Last week I did one of the most significant interviews in my career.
It wasn't really structured, neither did I do a good job conducting it. But it was very strong and important to me.
Many people may think that interviewing celebrities or front-page politicians is the most exciting part of a reporter's job and something we all aim at doing one day. At some point, I thought so too.
It was quite a few years ago, but I did a couple of interviews like that. I got to talk to several popular Russian and European singers, some influential businessmen, composers, producers and politicians, whose names wouldn't tell you anything, but carried a lot of meaning back in St. Petersburg.
Vladislav Tretiak, former Soviet hockey goalie and the president of the Ice Hockey Federation of Russia, who I also got to briefly interview for a documentary, might be the only person somewhat known here.
To talk to people who influence the lives of hundreds, thousands or millions of people is definitely an interesting and unique part of my job. But at the same time, to be interviewed all the time is also a part of their job. And in most cases, interviewing public persons turns into a fill-in-the-blank game, the scenario of which is well-known to all parties.
Nevertheless, it was challenging and exciting, but all of those past experiences, while they gave me a bit of adrenaline rush and tested my journalist skills, are not comparable to an interview with the peacekeeping Estevan veteran I had the honour to do.
I guess it was a combination of many important elements that made it so unique and valuable for me. It was the topic – conflicts and wars, and their resolutions always were important to me. It was the life story – a story of a man, who chose a dangerous career full of sacrifice, which also came at a really high price.
It was the person – friendly, calm, and bravely carrying the pain and experiences one never could forget. It also was the fact that he agreed to share his story with me and thus with the readers. It was his generosity, his strength to talk about some things he's been through so maybe others once again hear that they are not alone in their struggle and that there is help out there; so that others understand a bit better what military life is; and so others remember how much they have and how fragile world can be.
When talking about Remembrance Day or veterans, we often talk about those "who served their country." And while it's 100 per cent correct, I see it a bit differently. To me, those men and women actually serve for everyone in their camp, if it's wartime; or for everyone on Earth, if it is relatively peaceful. Serving the country sounds grand, but also ceremonial and official, it almost sounds like it's not about you and me.
But if you think about what they do and why they do it, not in a sense of personal reasoning, but in a sense of greater goals and missions assigned to them, you realize that every risk they take, every injury they suffer, be it physical or mental, and the lives that are lost, all of it is for each one of us. They do it so we could have a safe and pretty easygoing life (compared to what life can be if a war breaks out), so we all could enjoy cozy evenings with our families, so we all could live in a scheduled and pretty stable world. They, the very few, on the global scale, dedicated and brave people, take care of the chaos, so we could enjoy the rest of what life has for us.
So, while yes, they serve their countries, I believe it's more accurate to say that they serve for every human in the world.
While it's our daily duty to remember how lucky we are, thanks to those who serve, when life gets busy, we tend to forget. And Remembrance Day becomes a reminder when veterans quietly share bits and pieces of that chaos that exists, that they've experienced first-hand, and that they keep at the bay, so we all remember to take a moment to check up with our lives, realize how lucky we are and thank those who got us here. And then once poppies are gone for another year, to seal this gratitude in our hearts.
