Personnel… and Wars of Independence

July Fourth is coming up. We all know the names of the Generals who led our troops during the War of Independence. We know a quarter million people served in the army. We even know some names, among them John Neagle.

However, we don’t know enough about the privates and corporals who fought during the war. Partly, this is by design. History, until recently, was written from the point of view of great men. It was men and primarily members of a specific social class. Far more recently, we started to look for ordinary people, read diaries, and interview common folk. When I was attending my master’s, some of that change was beginning. Howard Zinn was one of the pioneering American historians who started doing this before it happened.

Today, I want to highlight a couple of the troops in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. This is via Yigal Levin, but it’s important to understand that while we all write about this at the abstract level, these are the people fighting. So first, here is a Ukrainian fighter pilot, “Saber:”

A Ukrainian pilot with the call sign Saber has been fighting Russian invaders in his Su-27 since the first days of the full-scale invasion. He has a record of destroying Russian aircraft in the air and ground targets. He told Platfor.ma about why Ukrainians were able to resist the Russian Federation in the sky, about difficult…