funerals — including a brother of his friend who was killed in February.

Tired first responders after a missile strike.

Graffiti left behind by Russian soldiers that read: “We will feed the bones of your children to dogs.”

War means there’s a lot of baggage to carry.

Oleksii had months before offered me his own protective vest and helmet while I was visiting. But I couldn’t possibly let him go without, so I bought my own.

But that meant that when I tried to pack it to check for my flights from Chicago to Poland, my suitcase weighed too much.

So, I had to take my vest and the ceramic plates carried inside it out of my suitcase and huff it through the terminal with an extra 20 pounds or more over my shoulder — not counting my overstuffed backpack.

The TSA guy on the other end of the x-ray machine, understandably — had questions .

Even he said he’d never seen someone carry through body armor before. He had me take it out of the bag and take the plates out of the plate carrier vest.

I told him no, I’m not a member of law enforcement, and I told him where I was going. He spoke with his supervisor for a moment — a conversation I would love to have overheard — and they let me through.

Fortunately, I never had to wear any of my armor during my five days and nights in Ukraine. The afternoon after air defense intercepted that missile somewhere above Oleksii and Sofia’s apartment, Oleksii and I went out and did some sightseeing.

I really thought about putting my armor on before we went out. I did feel nervous not having it with me.

But I didn’t want to look ridiculous when no one else I saw anywhere that day was wearing any, and I told myself there were subway stations all around where we would be, in case we needed shelter. There’s an air alert app, and it never went off while we were out.

Wisely or not, we were just trying to live our lives as normal, as much as possible — in a city with good air defense. Not all of my friends’ cities have that protection. And even with it, people were killed in Kyiv earlier in the day that I arrived.

I lived and worked in Ames at the time. I don’t remember if it was my helmet or those ballistic plates that was waiting at my door the night in June I went out to report at the scene of a shooting outside a church in Ames.

Two young people died there, not counting their killer. There have been times since when I’ve really wondered where I would need my armor more.

The last thing I did on the day I left for Ukraine, before going to the airport in Chicago, was be a pallbearer at an uncle’s funeral, at my hometown church in Illinois.

He was a good man and lived a long life. Cancer killed him.

I never wanted to tell most of the people in my life where I was going and I wouldn’t have if not for that funeral luncheon. I didn’t want people to overly worry given what I knew or thought I knew then the risks were and were not.

But I don’t want to leave anyone with any illusions. I made a will and typed out my final wishes before I went. I left bits of my hair and toenails as DNA samples.

Oleksii’s mom told me at lunch one day in Kyiv that I was brave for coming. A new friend I made on the trip told me only a certain kind of person does well in extreme situations.

They’re right. But I also haven’t had the courage to ask my mom or dad what they really thought as they waived off my bus to the airport, or what their drive home was like.

I want to look over on the side of the stage and see Oleksii and Sofia and more friends standing there — free to travel. Here. Anywhere. Free. Free from air alerts, and drone strikes, and power cuts, and physical and emotional wounds.

For now, I know that can’t happen. That’s why I went to them while I had the chance.

My last night on my trip in Kyiv, Oleksii and Sofia took me out to eat at a nice restaurant. We were alone in the dining room except for our waiter, and we had dinner by candlelight. That was not for ambiance but because blackouts had started because of damage to energy infrastructure from Russian attacks.

I learned a lot of things ahead of going to Ukraine, about first aid, immigration systems, how cotton-based fabrics behave in fire compared to synthetic ones, which melt.

But I realized after the missile explosion and during the blackout that I had no idea how I could possibly leave my friends in the middle of a war.

When Oleksii and Sofia prepared to leave me on the train back west, that’s when I broke down in front of them. The smiles and laughs from his birthday party with friends, and dinner, and a long drive in his car listening to music from high school and talking about life, all of that melted away and I broke down there in their arms.

It’s the moment when Oleksii told me not to let the world forget about them.

Travel is a choice, just like opening your heart. And when you make those choices — maybe making you the most vulnerable you've ever been — beauty can happen, even surrounded by ugly.

Ukrayinsʹkoyu movoyu: Moyi braty i sestry, vy smilyvi, nizhni ta sylʹni.

In Ukrainian: My brothers and sisters, you are brave, gentle and strong.

Travel can be a light in darkness. You can be a light in darkness.

Make your feet follow your heart, and you’ll find you’re not alone in either light or darkness.

ABOUT THE STORYTELLER: Phillip Sitter has been a community journalist in the Midwest for more than seven years and currently is the Des Moines Register's western suburbs reporter. Phillip is a native of Illinois, but in addition to Indiana, Missouri and Iowa, he has lived, studied or worked in New Orleans, Louisiana, Washington, D.C. and London. He also has deep personal connections to Ukraine.

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This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Register reporter Phillip Sitter tells the story of his trip to Ukraine during war