Viclore

This is part of a series of interviews that I conducted as part of The Chevrons Project.  Aidan came all the way from New Zealand to spend 3 months volunteering in Ukraine, and is currently planning his next volunteering trip.

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Vic: First up, can you tell me your name and what you were doing in Ukraine?

Aidan: My name is Aidan Lynch, I’m from New Zealand, and I went to Ukraine originally to join a kitchen making food for soldiers- but when I turned up, it turned out that there was politics involved and joining the kitchen wouldn’t have been the best idea. So, I ended up making nets for vehicles and individuals. I helped make trench candles, and I found a different kitchen in Kyiv to join.

Vic: So, you ended up going to multiple cities in Ukraine?

Aidan: I did. I spent most of my time in Lviv, but I went on two small trips to Kyiv during the three months that I was there.

Vic: Which city did you prefer?

Aidan: I liked Lviv more architecturally wise, and it is more similar to what I found back home. Like, its one city centre and everything else falls out beyond that. Kyiv is very strange in that it seems to be two or three cities mashed together which I found a bit weird, and its very weird that its very obviously a planned-out city, which I’m not used to. But it did have cooler history if you walked around the streets- relics everywhere.

Vic: So what was the main place that you volunteered at during your time in Lviv? 

Aidan: I can’t remember the name in Ukrainian, but it roughly translates to “camo netting at Gunpowder Tower”. And you’re essentially weaving camouflage netting, so they put it over a tank or a trench line or a soldier’s gun, because these days every asshole has a drone with a thermal camera, so if you get seen you’re dead. So you essentially take similar to chicken wire or garden netting with the big hole size, and then strips of like plasticy fabric, and you weave the camouflage pattern into it over several hours. The peak- there’s about 30 people in the establishment, and we get about 3 large nets big enough for like a truck done per day.

Vic: What types of people were volunteering there?  Were they mainly international volunteers, or Ukrainian residents?

Aidan: It’s very determined by what time of day you turn up. So I was in the lucky position that I didn’t have a job while I was in Ukraine to take up my time, so I could turn up earlier in the morning when there was essentially just me and retirees that were running it. It was run by five or six pensioners who are there every day all day, super super dedicated. Then towards the middle of the day you’d get students and the international volunteer would turn up, then round about 5 you get Ukrainian working age people turning up, and after school lots of kids would turn up. There was some form of art school or I think music school I the same building, so you’d have kids that would go do their lessons then come in afterwards. By about 6 o’clock it was bustling.

Vic: I’m familiar with the place that you volunteered at, and I know that they’ve got a bit of a ritual around what happens when they finish a net. Could you perhaps tell me a bit about that?

Aidan: Yes, so every time they finish a net they line up everyone in the centre of the room, put out a net on the floor. The net gets picked up, then the chosen person, usually its if there’s a new person, they get them to roll it up whilst playing the national anthem whilst they all sing along, and they do it underneath the Ukrainian flag. So its all very very patriotic. Then when they get to the end of rolling it up they put it away, they finish the national anthem, then they have a sort of chant.

Слава Україні! – Героям слава
Слава нації – смерть ворогам
Україна – понад усе
Волонтерському роду – нема переводу[1]

Glory to Ukraine, glory to heroes. Death to enemies, and there were some other ones that didn’t translate to English very well, then everything else- I think it was a Ukrainian song or poem and they changed the words slightly to be volunteer based, which I didn’t quite understand. Yeah.

Vic: And how did taking part in that ritual make you feel?

Aidan: Initially it was quite weird, I’m not from a patriotic county. <laughs> We’re a post settler colonial project here in New Zealand, so we’re taught to be quite ashamed of the old history on account of most of it being bad. We’ve usually been the perpetrators not victims, so the idea of having national pride or national defence is a very foreign concept. But, you know once you’ve been in Ukraine a little while and you’ve been bombed a couple of times, patriotism really starts to run hot and you get quite into it.

It’s also, there’s kinda a negative aspect- like in one case we had one of the really young kids come into the workshop, and in the end they were the one shouting “death to enemies”. So there’s definitely a conversation to be had around kinda the long term effects on culture that this conflict has had. But in terms of right now, I think its definitely a very valuable ritual in terms of social cohesion and keeping morale up.

Vic: How did the ritual impact you as a foreign volunteer?  Did it make you feel more connected to Ukraine?

