Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy
Speaker 1: here with tonight's guest journalist Colin Freeman. He is the
Speaker 1: author of The Mad and the Brave, which is a
Speaker 1: book about the Ukrainian foreign legion, that is, the foreigners
Speaker 1: from I mean, he'll tell us, but fifty some odd
Speaker 1: countries that came to Ukraine to help defend the country
Speaker 1: from Putin's invasion, the Russian invasion, mostly you know, starting
Speaker 1: on the twenty two, twenty twenty two full scale invasion
Speaker 1: that began going forward is kind of the context of
Speaker 1: the book. Collins also had an interesting career in his
Speaker 1: own right as a journalist covering various combat zones. So
Speaker 1: thank you Colin for joining us, and thanks for reaching.
Speaker 2: Out, thanks for having me on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I just read the book, the PDF that you
Speaker 1: sent me on. I'm gonna I need to order a
Speaker 1: hard copy for my library. I want to have it
Speaker 1: in my collection. I just finished reading it before we
Speaker 1: started this interview, and it was very, very good. Like
Speaker 1: I was telling you before the show, I wish I
Speaker 1: had written it because it was that good. So, Golan,
Speaker 1: let's start off a little bit with your kind of
Speaker 1: origin story. How did you grow up, Where did you
Speaker 1: grow up and how did that sort of take you
Speaker 1: towards journalism.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I grew up.
Speaker 3: In Edinburgh and Scotland, and I think when I was young,
Speaker 3: I didn't have any interest in anything particular. I didn't
Speaker 3: want to be a banker, didn't want to be a lawyer,
Speaker 3: that kind of thing. I couldn't really work out what
Speaker 3: I wanted to do, and I realized that journalism was
Speaker 3: quite a good profession for people who aren't interested in
Speaker 3: anything in particular, because every day is essentially different. Certainly
Speaker 3: that's the case if you're working on a general current
Speaker 3: affairs newspaper. So after I left school and went to university,
Speaker 3: I think by the end of Uni I decided I
Speaker 3: did that I would I would try and become a journalist.
Speaker 3: I didn't do much at university in terms of journalism.
Speaker 3: I then got a job on a local paper in Grimsby,
Speaker 3: which is a town in the north of England, doing
Speaker 3: very kind of typical local paper stories, court stories, stories
Speaker 3: about animals, stuck up trees, village, village shows, all that
Speaker 3: sort of stuff, you know, the kind of but it's
Speaker 3: a sort of microcosm of the world around us. And
Speaker 3: while it sometimes feels boring at the time, you do
Speaker 3: get to sort of see every side of human life,
Speaker 3: from the you know, life in the courts and the
Speaker 3: kind of darker underbelly of of of of a place,
Speaker 3: to the way the government works at local level, who
Speaker 3: the movers and shakers are, and of course all the
Speaker 3: human interest stories in between.
Speaker 2: It's more that the some of.
Speaker 3: The stories rather than the the individual stories themselves. It's
Speaker 3: a great chance really to just sort of sea life
Speaker 3: up front in all its different shades. Then I moved
Speaker 3: down to London to cut a long story short, and
Speaker 3: worked on a tabloid news agency chasing celebrities around. I've
Speaker 3: been I've been told to get lost by all manner
Speaker 3: of famous British celebrities, and some B list ones as well,
Speaker 3: like the Oasis, the Spice Girls, all these people. I
Speaker 3: think at one point or another I said, no comment,
Speaker 3: please go away to me. Probably did some American ones
Speaker 3: as well, but I didn't get very far. And then
Speaker 3: that that was the kind of stepping stone that tabloid
Speaker 3: stuff to Fleet Street or you know, which is which
Speaker 3: is where our national newspapers the shorthand for our national
Speaker 3: newspapers and it toughens you up a bit, gets you
Speaker 3: used to you know, gives you a bit of a
Speaker 3: thick skin. Then I worked on the London Evening Standard,
Speaker 3: which is kind of like the equivalent of the New
Speaker 3: York Post. I suppose it's London's main, you know, newspaper,
Speaker 3: but it sort of sees itself as a national paper.
Speaker 3: I was there for about four years, but I only
Speaker 3: got so far up the chain. Really, I wasn't one
Speaker 3: of them, you know, their brightest rising stars. And if
Speaker 3: that's the case in a competitive newsroom environment, you tend
Speaker 3: to realize that, you know, you're never going to do
Speaker 3: that well. And when the really big stories happened, such
Speaker 3: as the Iraq War, when it was looming, you realize
Speaker 3: you're not going to be part of the team that's
Speaker 3: going to get sent. And I think it was the
Speaker 3: Iraq War started in March of two thousand and three,
Speaker 3: if I remember correctly, and many as many of your
Speaker 3: listeners will remember that there was quite a kind of
Speaker 3: big roll up to the run up to the war
Speaker 3: where it was pretty clear it was going to happen.
Speaker 3: You know, you have troop deployments to the golf and
Speaker 3: so on. Months in advance under I think at Christmas
Speaker 3: of two thousand and two, about three months before the
Speaker 3: war started, I was on another celebrity doorstep and sitting
Speaker 3: outside some celebrities house waiting for them to comment on
Speaker 3: some story, not even sure if they were there or not.
Speaker 3: I was winging the photographer I was with about how
Speaker 3: the team for the to cover the Iraq War for
Speaker 3: the Standard had already been picked and I wasn't gonna
Speaker 3: be on it, not to any my great surprise, and
Speaker 3: he said, well, look, you know, rather than just sort
Speaker 3: of sitting there bitching, why don't you do and cover
Speaker 3: the war as a freelancer.
Speaker 2: And I still thought, can you do that?
Speaker 3: And it seemed a crazy idea, but it's sort of a
Speaker 3: little light bulb in my head and I thought, well,
Speaker 3: you know, I'll go and try and do it, and
Speaker 3: if nothing else, it will be like a kind of
Speaker 3: a gap year or a backpacking adventure with with with
Speaker 3: a bit of a difference, maybe with a bit more purpose.
Speaker 3: So off I went to Iraq. It seemed like a
Speaker 3: great idea to me. Some of the other people that
Speaker 3: I ran it past thought, no, that's that's absolute bloody madness.
Speaker 3: You know, you don't speak Arabic, you don't have any
Speaker 3: contacts out in Iraq, you don't have any hostile environment
Speaker 3: training and combat experience like that. You've got no work
Speaker 3: lined up, and actually you don't even know where Iraq is,
Speaker 3: which was true. I had to look where it was
Speaker 3: on the map. But anyway, I went out there. I
Speaker 3: pitched up actually on the day the war formal combat
Speaker 3: hostilities actually ended on I think May the first of
Speaker 3: two thousand and three, I the very last day of
Speaker 3: the active war, which is not a great spur to
Speaker 3: have in your cap that they have in your cap
Speaker 3: as a war correspondent, But it turned out to be
Speaker 3: a good time because as we know that, you know,
Speaker 3: the actual invasion atop or Saddam Hussaying went like clockwork.
