The Hard Way on Purpose by David Giffels

boots with slick, treadless soles, footwear better suited to a fight-or-flight-can’t-get-any-traction nightmare than battle maneuvers in the snow and ice. Most of the soldiers, including my grandfather, were from Michigan, men in their twenties who’d received penny postcards instructing them to report to Fort Custer in Battle Creek. In the fruitless poetry of operations, they were called the American North Russian Expeditionary Forces. Around carefully shielded campfires, they renamed themselves the Polar Bears.
    My grandfather, an army engineer, lived in a boxcar where he and his fellow infantrymen puzzled over how to face an enemy that wasn’t exactly an enemy in a battle that wasn’t part of a war. Even if that question had an answer, it wouldn’t have done any good. Illogic was the only certainty to their time in the far north. On Armistice Day, November 11, as the rest of the human race recognized the end of the Great War, the Polar Bears—the 339th US Infantry—were in a battle with thousands of raging Bolsheviks, a fight that was as gruesome as it was ambiguous. The war was over, yet the close combat went on for four days, with twenty-eight Polar Bears killed and seventy wounded, and more than five hundred Russian casualties.
    So isolated were the soldiers that they could only guess at why they were fighting or what might be happening back home, so far away. They were caught in the middle of another nation’s revolution, dispatched to fight the idea of something, which always makes for a difficult motivation, especially where homicide is concerned. They didn’t know that a letter-writing campaign was under way, calling for the nation’s leaders to bring them home. They didn’t know that President Woodrow Wilson was harboring private regret for his decision to send them there, admitting later, “I have at no time felt confident in my own judgment about it.” They were sick and freezing, ill equipped, wondering if they’d been chosen only because they were natives of the snowy upper Midwest, and whether anyone had any idea that it was never this cold back home. They pulled boots off dead Bolsheviks and put them on their own feet, throwing away the useless ones issued by their own military.
    The Creation of Russia is mostly about two things: cold and the question why. It opens with a poem called “Memorial Day Prayer,” filled with a particular kind of hurt, first for “thy children who have died,” but more for the injustice of being sent to kill and die without a mission, its final line pleading, “Oh, make our duty plain.”
    By midwinter, the issue of whether they should be transported home was irrelevant. The Russian ports were frozen and there was no way out. So the fighting went on, the Americans firing unreliable, Russian-made Mosin-Nagant rifles and Lewis machine guns into relentless waves of Russian soldiers, whose attacks continued through the winter and into the spring.
    One soldier wrote of their plight in a letter home: “We had to fight to save our necks and that’s what we did. We didn’t know why we were fighting the Bolsheviks. We fought to stay alive.”
    I found my grandfather’s brown overcoat in his attic, a heavy garment so long it draped behind me like a sad monarch’s cape. It never occurred to me then what he might have felt as he lived inside this coat, inside a boxcar inside a land that not even a Great Lakes winter could have prepared him for, and the Great Lakes winter is not to be trifled with. I took, or was given, I don’t remember which, a leather belt with a strap that went up and over the shoulder. For some reason, boys are always drawn to things that strap over the shoulder—guitars, rifles, backpacks—and by these things they are allowed to test the weight of whom they might someday become—musicians, soldiers, wanderers.
    My grandfather never talked about it, or not