Aidan: I think so, definitely. On one level it’s just nice to be included, and it definitely kind of helps communicate when you’re new how much the locals care about this, and how important it is to them. Not just “oh were in a war we need to win”, but, this is our national anthem, this is about our country, this is our land, and it’s important to us. Even the fact it’s in Ukrainian, because the language has been supressed so long, it’s a way of exclaiming their identity.

Vic: Do you feel like a lot of the Ukrainian national volunteers that were working on the camouflage nets had personal connections to the soldiers that the nets were being sent to?

Aidan: Yes, but no more than any other volunteer position I found. I think the Ukrainian army stands at 900,000 or 950,000 people now, so it’s almost impossible to get anyone who doesn’t have a friend or family member who’s serving. Several of the volunteers would have a father, brother, son, grandson in the military. Occasionally we’d get videos back from them from the front. I think especially the pensions who run the whole thing; have grandchildren fighting and are very very motivated to do everything they could since they’re not tied down by a job.

Vic: You mentioned earlier that while you were in Ukraine bombings did occur. If its not too sensitive, could you tell me more about what happened?

Aidan: Yeah sure. So, there’s kinda different levels of bombings/threats. Pretty much every day we get air alarms, and that pretty much says there could be a bomb coming. Usually that’s because a Mig-31 has taken off in Russia. So if you’re not into the whole military thing like I am, the Mig-31 Foxhound, it’s the largest jet the Soviet Union ever produced, and it’s the only jet that’s capable of holding this missile called a Kinzhal. That’s an aerial ballistic missile, I think it takes about 3 seconds to get from the launch site to Ukraine, so if they fire they could hit anywhere in the country and you don’t have time to get to cover.

So every time a Mig takes off, there’s always a threat that it could hold this missile and this missile could be coming towards you and you just don’t know. So every time they take off, using advanced radar they send a missile alert to the entire country saying “hey just so you know, an assault might be coming any second”. Most people don’t take it seriously because it happens several times a day, several times a night. Usually we call it “taking a Mig for a joyride” because they’ve gotta train their pilots, so they’re constantly going up and down.

Then kind of a bit more serious is “oh there’s actually a thing that’s flying”. Usually on the radar you’ll have a ballistic missile or a cruise missile or a Shahed drone that’s happening somewhere in the country. And usually in Lviv at least they get shot down or veer off course somewhere else before they get to you. So you just hear the alarm, nothing else.

Then a bit more threatening than that is shit directly actually coming towards us which is when you start hearing the air defence pop off. So you’ll kinda wake up and there’ll be explosions out there, which is kind of disconcerting.  The thing that movies tend to get wrong is the pitch of the explosion. It’s always far too high pitched in movies. In real life its really really deep, you don’t so much hear it as feel it- if you’ve experienced an earthquake, like a really big earthquake where you can hear the waves coming through the earth, its more akin to that than it is to like fireworks.

And then kind of really bad situations, “oh shit somethings coming towards us” and it gets through the air defence, and it actually blows up on the ground. So the big event for me was in Kyiv. I didn’t find out what type of missile it was, I think it was either an X-101 cruise missile or a Kinzhal, hit a factory about 1km away from the hotel we were staying at. I think it was about 30, 30-something people died in that factory. And then simultaneously there was something that hit one of the apartment blocks across the river from us. So, you look outside and there’s just smoke across the entire city and there was an air quality alert because there was just so much burning crap in the air.

Overall, I wouldn’t recommend being bombed, but it’s a- having been in a roughly safe city I would say the worst part of it was the lack of sleep, just because of the sirens going off constantly. You can’t really turn them off in case it’s a real threat. Then occasionally you’ll get early warning that something’s coming so you spend the entire night there kinda waiting for cruise missiles to start raining down, and then sometimes it just doesn’t come and yeah- the lack of sleep definitely gets to you after a while.

Vic: Do you think your experiences in Kyiv where there was actually a strike that came down fairly near to you made you more likely to actually listen to air raid alerts in the future?

Aidan: Um, for a little while. Never underestimate the ability of the human body to not want to get out of bed, I would say. <laughs> For the first couple of weeks yeah definitely it made me want to get out of bed, but then after a couple weeks of nothing bad happening you just stay in bed. I think something people don’t really realise is how much life goes on normally despite the horrible events. Theres a great picture of a postman during 911 delivering his post and the Two Towers are burning in the background and everyone in the comments is saying “oh my god how could he be going around doing his daily business, just keep working with that happening”, but it is genuinely like that every day.