Speaker 3: It was the it was the occupation afterwards. That was
Speaker 3: the bit that you know, proved that did not go
Speaker 3: to a plan, and that was where the news was really.
Speaker 3: So I was out there for a couple of years
Speaker 3: and that was kind of where I sort of learned
Speaker 3: my trade as a foreign correspondent. From then I became
Speaker 3: got a job on the Daily Telegraph back in London
Speaker 3: on their foreign desk. She foreign correspondent and spent about
Speaker 3: the next ten twelve years covering different big stories around
Speaker 3: the world, principally the Arab Spring, the Somali piracy crisis,
Speaker 3: and of course the rest of the war in Iraq
Speaker 3: and Afghanistan.
Speaker 2: So that was kind of me.
Speaker 3: I then went freelance in twenty sixteen, still doing the
Speaker 3: same sort of stuff really essentially, and then when the
Speaker 3: war in Ukraine started, the Telegraph asked me back as
Speaker 3: an extra pair of hands to go and cover that,
Speaker 3: and so I've been covering that on off for the
Speaker 3: last four years. I was in Kiev when the year
Speaker 3: I was in Ukrain at the start of the war,
Speaker 3: ended up in Kia for most of the first month,
Speaker 3: and that's where I ended up getting the idea for
Speaker 3: the book about the international volunteers. That's me in a nutshell,
Speaker 3: rather large nutshell.
Speaker 1: Just to point out to the listeners kind of the
Speaker 1: life of a freelancer order. I mean, you really are
Speaker 1: just packing sort of like a laptop and a camera
Speaker 1: and a change of clothes and going over there on
Speaker 1: your own. There's no security blanket, there's no nothing, and
Speaker 1: you have to pitch editors and hopefully sell a story.
Speaker 2: Right that that is exactly it.
Speaker 3: Yes, And certainly when I first went to Iraq, I
Speaker 3: didn't find that many editors that keen. Initially I thought
Speaker 3: that was just because they had their own people there.
Speaker 3: It turned out most of them didn't. The most of
Speaker 3: their staff correspondence had pulled out by then. But a
Speaker 3: lot of them were just reluctant to use you because
Speaker 3: they were worried that if something went wrong, as it
Speaker 3: could easily do, they would be, you know, morally.
Speaker 2: If not legally, liable for you.
Speaker 3: And that's not a position that a lot of media
Speaker 3: organizations want to find themselves in. Nobody wants to be
Speaker 3: waking up what no executive wants to be waking up
Speaker 3: to find some freelancer that they gave some vague kind
Speaker 3: of commission to via email suddenly staring out from a
Speaker 3: hostel video That has happened in the past.
Speaker 2: And so that's.
Speaker 3: The perennial problem for freelancers these days, is it is
Speaker 3: finding you know, news organizations are that are willing to
Speaker 3: trust them in war zones. Although you know it's it's
Speaker 3: not surprising because it has come down to a duty
Speaker 3: of care.
Speaker 2: Sometimes.
Speaker 1: I remember a time because I was going back and
Speaker 1: forth to Syria and Iraq during the ISIS war, and
Speaker 1: it was like twenty fourteen or twenty fifteen, it was
Speaker 1: I think it was one of the big ones. It
Speaker 1: was like Reuters or AP or someone. They would take
Speaker 1: copy from freelancers, but not photographs. It's very weird policy
Speaker 1: that they would not accept photojournalism. But if you went
Speaker 1: and wrote a story and submitted it, they would, you know,
Speaker 1: consider it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean they different places have different rules. Some
Speaker 2: places will not take.
Speaker 3: Anything from anybody, yes, because they don't want to be
Speaker 3: seen to be encouraging people. Other places will say, well, look,
Speaker 3: we can't commission you to go, but when you get back,
Speaker 3: when you're back in you're sort of safe and sound
Speaker 3: and assuming you're still alive, we can have a chat then,
Speaker 3: which is slightly having your cake and eating it a
Speaker 3: little bit.
Speaker 2: So you know, it's it's quite a difficult one.
Speaker 3: But we when I was working on the telegraph phone desk,
Speaker 3: we did occasionally get people who were free lancers ringing
Speaker 3: up saying they were often you know, about to deploy
Speaker 3: themselves to somewhere dicey, and we would often try and
Speaker 3: dissuade them. I've generally found the best way of dissuading
Speaker 3: them was to sort of say do you you know,
Speaker 3: do your parents know you're going? And they'd be like, well,
Speaker 3: what's what's that got to do with it? And say, well,
Speaker 3: it's your parents whose numbers will need in case you
Speaker 3: get kidnapped. We also need things like your blood group
Speaker 3: and you know, other information like that. And how will
Speaker 3: they respond if they were were on the phone telling
Speaker 3: them that you've you know, you've not been heard of
Speaker 3: for a week, and that.
Speaker 2: Your face has just appeared at a hostage video.
Speaker 3: I don't think I've had the let on quite as
Speaker 3: thick as that, But when you mentioned things like that,
Speaker 3: that sometimes drives the point home to people in a
Speaker 3: way that they perhaps haven't sort of quite thought about
Speaker 3: it in the past. Yea, I myself was actually kidnapped
Speaker 3: in Somalia back in two thousand and eight while working for.
Speaker 1: The Can you tell us about that?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Sure, I mean that's why I you know this, This
Speaker 3: is a sort of a subject of particular interest to me.
Speaker 3: I was covering the Somali piracy crisis at the time, which, again,
Speaker 3: as many of your listeners will remember, was when Somali
Speaker 3: pirates were sailing out in the Gulf of Aiden, hijacking
Speaker 3: ships and taking the cruise hostage. So yeah, we the
Speaker 3: finder said to me at the time, can you go
Speaker 3: to Somalia to do a bit of reporting on the ground,
Speaker 3: just to get an idea of what the you know,
Speaker 3: what the local people think about the piracy and so
Speaker 3: if we want.
Speaker 2: We went to a town called Bosassa, which.
Speaker 3: Is in the northern region of Somalia called punk Land,
Speaker 3: which is where most of the piracy was taking place
Speaker 3: because it's close to the Gulf of Aidens, So it's
Speaker 3: it's like being the being a spot on the inter
Speaker 3: on the state highway where you can just sail out
Speaker 3: into the sea and you've got you know, hundreds of
Speaker 3: passing ships every day, as most journalists do when they
Speaker 3: go around.
Speaker 2: Indeed most business people and aid workers.
