Global Courant
David Bramlette
In the days up to and including Russian invasion of Ukraine, David Bramlette sat in a classroom in Washington, D.C. discussing whether Russia would theoretically invade Ukraine. He was in the process of earning a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins in international affairs. At the time, he admits that he found the prospect of a Russian invasion implausible.
But when Russia finally pulled the trigger and invaded Ukraine in February Last year, David, who had previously served in the US military as a Green Beret on a counter-Russian mission and as an Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan, felt compelled to fight against the Russians.
“It’s right and wrong in my head,” Bramlette told The Daily Beast in an interview from Kiev this week.
Why did Putin let Prigozhin run away?
“I’m in class, and I’m like, I could sit here and finish college and go work in some office job, and have a small amount of impact on the world by working in some government office, right? ?” said Bramlette. “I have the knowledge and the skills and abilities to help. So I actually took a leave of absence from my master’s program and transferred.”
In early March, Bramlette, who goes by “Bam,” was on his way to Warsaw, Poland to get his bearings before joining the Foreign Legion in Ukraine. As he boarded a plane to Poland, Bam said he sent his parents a quick email explaining why he was going to war for another country.
“I sent my parents an email saying… This is the most just war I think my generation will experience in our lifetime. This is straight up good versus evil,” Bramlette told The Daily Beast. “That’s why I went. I was like, I can’t stand this shit.
Like Bramlette, former Marine Troy Offenbecker was forced to fight against the Russian invasion early in the war. He told The Daily Beast that Russian atrocities against Ukrainians reported in the news were part of the straw that set him up to go to war.
Story continues
“Last March I had seen everything that happened, and when I heard about the International Legion I knew I was coming,” Offenbecker told The Daily Beast in an interview from Kiev. “But at the time I had some commitments that kept me there. It took me two months… I had to sell my house, I sold my vehicles.
Offenbecker spent time preparing, conditioning and getting into better physical shape to fight.
When he saw pictures of mass graves and Ukrainian civilians murdered execution-style in Buchawas Offenbecker furious.
“It really pissed me off that you could do something so innocent,” he said. “It really pissed me off.”
“I have a skillset that I learned, I spent six years in the Marine Corps, I instructed other Marines, I instructed other nations how to fight. I just thought it wouldn’t be good for me to sit at home,” Offenbecker said.
The urge to go for Bramlette was also personal.
In 2014, just two months before Russia illegally annexed it Crimea from Ukraine he arrived to work for the 1st Battalion 10th Special Forces Group in Stuttgart, Germany. When Russia moved in, it was time for him.
“When Crimea happened, all our emphasis was essentially on the defense of Eastern Europe. So my three years in the Special Forces were basically… partner training all over Central and Eastern Europe and also Western Europe,” Bam said. “But I never really felt like we were accomplishing much.”
And while Bramlette has been on combat missions to Iraq and Afghanistan before, there are a slew of military or veterans around the world who prepared to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for whatever reason didn’t come. Of the vets he’s seen in Ukraine, many have felt the pull to fill that gap, Bam said.
“There’s nothing more frustrating than training and training, training all your life for something, or years, and then never really testing your mettle,” he said. “A lot of those guys, that was kind of the vibe.”
Offenbecker shared similar sentiments. “I’ve met some guys where maybe they were here for some purpose, they’ve seen their friends go through war and they never have,” he said.
“Kill as many Russians as you can”
Once in Ukraine, the war preparations in Lviv and Kiev brought a bit of luck and a bit of chaos, Bramlette said.
First, Bramlette was surprised by the number of people who picked up and went to Ukraine to help fight without having any military experience.
“There are a lot of stupid volunteers here who have no business in a war,” he said.
After arriving in Poland in early March 2022, he took a train to Lviv to meet other volunteer fighters. But along the way he found several other foreigners he didn’t want to fight side by side, he said.
“I met three other foreigners on a train. One was a German and he had no military experience. He was a carpenter or something,’ Bramlette said. “He had shot a gun—a little bit. And it was a shotgun.”
Once in Ukraine, Bramlette took in a number of different groups of foreign volunteers, but found that their military background was also missing. He was “equally unhappy with the quality of the foreigners there,” he said.
Ukraine will be the big winner of Prigozhin turning against Putin
A few days later, he joined two other Green Berets to form a multinational team of about 12 people to form a small tactics team or special operations team.
“And then they essentially gave us orders for Kharkiv and said, ‘Go kill as many Russians as you can,'” he said.
