In the days leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, David Bramlette was in a classroom in Washington, DC, discussing whether Russia could invade Ukraine. He was in the process of earning his master’s degree in international affairs from Johns Hopkins University. At the time, he admits, he thought the prospect of a Russian invasion unlikely.
But when Russia finally pulled the trigger and invaded Ukraine last February, David, who had previously worked for the US military as a Green Beret on an anti-Russia mission and as an Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan, felt forced to Go and fight the Russians.
“There’s good and bad in my head,” Bramlette said in an interview with Kyiv’s The Daily Beast this week.
“I’m sitting in class and I’m thinking I could sit here and graduate and work an office job and have a little bit of an impact on the world by working in a government office, right?” Bramlette recounted. “I have the knowledge and the skills and abilities to help. So I kind of took a leave of absence from my master’s degree and went over there.”
In early March, Bramlette, who calls himself “Bam,” was on his way to Warsaw, Poland, to get his bearings before joining the Foreign Legion in Ukraine. While boarding the plane to Poland, Bam said he sent his parents a short email explaining why he was going to war for another country.
“I emailed my parents and said, ‘This is the fairest war I think my generation will see in our lifetime.’ ‘It’s a clear battle between good and evil,'” Bramlette told The Daily Beast. “That’s why I left. I thought I couldn’t take this shit.”
Like Bramlette, former Marine Troy Offenbecker was forced early in the war to join the fight against the Russian invasion. He told The Daily Beast that the Russian atrocities against Ukrainians reported in the news were part of the last straw that prepared him for war.
“There’s a lot of really stupid volunteers here that have nothing to do with going to war.”
“Last March I saw everything that was happening and when I heard about the international legion I knew I was coming,” Offenbecker told The Daily Beast in an interview from Kiev. “But back then I had some commitments that kept me there. It took two months… I had to sell my house, I sold my vehicles.”
Offenbecker spent time preparing for the fight, conditioning it and getting into better physical shape.
When he saw pictures of mass graves and executed Ukrainian civilians in Bucha, Offenbecker was beside himself.
“It really pissed me off that you could do something like that to such an innocent person,” he said. “It really pissed me off.”
“I have skills that I have learned. I was in the Marine Corps for six years, I taught other Marines, I taught other countries how to fight. I just thought it wouldn’t be right if I sat at home,” said Offenbecker.
The urge to choose Bramlette was also personal.
“This is my third war I’ve fought and this is by far the worst.”
In 2014, just two months before Russia illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine, he came to Stuttgart to work for the 1st Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group. When Russia moved in, it was time for him to leave.
“When Crimea passed, our main focus was essentially on defending Eastern Europe. “My three years in the Special Forces consisted essentially of doing partner training throughout Central and Eastern Europe and also Western Europe,” Bam said. “But I never really felt like we accomplished much.”
And while Bramlette has previously participated in combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are quite a number of service members or veterans around the world who prepared to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan but for some reason didn’t make it . Of the vets he’s seen in Ukraine, many felt the urge to fill that gap, Bam said.
“There’s nothing more frustrating than training and training, training for something your whole life or for years, and then never having the opportunity to put your skills to the test,” he said. “A lot of these guys had a certain vibe.”
Offenbecker expressed similar views. “I’ve met some people who might have been here for a reason, they’ve seen their buddies go through war and they’ve never experienced that,” he said.
“Kill as many Russians as you can”
Once in Ukraine, preparations for war in Lviv and Kiev brought a little happiness and a little chaos, Bramlette said.
First, Bramlette was surprised at how many people without military experience went to fight in Ukraine.
“There are a lot of really stupid volunteers here who have no business in a war,” he said.
After arriving in Poland in early March 2022, he took the train to Lviv to meet with other volunteer fighters. But along the way he found several other foreigners he didn’t want to fight side by side with, he said.
“I met three other foreigners on a train. One was German and had no military experience. He was a carpenter or something,” Bramlette said. “He had fired a gun – kind of like that. And it was a hunting rifle.”
Once in Ukraine, Bramlette investigated various groups of foreign volunteers, but found that their military background was also lacking. He was “just as dissatisfied with the quality of the foreigners there,” he said.
A few days later, he joined forces with two other Green Berets to form a multinational force of about 12 people, forming a small unit tactical team, or special operations team.
“And then they basically gave us orders for Kharkiv and said, ‘Go and kill as many Russians as you can,'” he said.