Speaker 3: We use bodyguards that were hired by our fixes, local hires,
Speaker 3: just you know, guys with you know, guys who were
Speaker 3: probably the fixers, cousins or relatives or cousins, friends, whatever,
Speaker 3: with guns. Guys with guns, about seven of them. And
Speaker 3: it's basically a kind of scarecrow. In fact, you're not
Speaker 3: expecting these people to lay their lives down for you,
Speaker 3: but to. You do have to hope that the fixers
Speaker 3: hires ones who are trustworthy. In our case, they were
Speaker 3: not trustworthy. And on the last day, as we were
Speaker 3: driving to the airport, our bodyguards, the guys we were
Speaker 3: paying several hundred bucks to keep us safe every day,
Speaker 3: kidnapped us themselves and drove us off into the mountains.
Speaker 3: I won't go into the full details about it that
Speaker 3: there is a book about it if anyone wants to
Speaker 3: check it out, which tells the story in exhaustive detail.
Speaker 3: But basically we were held in a series of caves
Speaker 3: in the mountains of northern Somalia for about six weeks.
Speaker 3: We weren't we weren't hurt badlier and like that. We
Speaker 3: were threatened a few times, and there was a few
Speaker 3: other thrills and spills. A gunfight in the cave at
Speaker 3: one point with a rival clan, which is not a
Speaker 3: great place to have a gunfight, you know, with all
Speaker 3: those all those stone walls. That's the bullets zigza about
Speaker 3: ricocheting around. But eventually we were released. Our can't go
Speaker 3: the circumstances are released too much. But money was asked for.
Speaker 3: Whether money changed towns, I.
Speaker 2: Don't really know.
Speaker 3: That is quite frequent in that part of the world.
Speaker 3: We were also threatened at one point that when the
Speaker 3: negotiations were not going very well, the pirates happened to
Speaker 3: mention that a British naval vessel had killed a couple
Speaker 3: of pirates and a clan a few hundred miles down
Speaker 3: the road just the week before, and they said, the
Speaker 3: clan that the clan to which those dead pirates belong,
Speaker 3: and there are the cross about that, and they've heard that.
Speaker 3: We've got you, a British journalist hostage up here, and
Speaker 3: they put an a counter offer for you, So if
Speaker 3: your newspaper doesn't pay up, they'd be very keen to
Speaker 3: buy you, just to sort of have a little word
Speaker 3: about those pirates that your navy killed. And I remember thinking,
Speaker 3: Jesus Christ, you know, it's the first time the Royal
Speaker 3: Navy has killed anyone in about three hundred years, and
Speaker 3: it happens to be the same bloody week that I'm
Speaker 3: stuck with a bunch of pirates in Somalia.
Speaker 2: So yeah, it was. It was.
Speaker 3: It was not a pleasant experience, but it was it
Speaker 3: was manageable, and it has sort of taught me, you know,
Speaker 3: the sort of that it's fairly important to be careful
Speaker 3: when you get deployed abroad, although realistically these days kidnapping
Speaker 3: is a is a threat that can you know lots
Speaker 3: of journalists I know I've had it happened to, including
Speaker 3: quite a few in Iraq, where the consequences could be
Speaker 3: a lot more serious. You know, we had religious kidnappings
Speaker 3: that led to beheadings as well.
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Speaker 1: I was gonna say, like, one of the things I've
Speaker 1: been told about the kidnappings and Somalia is that they're
Speaker 1: not going to hurt you. Like that's not what it's about.
Speaker 1: It's all about a value transaction that they want to
Speaker 1: take place.
Speaker 2: That is generally the case.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they actually, I think it's almost fair to
Speaker 3: say that they specialize in being they trying to be
Speaker 3: fairly honest brokers in that sense, because and to honor deals,
Speaker 3: because you know, there is a sense among a lot
Speaker 3: of you know, a lot of Western firms, if they
Speaker 3: get somebody kidnapped in Somari, they would sort of assume
Speaker 3: that the people doing the kidnapping would be bad faith actors,
Speaker 3: and that offering them roundsom money would simply be chucking
Speaker 3: good money after bad and making a bad situation worse,
Speaker 3: and that there'll be no reason that these people in
Speaker 3: this lawless part of the world would honor their deal.
Speaker 3: In actual fact, I think they do have a reputation
Speaker 3: for once a deal is struck, it usually goes through.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: And as you say, there's not much relative to the
Speaker 3: numbers of people who've been taken by pirates, there's not
Speaker 3: been many cases where there as people have not come
Speaker 3: home alive as long as money has been forthcoming, whereas
Speaker 3: in Iraq or Syria, you know, you saw the majority
Speaker 3: of those many of those cases would end up with
Speaker 3: somebody being beheaded, And there was a school of thought
Speaker 3: that says that these were not the kidnappings at all.
Speaker 3: They were more what you watched someone was reading described
Speaker 3: as deferred homicides. You catch somebody, you intent that killed them,
Speaker 3: but you make out like it's going to be you
Speaker 3: want some political concession, which you know, you know is
Speaker 3: never going to be offered. For example, US troops being
Speaker 3: pulled out of Iraq was a common one.
Speaker 2: During that time.
Speaker 1: And then how did you get interested or get sent
Speaker 1: to cover the war in Ukraine? How did that first
Speaker 1: come about?
Speaker 2: So?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was a jobbing freelancer for the telegraph, you know,
Speaker 3: mainly for the foreigners, So whenever they needed an extra pair.
Speaker 2: Of hands on someone, I was there. And the Ukraine
Speaker 2: War was obviously one of those cases.
Speaker 3: And if you catch your mind back, you remember that
Speaker 3: the war, You know, there was quite a lot of
Speaker 3: pre indicators that the war was going to happen. Put
Speaker 3: In doing this enormous troops throughout the new year of
Speaker 3: twenty twenty two, and it became fairly obvious that he
Speaker 3: was gonna make some key decision about it. Around the
Speaker 3: last week of the last week of February of twenty
Speaker 3: twenty twenty twenty twenty two. We all have the telegraph
Speaker 3: already had a couple of people in Kiev, and one
Speaker 3: team in Kiev and one team in the east of Ukraine.
Speaker 3: They're in anticipation that the invasion would start. And initially
Speaker 3: they said to me, can you go to Leviv in
Speaker 3: the west of Ukraine, just to be there as an
Speaker 3: extra pair of hands if you know, if much.
Speaker 2: Happens or whatever.
Speaker 3: But we don't really think it will, you know, we
Speaker 3: don't improve into that daft, so neither did I, of course,
Speaker 3: so I flew in on what I think was the
Speaker 3: very last flight from the Viv on February the twenty
Speaker 3: third of twenty twenty two.
Speaker 2: The war, of course started on the twenty fourth.