You know, people get up and go to work with a burning building in the background because it got bombed and you cant really stop to look at it too much because you’ve got to get to work. So me, I need to sleep, I’m not going to let the Shaheds get in the way of that too much.

Vic: How did your experience of getting shelled impact your connection, the connection that you feel to Ukraine?

Aidan: Yeah, it definitely made it stronger. I remember the first kind of few weeks of the war there was lots of videos going round with like CGI of planes bombing like Paris- like “imagine if this was happening to you”. And you look at that and you think you understand like “what if my city got bombed”. You don’t really understand until you’ve seen a building was there one day and now it’s gone, or a piece of the landscape is just missing the next day. It does make you incredibly angry, especially if say you were from the city. I quite like Kyiv and Lviv, then one day the city I’ve grown to quite like is missing a skyscraper because it got blown up, you do sort of take offense at that.

Vic: Cool. Yeah, I mean that’s very understandable really. Do you think that this was a common experience for other international volunteers?

Aidan: I think it depends on where in the country you go. The getting woken up all the time because of Mig alerts is universal, you can’t get away from it. I think I had it relatively easy compared to a lot of people. The further east you get, the worse it tends to get. So Kyiv was much worse for actual serious alerts than Lviv was. Then if you go to Kharkiv or say Kherson, or Zaporizhzhia, or Dnipro, you’re getting real strikes several times a day all day. Especially Kharkiv will get like actually hit multiple times a day, whole day and night. So, it definitely could have been worse. But, so if you stay in Lviv you’ll maybe never experience an actual hit, but yeah if you go to Kyiv- I think my experience was pretty standard.

Vic: Would you recommend that volunteers stay in Lviv?

Aidan: Ah no, go see the rest of the country. I hear that Odesa’s wonderful. Go have a sense of adventure, you’ll still probably be fine. And if not, stay in a place with a really good basement and hang out there during the night, you’ll be fine.

Vic: How do you feel your experiences in Ukraine have impacted you personally?

Aidan: Actually, it’s been- it sounds terrible but its been a positive experience. I’ve made a whole bunch of lovely friends and relationships while I was over there. Definitely gave me a bit of perspective on the world as a whole, exposure to other cultures- like every European country seems to be represented among the volunteers I spoke to, and lots of non-European ones. So you kind of get to meet people from all sides of the world that you wouldn’t normally.

It also makes you very very personally invested, and it gives you an understanding of the news headlines. When you get a news headline that says “hospital in Kyiv got blown up by a cruise missile, this many dead”, you don’t really get it until you’ve been on the receiving end. Or if they say a power plant got blown up, this many people don’t have heating- until you’ve experienced Ukrainian winter temperatures you don’t really get what that means. Like having a negative temperature inside your flat, especially in New Zealand where it’s a foreign concept to go below freezing, the idea of it being truly life threateningly cold doesn’t make sense to us. You’ve kinda got to experience it in person.

Vic: Cool, thank you for that. So, let’s move on to discussing chevrons. Did you receive many chevrons during your time in Ukraine?

Aidan: So I received two- but only one that I’d call legitimate. Yeah.

Vic: What was the one that you’d consider legitimate? 

Aidan: I got one from net making at Gunpowder Tower. I’d say that it was legitimate because it was from actual Ukrainians and based on our work. They were happy that I turned up so often and stayed so late, so I feel like I actually earned that one. But yeah, and I enjoyed the process of I think- I think they call it being patched up, yeah. They do a whole ceremony for it. Everyone claps and cheers and they do a big speech. I didn’t understand it because it was in Ukrainian, but I got a friend to translate some of it and it seemed all good things, certainly made me feel quite special. It helps connect you to the people you were working with.

Vic: What was the one you don’t see as legitimate?

Aidan: So I got one a group called Global Augmentation. They’re a combat medical training group. So they gave us medical training, and in return we helped them adjust their training for civilians. They do military personnel, but they’re expanding to helping civilians, and they gave me a patch then. I see it as less legitimate as I didn’t really do any work for it. It was just they had it, it felt like a participant trophy. I’m happy to have it because yeah its like a nice reminder of what we did and the friends we made doing that, but yeah, I didn’t earn that one.

Vic: So in your mind is receiving a chevron tied to work?