After some training and preparation, with weapons and ammunition from Ukraine’s stockpiles, the force set out.
“We carried out recruitment exclusively from foreigners who were already in Kiev. And we’ve provided all of our resources and funds ourselves, like buying our own cars and financing our own safe houses,” Bam said.
In Kharkiv, their missions were largely self-directed. The Ukrainian government did not connect them with Ukrainian or other foreign volunteer units for coordination, so they took it upon themselves and introduced themselves to the Territorial Defense Forces, regular army units, airborne units and Ukrainian special forces.
After establishing contacts near the front lines, Bam’s squad got an overview of the latest developments regarding the Russians and determined what kind of mission they should carry out for the Ukrainians, from reconnaissance of enemy positions to mining.
Offenbecker, the former Marine, also had to organize his combat team spontaneously. He had applied to the International Legion but hadn’t heard from him in about a week. Instead of waiting for the final plans, he told a few family members and close friends, packed his bags and headed to Ukraine.
“I didn’t hear anything, so I just flew… anyway. I figured I’d volunteer and help out in other ways,” Offenbecker said.
Once in Ukraine, he made contacts with the right people to join the international legion and was soon fighting with them in Donbass in eastern Ukraine.
Even then he met some foreign volunteers who had no idea what to expect.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not going to go back and fight.”
“This is my third war I’ve fought and this is by far the worst,” Offenbecker told The Daily Beast. “You’re going to get damned smashed with artillery and tanks. Last week a plane dropped a bomb next to us about 300 meters away. It’s terrible shit.”
When he got there, some of his military friends began sending him messages asking for information on how he could join as well. But he ignored messages for months.
“It was pretty bad to be honest, so I didn’t want to involve anyone,” he said.
The operations were exhausting, said Bramlette. In Iraq or Afghanistan, Bramlette had air support or supported ISR or intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. “The worst day in Afghanistan and Iraq is a great day in Ukraine,” he said. “Even when we thought that wasn’t the case, we were always in control of the situation…unlike commanding a team in Ukraine,” where there are more unknowns.
On reconnaissance missions in Ukraine, you simply have to wait for team members to come back as communication is not reliable. “I would always send out a recon element first…once these guys leave my side, I won’t really hear from them until they’re in sight again. And that can be 24 hours later, maybe 48 hours later,” he explained. “If two of them get hurt… no helicopter comes to get you… shit can go wrong very, very quickly. And that’s the kind of thing that’s pretty difficult.”
As winter rolled around, Bramlette decided to send the members of his small unit home for a break. Their thermal signatures cracked louder than they had in the summer, giving their position away. It was becoming more difficult to stay out of sight of the Russian troops by the day as the foliage cover disappeared. In addition to these problems, the troops’ vehicles kept breaking down and running out of money.
“Because we’re a small-unit tactical team, you run around… in front of the Ukrainian line and in front of the Russian line. The trees are leafless, the bushes are bare, the trees are bare and it’s colder… That’s really bad news, bears,” Bramlette said. “You can’t hide.”
Without drastically changing their approach, they were in danger of failing. “I was just afraid we’d go out there and do what we normally do and we’d basically all die,” he added.
And while the plan was to return in January, Bam couldn’t bring himself to do so once he was able to emerge from the fog of war.
“Coming back in December, it kind of gave me the distance, the space, to reassess everything that had happened, because when I’m in charge of a whole team, you don’t have time to really think about everything,” he says called. “I turned it off a bit, but it gave me the decompression room to reevaluate. And so I came to the conclusion that I’m not going to go back and fight.”
Bam is still working to support the war effort from Kiev through his work for the Weatherman Foundation, which has recently been dedicated to finding and repatriating the remains of Americans killed in action in Ukraine.
Offenbecker is currently working on a move to a new team in the Ukrainian Foreign Legion and plans to continue fighting in Ukraine.
“I look at these children and I have my own child, niece and nephews. If that were the case for them, I would hope that people from all over the world would come and try to keep them safe and secure as well,” Offenbecker said. “It’s what keeps me here.”
But if the world community is not ready to adequately counter Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, Moscow will only continue its territorial expansion course, Bramlette warned.
“If we don’t take our opinion on Russia seriously and don’t stop Russia here, the next step is… Belarus will be incorporated into Russia. Or Moldova will be annexed to Russia. Ukraine will be annexed to Russia,” said Bramlette. “Russia is a rabid dog. The Kremlin must be crushed.”