Speaker 3: Got to the hotel, had a couple of beers, went
Speaker 3: about thinking, and yeah, it's going to be a couple
Speaker 3: of weeks watching covering what we call the diplomatic climb
Speaker 3: down story in the media, where it's like, you know,
Speaker 3: there's been a big build up, lots of saber rattling,
Speaker 3: and then Putin decides not to do much in the
Speaker 3: end and maybe send a few more tanks into bits
Speaker 3: of the down Bass of the already occupied.
Speaker 2: Or something like that.
Speaker 3: Then a few hours later, I'm sort of woken up
Speaker 3: by florries of WhatsApp messages from colleagues in key Evan
Speaker 3: elsewhere saying the war has started.
Speaker 2: You know, all hell is breaking loose, and yeah.
Speaker 3: So that was that, And so the first week was
Speaker 3: was you know, it was a bit frightening because I
Speaker 3: had never I'd covered wars in Africa in the Middle
Speaker 3: East a bit before, but you know that this.
Speaker 2: Was kind of like grown up warfare.
Speaker 3: This is, you know, that the world's second superpower, and
Speaker 3: also it's of Vladimir Putin's It's not more than the
Speaker 3: nice guys. And you know, nobody really had any idea
Speaker 3: of what kind of things he was capable of. As
Speaker 3: we now know, you know, he's barely capable of invading
Speaker 3: the Dawn Bass, let alone, Kiev or anywhere else. But
Speaker 3: at that time, you were, you know, you were expecting
Speaker 3: Russian paratroopers to land in the Viva at any moment
Speaker 3: you were.
Speaker 2: I was worried the border might be sealed.
Speaker 3: I was thinking, like, you know, if if all hell
Speaker 3: breaks lose, can I walk from the Viv back to Poland.
Speaker 2: It's only seventy miles or something. So yeah, it was.
Speaker 3: It was quite so that that first week was was
Speaker 3: quite scary. It was it was difficulty sleeping and so on,
Speaker 3: and also you're very adrenalized just from having to you know,
Speaker 3: do the job as well the daily reporting. Then on
Speaker 3: about day five I had I was, you know, I
Speaker 3: was tasked with replacing the team in Kiev that we
Speaker 3: had who'd already been there for a month. They both
Speaker 3: had COVID and you know that they weren't feeling match
Speaker 3: fit for what could be, you know, an unending siege potentially.
Speaker 3: So I was kind of thinking, well, after we get
Speaker 3: into the Kiv, all the cars are driving the other way,
Speaker 3: the higher cars shut place in the Vivas has been shot,
Speaker 3: you know, and nobody in their right mind is driving
Speaker 3: down that motorway. And I was kind of despairing. And
Speaker 3: then sudden somebody said, well, why don't you take the train?
Speaker 3: I said, what do you mean the train, thinking like
Speaker 3: all the trains would have stopped ages ago. They pointed
Speaker 3: out that the trains were every day there were disgorging,
Speaker 3: you know, large numbers of refugees at the at the
Speaker 3: border with Poland, and obviously those trains came back empty
Speaker 3: and so you could just jump on one of them,
Speaker 3: and it was it was one of the strangest train
Speaker 3: journeys I've ever done.
Speaker 2: You know, it's just almost a completely.
Speaker 3: Empty train, me and one or one or two other
Speaker 3: a few other Ukrainians and I think of for Italian,
Speaker 3: an Italian photographer who was told by the steward not
Speaker 3: to take to take his feet off the seat. So
Speaker 3: there's still maintaining standards the Ukrainian train service. As we
Speaker 3: got into Kiv and then covered the you know, the
Speaker 3: the Siege of Kia for the next the next five
Speaker 3: weeks or so, by which time it was already showing
Speaker 3: signs of petering out.
Speaker 1: This is when they were trying to capture the airfield
Speaker 1: and there were assassination at tams.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yes, the majority.
Speaker 3: I mean, there was a lot of fear of Russian
Speaker 3: saboteurs wandering the streets in the first few days, and
Speaker 3: the Ukrainian troops, although pretty professional most of the time,
Speaker 3: were quite jumpy. Those sabatarres are either were rounded up
Speaker 3: or proved to be nothing more than the rumor. After
Speaker 3: about a week.
Speaker 2: Or yours.
Speaker 3: The Russians pushing into Urpin and Butcher in the northwest
Speaker 3: that was the main focus of their assault. Also an
Speaker 3: area called Brivery in the east, so that the combat
Speaker 3: itself was limited to certain areas. But I mean Kiev
Speaker 3: at that point certainly felt very much like you know,
Speaker 3: a city under under siege. You had, you know, missiles
Speaker 3: coming in quite regularly in the mornings, and also just
Speaker 3: the streets were almost completely deserted at that time, far
Speaker 3: far quieter than they are now, and you know, there
Speaker 3: was just signs of the of things kind of fraying
Speaker 3: at the edges. Lots of spots on street corners were
Speaker 3: or streets where cars had crashed just because people were
Speaker 3: driving in a panic. Quite a lot of mentally unstable
Speaker 3: people out on the streets who primarily people whose medical
Speaker 3: who are on medication of one sort or another or
Speaker 3: otherwise unable to care for themselves, who've been left basically
Speaker 3: to defend for themselves, and who you know, running out
Speaker 3: of appropriate medication. Yeah, just quite a few signs that
Speaker 3: you know, the sort of the place was buckling. But
Speaker 3: as as time went on, it you know, things sort
Speaker 3: of you know got back together, back back to normal again,
Speaker 3: and you know, shops were open, cafes were open, and
Speaker 3: we saw Ukrainians rallying around in the way that you
Speaker 3: know he's now. You know, they're not very famous for
Speaker 3: around the world.
Speaker 1: When was the first time you came in contact with
Speaker 1: a foreigner that was fighting over there.
Speaker 3: Well, Zelensky announced the creation of the International Legion on
Speaker 3: about day three of the war from his bunker in
Speaker 3: the center of Kiev, a time when you know, all
Speaker 3: rather rather grim for Kiev, and everybody was expecting that,
Speaker 3: you know, if if the regually, if the Zelenski's government
Speaker 3: didn't collapse within seventy two hours in three days, it
Speaker 3: would be you know, within three weeks or three months
Speaker 3: or whatever. And he framed it very much as an
Speaker 3: appeal in the wider world. He said that anyone who,
Speaker 3: anyone ouse out there has got military skills and wants
Speaker 3: to come and fight for Ukraine, fight, I'm forming an
Speaker 3: international legion. It will be for those who want to
Speaker 3: fight for democracy, freedom, human rights, not just for Ukraine.
Speaker 2: But for Europe and for the whole of the world.
