As the only woman, I was able to sit with the officers in front

The words of Åsne Seierstad — “As the only woman, I was able to sit with the officers in front, with a glass of vodka in one hand and a cucumber in the other. That's how I went to my first war.” — are spoken with the vivid intimacy of memory, a memory that reveals how the extraordinary often enters our lives through the most ordinary of doors. She does not begin her tale of war with fire, with death, or with thunder, but with the quiet absurdity of vodka and cucumber, a moment that captures both the strangeness and the fragility of human experience at the threshold of chaos.

To be the only woman is to stand apart, to occupy a place both privileged and precarious. In that moment, Seierstad was both inside and outside the world of war: sitting with officers, sharing their food and drink, but still marked by her difference. Her gender gave her an unusual vantage point, one not bound by the rigid fraternity of soldiers, but shaped by her own uniqueness. This detail reminds us that war is not only about weapons and armies — it is about individuals, about how they step into its furnace each from their own path, carrying with them fragments of normal life even as they walk toward devastation.

The vodka and cucumber are symbols here, emblems of the ordinary rituals that persist even when the world tips into violence. The officers, heading to war, still cling to their drinks, their food, their laughter. This juxtaposition of normalcy and impending terror is the essence of Seierstad’s story: war rarely announces itself with a clean break from life, but seeps into it, cloaked in moments that feel almost mundane. Her words remind us that the path to the battlefield may begin not with the sound of cannon, but with the clink of a glass.

History is filled with such scenes where the ordinary carried men and women into the extraordinary. On the eve of the First World War, soldiers in Europe boarded trains with flowers pinned to their uniforms, believing they were going to a brief adventure. In 1941, Russian villagers, summoned to the front, ate one last simple meal of bread and pickles before marching into the snow of the Eastern Front. These moments reveal that war is never only about guns and glory, but about people trying to hold onto fragments of normal life as they cross into the abyss.

Seierstad’s first war was in Chechnya, a conflict marked by brutality, destruction, and the silencing of voices. By recalling her introduction in such human terms, she exposes the sharp contrast between the innocence of beginnings and the horrors that followed. The vodka and cucumber, symbols of lightness, stand against the images of Grozny in ruins, of civilians fleeing, of cruelty inflicted. The story becomes a parable of how war often begins in banality but ends in tragedy, how the first steps seem small, yet lead into shadows beyond imagining.

The deeper meaning of her words is that war is lived, not only fought. It is experienced in countless little details — in the food shared, in the conversations held, in the strange rituals that precede catastrophe. For the war correspondent, as for the soldier, the first step into conflict is never truly understood until one has walked it. Seierstad’s memory serves as both witness and warning: do not imagine that war exists far from life, for it entwines itself with life’s simplest things.

The lesson we must take is this: never grow numb to the humanity within war’s telling. When we hear of battles, let us remember the glasses raised before them, the cucumbers bitten in nervous laughter, the moments of ordinariness that make war all the more terrible because it begins amidst life rather than apart from it. And in our own lives, let us hold sacred the simple things — the meals shared, the drinks raised — for they are fragile, and in times of conflict, they may be all that is remembered of peace.

Thus Seierstad’s words endure as a torch of memory: war does not begin in fire, but in life itself — in vodka, in cucumber, in human company. Let us remember this, so that when we speak of war, we do not forget the people who walk into it with hands still holding the simple tokens of an interrupted world.