Garden Grove veteran Giovanni Roman lost his right eye in the attack. He has volunteered in Ukraine twice since Russia’s invasion.
As also alleged by Ukrainian president Volodymr Zelenskyy, Roman saidthreatening to burn through flesh. The acrid smell of it still lingers on some of his gear today, he said.
Although Roman was in the early stages of becoming a Navy corpsman last February, leaving his burgeoning Naval career and a day job as an ER technician felt necessary. Russia’s invasion, he said, seemed as consequential a moment as the early days of World War II.“It didn’t feel right that I’m over here comfortable with my hospital scrubs, clean and living a good life, knowing there are civilians getting bombed,” Roman said.
“I felt proud of Gio for serving the victims of the Russians’ assault, but also worried about his safety,” said Caceres, a Santa Ana police officer. “I tried my best to support him.” Roman said he wasn’t — and still insists that he went to help, not to get a thrill out of the violence. On the frontlines, Roman saw horrors. He declines to get into specifics about what he did and witnessed, but alleges that serious crimes — from rape and torture to extrajudicial executions — wereAlthough they were never used, Roman kept extra magazines in his breast pocket, planning to take his life and destroy his cell phone if he were ever captured. He feared what the Russian forces would do to an American, much less a former U.S. soldier.
It became challenging to work while he knew civilians, Ukrainian soldiers, and fellow volunteers remained in a warzone. So in December, he took a leave of absence and returned to Ukraine. While Roman is proud nobody he treated medically died, several others he knew have been killed. Some are among the signatories on the Ukrainian-American hybrid flag that now sits on the cerulean wall behind his bed. Most of the messages are written in Ukrainian. Roman and the Ukrainian soldiers had no lingua franca other than a few words — the “You best” scrawled in the middle of the flag among them.
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