Speaker 3: It's a very you know, romantic appeal really and you know,
Speaker 3: you know, echoing the spirit of the the International Brigade
Speaker 3: in Spain during the Spanish Civil War in the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 3: when volunteers around the world flocked to fight to help
Speaker 3: the Republican government that democratically elected left wing Republican government
Speaker 3: in Spain fight off Franco's fascists. And you know, so,
Speaker 3: you know, has since been regarded very much as you know,
Speaker 3: a dry run for World War two. And yeah, so
Speaker 3: that's what he said, And within I think a couple
Speaker 3: of weeks, you know, the Ukrainian government said they've had
Speaker 3: something like twenty thousand email twenty thousand applications to join
Speaker 3: the new International Legion. I think majority of that by
Speaker 3: what they meant that was the twenty thousand emailed expressions
Speaker 3: of interest, but it was still a significant number. I
Speaker 3: think the first ones I met, I didn't actually meet
Speaker 3: them physically because a lot of them wanted to keep
Speaker 3: themselves fairly low profile because they were worried about getting
Speaker 3: tracked by the Russians, and sometimes one didn't want people
Speaker 3: to know at home that they were there, because not
Speaker 3: all of them had actually told them their families that
Speaker 3: they were going.
Speaker 2: You know, I spoke to a few on the phone.
Speaker 3: A lot of them were ex British soldiers, mainly people
Speaker 3: who were younger actually, and I think quite a lot
Speaker 3: who had missed out on the Iraqi Afghanistan and who
Speaker 3: saw this as a as a chance to put their
Speaker 3: skills to the test. And in that sense, soldiering is
Speaker 3: a pretty unique profession because you can spend your life
Speaker 3: training in soldiering and never get your skills. You know,
Speaker 3: the chance to put your skills to the test is
Speaker 3: like being a surgeon who never operates, foreign correspondent who
Speaker 3: never goes to cover the war, that sort of thing,
Speaker 3: you know. So there was a strong that there was
Speaker 3: a strong element of that people wanted to see with
Speaker 3: their skills were up to it. There were also more seasoned,
Speaker 3: you know, combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who wanted
Speaker 3: to see what it was like to fight a peer army,
Speaker 3: you know where you know, it would be the Russians
Speaker 3: this time, rather than coalition forces that held all the aces.
Speaker 3: So that there was that element, and then there was
Speaker 3: also just quite a lot of people who had never
Speaker 3: fought before, or if they did have military experience, you know,
Speaker 3: what was limited to you know, driving trucks in in
Speaker 3: logistics squadrons.
Speaker 2: And things like that.
Speaker 3: Who you know who again wanted you know, wanted to
Speaker 3: see what combat was like. And I think it would
Speaker 3: be fair to say for most of them, if not
Speaker 3: all of them, that was also just drawn by the cause.
Speaker 2: You know, this was a.
Speaker 3: Pretty unique war in the you know, for the first
Speaker 3: time since World War Two, really it felt like a
Speaker 3: just war with a clear body and a clear goody
Speaker 3: in Zelenski and with with echoes of the land grab
Speaker 3: that hit the Maid that started World War Two when
Speaker 3: he invaded Poland and the Czech Republic. A lot of
Speaker 3: people saying like, you know, I don't really want to
Speaker 3: come and fight, particularly, but I feel it's my duty
Speaker 3: as a soldier and someone with someone with with the
Speaker 3: relevant military skills. I'm gonna feel shit if I stay
Speaker 3: at home in London or New York or anywhere while
Speaker 3: there are Ukrainians out there fighting and dying. Partly because
Speaker 3: we know that this may, this may only, this may
Speaker 3: be the start of a bigger operation against other parts
Speaker 3: of Europe. And also it's if he succeeds, if he's
Speaker 3: not opposed, it will be the end of the the
Speaker 3: you know, the rules based order as we know it,
Speaker 3: and as a as a military equipped individual, I feel.
Speaker 2: It's my job to go out there.
Speaker 3: So those were the kind of motivations that were involved,
Speaker 3: although for a lot of them, you know, there were
Speaker 3: other factors, personal factors as well. A lot of them had,
Speaker 3: you know, civilian lives that they weren't particularly enjoying jobs
Speaker 3: that they found on fulfilling personal lives.
Speaker 2: That's you know, marriages that were sometimes on the rocks.
Speaker 3: A few people, you know, were on the run from
Speaker 3: the law or had been in trouble with the law
Speaker 3: in the past and wanted to kind of wipe the
Speaker 3: slate clean, which is something you also noticed with you know,
Speaker 3: people who went out to fight for ISIS as jihadists.
Speaker 3: That's the thing, you know, the sense of I've not
Speaker 3: led a decent life. Well, I've led a bad life.
Speaker 3: This is the chance for me to kind of try
Speaker 3: and you know, rectify that a bit. So you have
Speaker 3: a wide range, a very colorful range of people's science
Speaker 3: joining up, and that was one of the reasons I
Speaker 3: wanted to write the book.
Speaker 2: Really, it's it's.
Speaker 3: Partly an account of the combat that they faced and
Speaker 3: their experiences on the front line.
Speaker 2: That is obviously primarily what it is.
Speaker 3: It also tries to be narrative of the first three
Speaker 3: years of the war, so you get that as a
Speaker 3: kind of thrown in for free, as it were if
Speaker 3: you read the book. But it's also trying to describe
Speaker 3: what the you know what why these people go out there,
Speaker 3: and what it is about life in their home countries
Speaker 3: in America or the UK that they feel is lacking,
Speaker 3: you know, in their own you know, and that for
Speaker 3: quite a few of them, I think that there's what
Speaker 3: I would call the sort of fight club element to it,
Speaker 3: as in the film The Book starring Brad Pitt, where
Speaker 3: you have a generation of men brought up these days
Speaker 3: in the United States and certainly in Britain, where they've
Speaker 3: known you know, the countries have known peace really for
Speaker 3: largely for more or less for eighty years, and they
Speaker 3: don't really feel like there's you know, many existential challenges
Speaker 3: left in life, that life is too too molly coddle,
Speaker 3: too soft, and they want to know whether they can
Speaker 3: face up to the kind of hardships their forefathers faced
Speaker 3: in World War two or World War One. You know,
Speaker 3: they've seen it in you know, programs like uh oh,
Speaker 3: what's it called the.
Speaker 2: Sorry my mom is the brothers?
Speaker 3: Yet you know they you know they've they've got relatives
Speaker 3: who you know, fought in that war in World War two,
Speaker 3: or they might have vote. In America's case, well it
Speaker 3: was in Vietnam, and it's not a sense of what's
Speaker 3: it like to fight in.
Speaker 2: A real, a proper grown up war. Can I handle it?
Speaker 2: Here's a chance.
Speaker 1: There was a very motley crew that showed up for
Speaker 1: this international legion Especially, it sounds like early on in
Speaker 1: the war and you have a chapter you talk about
Speaker 1: the screamers. I think you guys call them waltz. You know,
Speaker 1: people are presenting to be someone they're not. And then
Speaker 1: there's this ballistic missile strike that kind of separated the
Speaker 1: wheat from the cheft.
