A US Veteran Perspective from Ukraine

February 21st, 2022 — three days before the Russian invasion — I shared with a men’s group a military.com article about American Veterans training Ukrainian troops. I said I very much wanted to do something like what these Veterans were doing, and I thought maybe there would never be a better time. I had had extensive training in the Army, but I'd never gone somewhere dangerous to do something good with the skills I'd learned; Soldiers will understand that drive. A Ukrainian gentleman in the group encouraged me to come over and help.

Then the invasion came.

I work in the defense industry for a company called Special Tactics. My boss is a retired Sergeant Major from a Tier-1 Special Mission Unit and my division chief is a former 18A Special Forces Officer. I told them I wanted to go to Ukraine for a couple of months, knowing they would work with me on any time off I needed. Since most of my work is remote, I could potentially keep working while in Ukraine, but at the time we weren’t sure if the logistics of that would pan out.

My superiors not only supported me in this, but also connected me as a liaison to The Mozart Group, a fledgling organization run by a few USMC SOF Colonels and staffed by SOF, Infantry, and other Veterans from allied nations across the globe to train Ukrainian troops and extract civilians from areas no other NGO would dare to venture.

I squared away some personal matters and set out in late May for my first deployment. I was to gain experience as an instructor, and see what lessons I could bring back to Special Tactics from this war.

The day of my flight out of Orlando I encountered my first snag. EU bureaucratic requirements regarding COVID vaccines meant the airline employees had to juggle my flights to get me over there legally, but get me there they did. Of course, I still couldn’t fly into Ukraine. I had an overnight layover in England, then I landed in Krakow. Piotr, a Polish reserve police officer working as a taxi driver went above and beyond to help me get on a train to the border. He somehow arranged a steep discount on the ticket price, found volunteers to help me carry my duffels, and even got me a meal at a refugee tent by the train station. The train took me as far as the border, but I had to take another train across to Lviv. Volunteers helped me get a ride without a ticket at the last minute, and more volunteers in Lviv helped me get a ticket to Kyiv in the middle of the night. Somehow I got a small but irksome cut on my hand, and no less than five medical personnel appeared to bandage me up in the Lviv train station. I wondered if they might have been more useful somewhat farther west.

If you’re counting, it took two planes, three trains, a taxi ride, and some shuttle buses to get to my destination.

Wade, a retired USMC SOF Colonel representing The Mozart Group, picked me up from the Kyiv train station. As we drove through the city, I noticed blackened spots on the roads from battle. Concrete barriers, iron hedgehogs, and sandbags were everywhere.

They offered to let me rest the first day I was there, but I jumped in with both feet, joining Andy Milburn (another retired USMC SOF Colonel, and the leader of TMG) and others as we met a unit who was supposedly interested in our training. Strangely, some junior personnel from the unit met us and showed us their shooting range. Andy was annoyed. “We’re not here to see your range. Where is the Commander? We need to talk to him about what training he needs.” It seemed the Commander was occupied with matters more pressing than getting free professional training for his untrained troops.

We left before long. If they wouldn’t take us seriously, we would train someone who would.

And we did. A few days later we were at an outstanding professional training facility near Kyiv, training troops in battlefield medicine, marksmanship, and small unit tactics. The troops were a mix of blooded combat Veterans and fresh civilians. Less than 5% of them had their rifles zeroed, including those who had been to combat multiple times.

A Soldier wearing ATACS camouflage carried a pistol he had taken from a Russian he had killed. Despite my earnest admonition, he insisted he didn’t need hearing protection as we fired rifles on the indoor range.

Over the next two months, we would do a rotation or two near Kyiv, and then a rotation or two in the Donbas. We would stage in Pokrovsk, the farthest east town you could get a hotel room in that area. Sometimes the power or water were turned off, and the windows might be rattled by rockets, but we could sleep there and get chow before and after a day of training troops several miles east of there, close enough to the front that Russian artillery was a real threat. We even cut training short one day when a nearby power plant was hit; some thought a company of Infantry with foreign advisors might make a good target for the Russian drone that would conduct the BDA on the power plant.

My thirty-second birthday fell on the last day of my first four-day training session in the Donbas. To thank us for our help, the 54th Mechanized Infantry Brigade Combat Readiness Officer treated us to a traditional Ukrainian dinner, notably including raw bacon and several kinds of vodka. Ukrainian food is always a gustatory pleasure; I mean that sincerely. Four days later we celebrated another successful training session; this time Russian artillery landed on the other side of the house while we ate, close enough to set off car alarms near us. We continued eating, and we did not die.

While we taught them the basics of SUT, I also sought to learn what lessons I could learn from the experienced Soldiers of this war. One little example is when a Ukrainian Soldier taught us how to boobytrap an AK using its ammunition. The technique involves stacking two rounds so one nose is on the other’s primer, and both are placed so pulling the bolt compresses them to catastrophic effect.

And we weren’t just there to train troops. Our extraction team did extremely dangerous work, going places no one else would go. One day they took 30mm fire close enough to make the most senior combat Veteran, an SAS sniper and medic, particularly nervous.

We all got as far as direct fire range of enemy lines more than once, bringing humanitarian aid to Marynka, a town that has been split by the front lines since 2014. The civilians still living there told us that while other NGOs had been there, none had returned. We were the only ones to keep going back, bringing food, hygiene, and medical care. Some of the people there desperately needed medical attention. It would have been better to take them to a hospital, but at that point they were determined to stay there. A young girl seemed to have grown up there. Maybe 14 years old and she had lived through eight years of war in her little town. We had a New York Times team with us, and their picture of her was published in a series of photos of the war in Ukraine.

This deployment was an unforgettable experience. The closer I got to combat, the more poetry I found in my soul. I found myself writing a poem to the sound of a Kyiv air raid siren at 2 AM. Admiring a butterfly who spent several minutes resting on my hand while I stood during a Donbas training exercise within range of Russian artillery. Feeling stress I hadn’t realized I was carrying dissipate as I drove away from the most dangerous region of the war-torn country.

Did we help win the war? That remains to be seen. Did we save lives? Absolutely. Units trained by The Mozart Group had 70% fewer casualties than units not trained by us, as reported by an interpreter who worked with TMG for a year. The men I served with were all outstanding Soldiers, and I’m glad to stay in touch with them even now.