Aidan: I think so. I think any sort of- well I see it as a sort of token of appreciation, and not so much a trophy but a mark that you’ve stayed and made connections, and I think hard work is kinda the best measure of that.

Vic: Did you buy any chevrons for yourself while you were in Ukraine?

Aidan: Not while I was in Ukraine- it’s not safe for work but it was a fundraiser through someone that I quite like, so I ended up buying it. It has no meaning compared to the other ones, but the money did go to a good place and yeah the slogan’s relatively funny, so.

Vic: So was that for a fundraiser for a military unit, or?

Aidan: Yes. I forget which unit, but I think it was to buy drones.

Vic: Cool. What do you do with the chevrons that you’ve received?  Do you ever display them on your backpack or a hat?

Aidan: So, not on any clothing. I have almost a display. I’ve got the top of my wardrobe which has got all of the trophies from my life and the stuff I’ve brought back from Ukraine. So I’ve got the old anti-aircraft shell that’s been cut into a tryzub, and I’ve got a piece of an x-ray diffraction machine that I took out of a dumpster from uni, that kinda stuff. But I’ve got my patches up there with that kind of trophy stuff. So, it’s a semi display.

Vic: So do you see your chevrons as trophies?

Aidan: I think definitely the ones that I’ve earned. It’s like “oh look I did a cool thing, here’s a mark of the cool thing I did”.

Vic: Were you ever tempted to buy any chevrons for yourself in Ukraine? I’ve seen that there’s a lot on sale at the various souvenir stores.

Aidan: Oh yeah there are an endless amount of interesting designs. I was tempted to buy one which was half and half New Zealand and Ukrainian flag, just because id never seen any of a hint of New Zealand in Ukraine, but in the end no. I do feel if you buy them for yourself, they get less special. It comes back to the whole award/token of appreciation kind of aspect. If you buy them for yourself and you’re not gonna try and sew it on your clothes as fashion, then I don’t see the point in it. Its more what they represent than what they look like. Yeah.

Vic: So say someone else had been volunteering at the net making place and had received the net making patch, then started wearing it on a baseball cap or on the sleeve of their shirt, how would that make you feel?

Aidan: That’s fine. So long as they were given it and didn’t go out and buy it themselves, I think that’s fine. I don’t think I’d go so far as to say that it’d be stolen valour equivalent doing that, but like if they had bought a patch that said “oh I volunteered at this place I’m part of this unit” etc. etc. and started wearing it without having any connection I think that would be a bit strange. But no, go for gold and wear your patches if you like!

Vic: Say someone went out and bought, I don’t know, a 93^rd patch from a souvenir shop and put that on their bag. How would you react to seeing that?

Aidan: I don’t think it’s quite at the level of stolen valour, but I would think that its kind of strange if they don’t have any connection; and it wouldn’t need to be a big connection, like you fundraised for them once or they gifted it to you or you knew someone, you had a friend, you even maybe traded with them for it. Anything like that I think would be fine. But buying directly with no connection to them does seem a bit LARP-y[2].

Vic: So if you saw someone that was wearing a patch for a specific unit, would you assume that they belong to that unit, or that they’d obtained it via supporting the unit?

Aidan:  Generally, I would probably- in the context of where I was hanging out, I would assume that they had donated to or had friends in the unit. Though there were definitely some crowds where everyone’s a soldier, so you’d assume that’s where they’re from.

Vic: How do you feel about people who obviously bought non-military patches like Flork, NAFO, the various joke ones- and have shoved a bunch of them on their backpack?

Aidan: That’s fine, you’re not impersonating any military group or volunteer group so that’s fine. Usually the money goes to a good cause, especially the charity ones, and even if you’re buying it in the country and its just like a cool symbol or a Ukrainian flag, the money goes into economy. That helps the effort eventually, people get taxed eventually its goes to the front, so that’s all good. Yeah, so long as it’s not directly impersonating a for real quote on quote organisation, go for gold.

Vic: Do you think that places should be a bit more discerning about scenarios in which they give out chevrons? Or is it a the more the merrier kind of system?