Speaker 3: It sounded like, yeah, uh so that when the legionnaires
Speaker 3: first came across the border, a lot of them were
Speaker 3: told to deploy or sorry to to go to a
Speaker 3: base at a place called Yavarev near the Polish border.
Speaker 2: It's actually a base that was used prior to the
Speaker 2: war by as a kind of native training base.
Speaker 3: And you know, so there's I think there's probably about
Speaker 3: a couple of thousand of them pitched up there at
Speaker 3: the at the beginning of the war, all sort of
Speaker 3: sitting there waiting, you know, for orders, waiting to get
Speaker 3: trained up. And yes, as you say, some of them
Speaker 3: were you know, fairly competent volunteers with proven military records,
Speaker 3: and some of them were not. You had quite a
Speaker 3: lot of watermittees, I fantasists.
Speaker 2: You had quite a.
Speaker 3: Lot who so called screamers, I people who had no
Speaker 3: military training at all, but who bullshited a lot that
Speaker 3: they had you know, previous records as you know, Navy
Speaker 3: Seals or Delta Force or sas. And then who would
Speaker 3: go up run off screaming the moment they action started.
Speaker 3: And yeah, I mean according to some of the volunteers
Speaker 3: I spoke to for the book, you could kind of
Speaker 3: see these fantasists a mile off, you know that they
Speaker 3: all wore kind of berets and cat badges that had
Speaker 3: you know, insignias that you know, nobody actually seen before,
Speaker 3: and they would often talk about, you know, various missions
Speaker 3: they'd been on, you know, inevitably with the CIA Delta
Speaker 3: Force works a bit like I can't really talk about
Speaker 3: it too much, but it was, you know, it was
Speaker 3: real harsh hush stuff. But you know, and you sort
Speaker 3: of think, well, it was that harsh shush, why why
Speaker 3: is it not classified? You know what, why are you
Speaker 3: even mentioning it?
Speaker 2: So that there was there was, there was.
Speaker 3: There was quite a lot of those sorts of people,
Speaker 3: and it was a big worry for the more regular
Speaker 3: competent legionnaires to see these people having turned up because
Speaker 3: the Ukrainian military authorities didn't really have any means of
Speaker 3: vetting people at that particular point. Because you know, if
Speaker 3: you've got normally, when you go to warrior fighting alongside
Speaker 3: other guys you've been with for years and years, you've
Speaker 3: trained alongside, you know their strengths, you know their weaknesses.
Speaker 3: Here you're being lined up to fight along with a
Speaker 3: whole load of people who are tilting strangers anyway, some
Speaker 3: of whom seem like complete wat jobs. And then yeah,
Speaker 3: the other the other problem with a lot of these
Speaker 3: people was that they had no sort of sense of
Speaker 3: you know, secure secure comms at all, no, you know,
Speaker 3: no situational awareness. They'd be posting TikTok videos of them
Speaker 3: sort of saying yo hanging here at Yavarev or whatever,
Speaker 3: and sending all kinds of you know, messages to you
Speaker 3: know on the social media saying where they were, and
Speaker 3: yeah about about on about March the fourteenth, I think
Speaker 3: it was or something. One night at that particular base,
Speaker 3: the rush Is hit it with a series of missiles,
Speaker 3: hypersonic missiles, big ones, and you know, they clearly identified
Speaker 3: this place as a as a haunt of international legionnaires.
Speaker 3: By some miracle, I think only one legionaire if that
Speaker 3: was killed. A large number of Ukrainians were killed in
Speaker 3: a in a neighboring barracks. But as a result of that,
Speaker 3: a lot of the it was something of a wake
Speaker 3: up call. A lot of the legionnaires then decided and
Speaker 3: actually I don't really fancy this.
Speaker 2: I feel a bit out my league. And it was widely.
Speaker 3: Presumed that the reason the Russians had managed to hit
Speaker 3: this place was because there was so much digital traffic
Speaker 3: on the internet that they you know, they've been able
Speaker 3: to easily pinpoint where it was all the foreigners mobile
Speaker 3: phones and so on. Personally, I think they could have
Speaker 3: probably worked it out anyway, just because it was a
Speaker 3: it was an obvious place for all the foreigners to
Speaker 3: go to. But certainly yes, as you say that, that
Speaker 3: kind of slightly sort of sifted the week from the chaff.
Speaker 3: A lot of people left deciding, you know, that this
Speaker 3: was not for them, but you know, probably unbalance more.
Speaker 2: Of them stayed. But that was certainly very much a
Speaker 2: kind of a baptism of fire for a lot of them.
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Speaker 2: Thank you everyone.
Speaker 1: You profile a lot of these foreign fighters that came
Speaker 1: over there. Some of them were professional soldiers, served in
Speaker 1: the Paros. One of the one guy with a Sandhurst
Speaker 1: graduate as I recall. But then there's also like another
Speaker 1: guy who was like grew up on a farm in
Speaker 1: Scotland and just wanted to get it on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that was Douglas Cartner who was Yeah, he
Speaker 3: had no military experience at all. I think he wanted
Speaker 3: to join the US Marine, wanted to join the Royal
Speaker 3: Marines or the commandos when he was when he was
Speaker 3: a kid. But he'd he'd you know, had a problem
Speaker 3: with a shoulder or something like that during the qualification process,
Speaker 3: so that had kind of ruined his dream of joining
Speaker 3: the military. He became a tractor engineer instead, had a
Speaker 3: perfectly happy life, but he always felt there was something missing.
Speaker 3: And I think, you know, normally, if you were a
Speaker 3: twenty something in the UK and you want, you know,
Speaker 3: thrills and kicks, you you go off, maybe have a
Speaker 3: gap year around the world, travel to Asia and India
Speaker 3: and the Far East, that sort of thing. But if
Speaker 3: you've set your heart on being a commander or a
Speaker 3: member of the ESAs, that's not really going to be
Speaker 3: much of a substitute. So yeah, when the war came along,
Speaker 3: he's just sort of thought, shall I do it?
Speaker 2: You know, why not? This is my this is my
Speaker 2: one and only chance. And off he went.
Speaker 3: Yeah, undeterred by the fact that, you know, he didn't
Speaker 3: have any military experience, undeterred by the fact that the
Speaker 3: Ukrainian embassy had told him no, might just just stay
Speaker 3: at home and you know, do a bit of charity
Speaker 3: work back in the.
Speaker 2: UK if you want.
Speaker 3: Undeterred by the fact that his parents said to him,
Speaker 3: you know, your bloody daft, you know you'll get killed,
Speaker 3: and you know.
Speaker 2: In finness to him, he played it fairly, fairly carefully.