After some training and preparation, with rifles and ammunition from Ukraine’s supplies, the squad set out.
“We have already done our own recruitment of foreigners who were already in Kiev. And we did all our own resources, financing, like buying our own cars, financing our own safe houses,” Bam said.
In Kharkiv, their missions were largely self-directed. The Ukrainian government did not pair them with Ukrainian or other foreign volunteer units to coordinate, so they took it upon themselves and introduced themselves to the Territorial Defense Forces, Regular Army Units, Airborne Units, and Ukrainian Special Operations.
After making connections at the front, Bam’s team would be briefed on the latest news about the Russians and determine what kind of mission to perform for the Ukrainians, from reconnaissance of enemy positions to mining.
“Horrible Shit”
Offenbecker, the former Marine, also had to organize his combat team on the spot. He had enlisted in the International Legion, but hadn’t heard from him for about a week. Instead of waiting for final plans, he told a few relatives and close friends, packed his things and went to Ukraine.
“I didn’t hear anything, so I just flew… anyway. I thought I’d volunteer and help in some other way,” Offenbecker said.
Once in Ukraine, he made contact with the right people to join the International Legion and soon fought with them in the Donbas of eastern Ukraine.
Even in those early days, he started seeing some foreign volunteers who had no idea what to expect.
“This is my third war I’ve fought in, and this is by far the worst,” Offenbecker told The Daily Beast. “You will be crushed by artillery, tanks. Last week, a plane dropped a bomb next to us about 300 meters away. It’s horrible shit.”
Once he got there, some of his army buddies started messaging him asking for information on how they could join as well. But he ignored messages for months.
“To be honest, it was pretty bad so I didn’t want to involve anyone else,” he said.
The missions were grueling, Bramlette said. In Iraq or Afghanistan, Bramlette had air support, or supporting 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 it wasn’t, we were always in control of the situation… versus commanding a team in Ukraine,” where there are more unknowns.
On recon missions in Ukraine, you just have to wait for the team members to come back, as communication is not reliable. “I’d always send a recon element first… once those guys leave my side, I don’t really hear from them until they’re in sight again. And that could be 24 hours later, maybe 48 hours later,” he explained. “If two of them get hurt…there isn’t a helicopter coming to get you…it could go south very, very quickly. And things like that are quite difficult.”
“You Can’t Hide”
As winter arrived, Bramlette put out the call for members of his small unit to be sent home for a break. Their thermal signatures popped more than in the summer, betraying their positions. It became harder every day to stay out of sight of the Russian troops as the leafy cover disappeared. In addition to those problems, the squad’s vehicles kept breaking down and they ran out of money.
‘Because we are a small tactics team… you run around… in front of the Ukrainian line and in front of the Russian line. You have no leaves on the trees, the bushes are bare, the trees are bare and it’s colder… It’s really bad news, bears,’ Bramlette said. “You can’t hide.”
Without drastically changing their approach, they were in danger of failure. “I was just afraid that we were going to do what we normally do and we would all die,” he added.
And while the plan was to rejoin in January, Bam couldn’t bring himself to do it once he was removed from the fog of war.
The alternate reality of filthy, rich Russians in Putin’s war
“When I came back in December, it gave me the distance, the space to re-evaluate everything that happened, because when I’m in charge of an entire team, you don’t have time to really think about everything.” said. “I closed off a bit, but it gave me the decompression space to reassess. And so I came to the conclusion that I am not going back to fight.”
Bam is still working to aid the war effort from Kiev through his work for The Weatherman Foundation, which has recently worked to locate and transfer the remains of Americans killed fighting in Ukraine.
Offenbecker is currently transitioning to a new team in the Ukrainian Foreign Legion and has plans to continue fighting in Ukraine.
“I look at these kids, and I have my own child and niece and nephews. If that was a circumstance for them, I would hope that people would come from all over the world to help keep them safe and protected,” Offenbecker said. “That’s what keeps me here.”
But if the world community is not prepared to properly deal with Russian aggression in Ukraine, Moscow will only continue its territorial expansion, Bramlette warned.
“If we don’t take seriously how we think about Russia, and we don’t stop Russia here, then the next step is… Belarus being folded in Russia. Or Moldavia being folded in Russia. Ukraine is collapsing into Russia,” Bramlette said. “Russia is a rabid dog. The Kremlin must be brought down.”
Get the Daily Beast’s biggest scoops and scandals straight to your inbox. Sign up now.
Stay informed and get unlimited access to the Daily Beast’s unparalleled reporting. Subscribe now.
