Ordinary People Don't Carry Machine Guns

In Ordinary People Don't Carry Machine Guns, Artem Chapeye reveals his war, intimate and senseless, withholding nothing about his motivations, his nightmares, his new relationship with the world. Here one man, a pacifist turned fighter, a story writer turned soldier, a father and husband, considers the reasons for and reactions to war on a very personal level.

An avowed pacifist until 2022, Chapeye joined the Ukrainian army in the first days of the Russian invasion. He tries to understand the large-scale decision-making that has a defining impact on both individual citizens and society-at-large: many of his fellow soldiers never considered enlisting before finding themselves at war; others flee the country. He wonders from the front lines what his young children at home are doing and what they’re feeling.