Aidan: Hmmm. I think there definitely should be some sort of selection- I’m not asking for a comissionary thing to vote on it, but yeah there should be some thought given to who’s patched up. Like you do get kinda crazy people who wander into Ukraine looking for an adventure, and not all of them are the best people. So if you’re giving them a chevron you are kind of associating yourself with them- especially if they decide to start wearing it everywhere. So you don’t want to be giving them to everyone who walks through the door, and again the hard work aspects of it. If they kinda turned up for 10 minutes took a photo and left, you probably don’t want to reward them with a chevron. But at the same time, it shouldn’t be an exclusive club. Yeah.

Vic: Going back to the concept of chevrons in exchange for hard work, how did you feel when you volunteered at other places and they didn’t give you a chevron?

Aidan: I mean it was never expected, so it was fine. Especially say candle making was kind of completely an impromptu thing, over a week, so of course they’re not going to have had time to go design and print a bunch of patches off to give to people. Um, so yeah. Absolutely no hard feelings about it. Cause it does drain resources to do that. You’re exchanging resources in terms- either in exchange for a moral boost, so it’s a calculation that every group needs to make individually as to whether or not they invest in that.

Vic: So you see chevrons as giving a morale boost?

Aidan: I would say so, like they definitely mark you out as “oh you’re one of us, you’ve done a good thing and you’re part of the group”, and I think that that makes you more likely to have loyalty- like I’ll always go back to the same net making place now because they’re my friends. They thought I was cool enough to give this little token to, yeah it shows to me that they like me, I like them, so I’m gonna keep coming back.

Vic: Is there a greater chance that you’ll return there than anywhere else you volunteered?

Aidan: Almost certainly.

Vic: Do you think that organisations within Ukraine should try and produce chevrons in an attempt to get better- I guess better brand loyalty out of their volunteers?

Aidan: Um, hmm. I think that would entirely come down to the costs associated with making it, which I’m unaware of. Because it is a trade-off, it does cost money. I think- there’s an idea floated a bit back of essentially having a volunteer passport quote on quote, where its just a book and each group gets their own little stamp and when you volunteer at a new group you get a stamp in your passport, and you’d pay what $100 up front for the passport and use that for a fundraiser. So that kind of idea of maybe selling the patches, or like you need to pay to actually get the physical patch, I’m not against. Every group needs as much money as they possibly can, because fighting a war against the second largest military in the world is expensive. So, I wouldn’t expect every small grassroots group to put that kind of investment in.

Vic: But if organisations started selling chevrons, would that not dilute the- would it feel like it diluted the work that you’d put in to receive your one?

Aidan: Probably it would to some extent. I definitely wouldn’t be suggesting that any stranger can just buy one. So I do target shooting as a sport, and we have things called a marksman’s badge where its like- you designate a round that you’re gonna shoot in and you’ve got to score above a certain threshold, and you get a marksman’s badge for that grade. But you need to pay to get the physical badge. You do the work to be able to qualify for it, but you still need to buy it for yourself- and people still do, en mass.

So I think, there’s a way to kind of extract extra donation money or funding out of volunteers who’re from rich countries, where $5 doesn’t mean much to someone from Germany, or euros, but in Ukraine that can actually get you quite a long way. I think it’s kinda a valid fundraising mechanism, and it wouldn’t take away from the meaning too much.

Vic: So you got one while you were over in New Zealand. Is it a patch, or a badge, or?

Aidan: It’s a patch, though it doesn’t seem to have Velcro on the back- I think its some form of adhesive that you melt that probably adheres permanently to whatever you put it on. I was very surprised that it managed to get to me through the post from wherever it was printed.

Vic: And do you display that in some way?

Aidan: It’s on the kind of display bench with everything else.

Vic: Is that a common thing in shooting clubs in NZ to have chevrons? Well, patches.

Aidan: It is, yeah. Everyone who’s associated with the national target shooting body- like all the clubs will have them. So you get a badge if you represent New Zealand, so I’ve got- well you get a pocket quote on quote. It’s essentially a chevron that you sew onto your fancy dress when you go to prize giving. So I’ve got one for the junior New Zealand team somewhere, and then if you make a regional team you get a badge with a big ribbon on, and every year you make the team again you get a bar with the date, the year. So you get people that are 60 years old and have been shooting for most of their lives so they have a ribbon all the way down their chest for every year they’ve competed in. It’s relatively common.

Vic: And would you say that they function similarly to how they do in Ukraine?