Speaker 3: He started out with just a volunteer humanitarian unit, getting
Speaker 3: getting to know that the ropes, getting to know the
Speaker 3: ground in Ukraine a bit, then moved to a some
Speaker 3: sort of medical unit where they had an number of
Speaker 3: soldiers or ex soldiers who were doing sort of humanitarian
Speaker 3: medical work a bit close to the front lines, and
Speaker 3: then from there eventually moved to a sort of medical
Speaker 3: unit that was a combat unit of some sort of
Speaker 3: I remember rightly. And yeah, eventually, you know, a few
Speaker 3: months in, found himself heading towards the front lines, you know,
Speaker 3: ready for combat with a with with the Ukrainian legion
Speaker 3: that took a large number of foreigners. And yeah, we're
Speaker 3: sort of trying to describe what it's like for him
Speaker 3: when he when he's sort of first heads into combat,
Speaker 3: is with all this all this sort of other piles,
Speaker 3: many of whom are likewise rookies, and there's a sort
Speaker 3: of sense of like, you know, finally we've got the
Speaker 3: chance to get here. We're sort of dreading it and
Speaker 3: yet we're longing for it at the same time.
Speaker 2: Then he gets to the.
Speaker 3: To the to the base or the trenches where you
Speaker 3: know where he's going to be based, and he's kind
Speaker 3: of expecting to get to right, you go over there,
Speaker 3: you point your gun there, and you know all that,
Speaker 3: and he's just left on his own in a trench,
Speaker 3: you know, not knowing what to do with this machine gun,
Speaker 3: a p k M, which is like a big belt
Speaker 3: fed thing, a bit like a general purpose machine gun
Speaker 3: that he's been trained on, but he has no idea
Speaker 3: where the front line is, you know which direction it is.
Speaker 3: And then out the blue, several soldiers start walking towards him.
Speaker 3: Because of the light at that time of day, because
Speaker 3: he was in some in some woods, you couldn't see
Speaker 3: whether they were Russians or Ukrainians, but they were. They
Speaker 3: were more wondering, you know, with their guns in a
Speaker 3: sort of in a manner that you know, didn't look
Speaker 3: terribly relaxed, looked like they meant business. And so he
Speaker 3: starts thinking, right, that was my guys are they're the enemy.
Speaker 3: And as they get nearer and near, he's some things
Speaker 3: were like I'm gonna have to do something. You know
Speaker 3: I'm gonna have to shoot if these guys are Russian soldiers,
Speaker 3: because the moment they see me here my trench, you
Speaker 3: know they're going to start shooting. So they get closer
Speaker 3: and closer. He's hoping they'll, you know, where, you'll be
Speaker 3: able to work out who they are. Eventually he's on
Speaker 3: the point of firing a warning burst over their heads,
Speaker 3: which I think would almost certainly have led to them
Speaker 3: firing back when one of them waved at him and said, ah, yeah,
Speaker 3: how are you doing in English or something, and you know,
Speaker 3: he's sort of like described sort of wiping the sweat
Speaker 3: off his brow and sort of pulling his hand off
Speaker 3: the trigger grip, which is kind of, you know, just
Speaker 3: about shaking by that time. And it turns out to
Speaker 3: be the guy who's going to be command, his new commander,
Speaker 3: who basically just almost wiped out that very first but
Speaker 3: you know, that very first.
Speaker 2: Day, simply because nobody had told him which direction the
Speaker 2: point is gone in.
Speaker 3: I'll mention that because it's sort of symptomatic of the
Speaker 3: kind of unexpected chaos you governed the Ukrainian flunt lines.
Speaker 3: People imagine that it's going to be a nice straight
Speaker 3: line it's not Neander's in and out like a river,
Speaker 3: and it changes within the hours, and quite often people
Speaker 3: don't really know whether they're sort of, you know, the
Speaker 3: Russians are ahead of them, or perhaps a little bit
Speaker 3: beside them or behind them or or whatever.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, that was I think it's something of a
Speaker 2: baptism of fire for him. Definitely.
Speaker 1: Another interesting person you profile on the book is a
Speaker 1: Vietnamese American military veteran. Can you tell us about him?
Speaker 1: He had a very unique story.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think his name a while since I've reread
Speaker 3: the book, but I think his name was Hugh Lee.
Speaker 3: And yeah, he was a Vietnamese American. His family had
Speaker 3: come over at the end of the Vietnam War to
Speaker 3: the US. He you know, was very much of the
Speaker 3: opinion that America had given his family a decent life
Speaker 3: and that you know, when when when other when other
Speaker 3: parts of the world suffered, you know, suffered military aggression,
Speaker 3: that you know, he had a duty to help them,
Speaker 3: just as he'd been helped or his family had been helped.
Speaker 3: So at the time, he was running a restaurant in Columbia,
Speaker 3: of all places, having retired from the US Marines, and
Speaker 3: he'd served in Afghanistan as a command center sort of
Speaker 3: technical operator more than a frontline soldier. But you know,
Speaker 3: he'd still done US Marines training. He was a capable
Speaker 3: and competent operator, but you know, he wouldn't call himself
Speaker 3: any kind of you know, rambow infantry kind of guy.
Speaker 3: You know, didn't sort of over sell his skills. Anyway,
Speaker 3: he decided to go out.
Speaker 2: I think he was.
Speaker 3: Similar to a lot of the American soldiers out who
Speaker 3: volunteered for Ukraine in that he having served in Afghanistan,
Speaker 3: he had been quite disappointed by the pullout in twenty
Speaker 3: twenty one of US sportsters from Afghanistan, by the collapse
Speaker 3: of the Afghan army, and that had made him feel like,
Speaker 3: you know, we spent twenty years there, all that blood
Speaker 3: and treasure invested, and yet you know, when it came
Speaker 3: to the moment we pulled out, the Afghan Army collapsed,
Speaker 3: and was what was the point of supporting these people.
Speaker 3: I know the story is more complicated than that, as
Speaker 3: does he, but that that was the kind of the
Speaker 3: you know, the rough headline, and one of the things
Speaker 3: he felt. And he saw the Ukrainians though, you know,
Speaker 3: actually fighting tooth and nail against the Russians, and he
Speaker 3: sort of thought, yeah, that these people are worth fighting,
Speaker 3: these people are worth supporting because they're fighting on their
Speaker 3: own accord, that they're not even you know, asking us
Speaker 3: to come in officially, you know, and that they're worth
Speaker 3: helping and there'll be a useful future ally for America
Speaker 3: in the future.
Speaker 2: So off he went.
Speaker 3: Hugh did not have a good experience, and he was
Speaker 3: at Yavarev when the missiles landed, but he didn't let
Speaker 3: that deter them. However, he didn't he didn't have a
Speaker 3: very pleasant time with the with the legionnaires when he
Speaker 3: just met them. He's described bumping into a bunch of
Speaker 3: guys who he uh, who he summed up a Special
Speaker 3: Forces washouts, basically sort of very muscly, rambo rambo looking
Speaker 3: guys who he reckoned were sort of high on steroids
Speaker 3: or something, who were quite aggressive and dismissive of him.