Aidan: I think they’re more ego driven here. It used to be that wearing those at prize giving was a very normal thing to do, like you come and show off how good you are. But nowadays we’re a generation of much more self-deprecating people, and showing off like that isn’t normal anymore, so people don’t wear them. I didn’t even wear my pocket to prize giving after I made the national team. Whereas in Ukraine, I feel because it’s so- it serves such an important role to have group cohesion and morale, I think its much more common to wear it there.

Vic: But you never wore your chevrons while you were in Ukraine?

Aidan: I did not, but then again I guess it’s the same sort of cultural influence that stops me from wearing my pocket.

Vic: So you’d say there’s less ego associated with the displaying of chevrons in Ukraine?

Aidan: I’d say so, especially with volunteers that go to a warzone to volunteer- it probably has a bigger moral implication than “I was good at shooting pieces of paper”. There’s more to be proud of there, than with the marksman badges.

Vic: Yeah, okay, that makes sense. Cool, that’s all the questions I have. Do you have any other general comments about Ukraine you’d like to make? Or any thoughts about chevrons you’d like to share?

Aidan: Um, general thoughts about Ukraine- something that has bugged me for a while and became even worse after I’d seen it myself, or like gone to Ukraine myself, basically: every westerner treats Ukrainians, even if they don’t mean to, as if they’re some sort of either as a fantasy creature, or as if they’re lesser because they’re poor. The kinda stereotype goes, it’s a poor country and everyone there is a bit backwards. And you find this even with people who are ostensibly pro Ukraine, support Ukraine’s state of nationhood.

They still have these little kind of ticks that betray that there’s what they’re subconsciously thinking. I didn’t realise that that also sort of applied to me until I got there, and I saw that I have even more in common with the average Ukrainian than I have with say the average American. The only thing that separates Ukrainians from me is that they’re slightly poorer than I am, but like not much- and that they put cream cheese in their sushi. Whereas what separates me from the people 2km away down the apartment buildings is several million dollars and the fact that they grew up in a completely different world with a completely different experience.

I have so much more in common with Ukrainians than I do with say my own politicians, or the bankers, kind of nearby my house. Like, in Ukraine, it’s a much more advanced country than we would think. Just because they’re poor doesn’t mean they’re not intelligent or technically capable. So New Zealanders- I don’t want to say backwards but behind, we’re about 10 years behind on technology things compared to Europe and America. Ukraine is not. Ukraine is past us in terms of technical things whether it be public transport or infrastructure. The only difference is they don’t have the money to roll it out everywhere. It’s not evenly distributed, but it is more advanced than what we have here. Yeah.

Vic: Out of interest what were the ticks you noticed in other people, or the things that suggested they don’t quite see Ukrainians as equal?

Aidan: So the kinda like common jokes of- I actually started, so- <laughs> It started originally with sort of the “meanwhile in Russia” meme, so that’s problematic for multiple reasons. A: it’s stereotyping and B: it’s putting Russia and Ukrainians as the same kind of people which obviously we’ve learned is not correct. But yeah, that all eastern European or ex-Soviet citizens as being backwards, uneducated, the weird white people who eat nothing but potatoes and, yeah. Incapable of doing anything technical, all soviet weaponry is inferior to western weaponry and its not because of eternal factors or economic factors or social pressures its because the people were incapable of producing anything like the Americans could. Kind of those sorts of stereotypes. Yeah.

And then there’s also positivity- oh they’re all rugged, they can take on so much more hurt than we in the west could, they’re so much stronger than us. They kind of treat that as that positive aspect, it treats them like they’re superhuman to the point where they’re not human anymore, where they’re not allowed to have trauma or bad days or- you particularly see it online with Americans who get angry if Ukrainians don’t thank them profusely for their support at every single opportunity. The most recent opportunity of that of course was JD Vance, but it’s been happening for years that individual Americans will go into the comments of people complaining about being bombed and go “why aren’t you saying thank you for the air defence missiles that we sent you?”  It’s like- they’re not allowed to show weakness despite the terrible events because they’re this mystical eastern European people and they’ve had so much hardship in their pasts that it means surely they can take the hardship now.

Vic: That’s very interesting, thank you for sharing. Unless you’ve got any other things you’d like to say, then I think we’re all finished.

Aidan: I think that’s it.

Vic: Thank you for your time!

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[1] Aidan was able to recite some of the chant, but I was sent a text copy after the interview

[2] LARP stands for Live Action Roleplay. Calling someone a LARPer in your space is a derogatory term meaning they’re only pretending to be what they claim.