Speaker 3: And again, you know, just that feeling like I don't
Speaker 3: want to be stuck in the trench with these guys.
Speaker 3: I'll feel more scared of them than the Russians. And
Speaker 3: then also on his his very first deployment, he was
Speaker 3: said to erpen in the north, the northwest suburb of
Speaker 3: Kiev where the Russians were pushing in. During that first
Speaker 3: month in Kiev, his first assignment was to was to
Speaker 3: pick up a corpse from behind enemy lines. A Georgian
Speaker 3: fighter is a fighter from the from the volunteer from
Speaker 3: the the ex Soviet state of Georgia who'd been killed.
Speaker 3: And him, Hugh and several other about a dozen other
Speaker 3: guys went through through the combats area to actually pick
Speaker 3: this this guy's body up, the Georgian's body up. He
Speaker 3: was a big, heavy guy, fifteen stone maybe, and they
Speaker 3: spent the next seven hours stretching him back through the
Speaker 3: enemy lines, through you know, mortar fire and and you know,
Speaker 3: potential sniper areas and potential minefields, back to you know,
Speaker 3: back back to the rear with lines, the Ukrainian lines.
Speaker 3: And I don't think it was so much the you know,
Speaker 3: the actual threat of you know, the the threat of
Speaker 3: armed danger, but the actual weight of the corpse was
Speaker 3: was made it really really hard.
Speaker 2: They only had a kind of.
Speaker 3: They had a soft stretch of one of those ones
Speaker 3: who wait that you can like almost like a tar paul,
Speaker 3: and with handles that used primarily for getting people out
Speaker 3: of the buildings, which which are more flexible, which but
Speaker 3: which make the actual task of carrying somebody far harder.
Speaker 3: And they said, you know, every one hundred yards or so,
Speaker 3: he was getting exhausted, and they were also kept dropping
Speaker 3: the guy, which didn't feel very respectful. And then by
Speaker 3: by the time he got back to the end, back
Speaker 3: to the Ukrainian lines, he was exhausted. He felt totally
Speaker 3: somewhat out of shape for what he was being tasked
Speaker 3: to do, as well somewhat rattled by, you know, his
Speaker 3: experiences with these other legionnaires early on, and he just
Speaker 3: burst into tears and he just realized, I cannot cope
Speaker 3: with us.
Speaker 2: And as a result of that, he then went home.
Speaker 2: And I mentioned that case in the book.
Speaker 3: I think just partly just sort of show that not
Speaker 3: everybody emerges a hero out of these things. Are not
Speaker 3: a hero in a conventional sense. You know, Hugh did
Speaker 3: still do his bit, he just decided it wasn't for him.
Speaker 3: But also just I think to sort of show to
Speaker 3: people that, you know, wartime experiences, as with Douglas Cartner,
Speaker 3: you know, the guy who you know was told which
Speaker 3: direction the fire is gone, and wartime experience is never
Speaker 3: going to be what you expect them. You know, he
Speaker 3: was expecting to be there in a trench fire and
Speaker 3: a gun and in steadies humph, and of guy's body
Speaker 3: for seven miles, you know, staring at a dead man
Speaker 3: in you know, staring in at a dead man's eyes
Speaker 3: the whole time, be very very closely confronted with with
Speaker 3: the consequences of war and yet not actually participating in it,
Speaker 3: not getting the kind of adrenaline that you normally would.
Speaker 3: She's quite an unusual perhaps introduction to you know, a
Speaker 3: conflict zone, and you know, it just sort of struck me.
Speaker 3: That again also underlined how different the war in Ukraine
Speaker 3: was to the one in Afghanistan where he had been before.
Speaker 3: If soldiers were killed, then there were helicopter lifted out. Usually,
Speaker 3: you know, their bodies might have had to drag them,
Speaker 3: you know for you know, stretch them for a short
Speaker 3: time or something like that, but it would it would
Speaker 3: be relatively usual for anyone to have had the kind
Speaker 3: of experience that he had in Ukraine, Whereas in Ukraine,
Speaker 3: you know, the world who helicopters flying around anywhere, There
Speaker 3: wasn't that sort of Kazavak system and so situations like
Speaker 3: he had were actually very common and often.
Speaker 2: Very very difficult.
Speaker 3: You know, most of the people I spoke to who
Speaker 3: did stretchering jobs said it was, you know, the most
Speaker 3: exhausting thing they've ever done, you know, on the battlefield.
Speaker 1: There's another guy, you profile who had a bad experience,
Speaker 1: as I recall, and he got to a certain point
Speaker 1: was kind of like, screw this, I'm going to go
Speaker 1: guard this diamond mind in the Congo and make some
Speaker 1: real money and then maybe come back.
Speaker 2: Yeah. That was Christopher Perriman, known as pez who who
Speaker 2: was you know, a highly qualified soldier.
Speaker 3: He fought in Iraq in you know, in the Second
Speaker 3: Gulf War. He was a trained sniper, and yeah, he
Speaker 3: went to Ukraine thinking, you know, very much like this,
Speaker 3: this is my job as a soldier. I you know,
Speaker 3: I've I've got the skills, I will i will be
Speaker 3: able to help train Ukrainians and save some other guy
Speaker 3: from losing his life because of his his lack of
Speaker 3: you know, his his lack of aptitude for the task.
Speaker 3: So yeah, Unfortunately, he, like like a lot of people,
Speaker 3: when he got there, found that the Ukrainian military system
Speaker 3: wasn't really capable of you know, processing all the volunteers
Speaker 3: that were coming in, including the experienced people like him.
Speaker 2: Zelenski had not told his.
Speaker 3: Generals before creating beforehand that he was creating the legions,
Speaker 3: so he was blindsiding them, and they didn't really have
Speaker 3: the organizational capacity to, you know, to put all these
Speaker 3: people in barracks just as the war was starting to
Speaker 3: train them up and to send them off in different
Speaker 3: you know, big battalions and foreigners or whatever to the
Speaker 3: front lines. So a lot of the soldiers, like pairs
Speaker 3: found themselves was sitting around in the bases at places
Speaker 3: like Javarev, where they're getting missiled. They're doing nothing. They're
Speaker 3: just getting bored and paranoid and wondering how much longer
Speaker 3: it's gonna take before they get sent to the front
Speaker 3: lives keeping. They keep getting promised that, you know, they
Speaker 3: don't get sent soon, and nothing happens. And he, like
Speaker 3: a lot of soldiers that ended up just kind of
Speaker 3: taking matters into his own hands.
Speaker 2: He teamed up with a.
Speaker 3: Bunch of other guys, but maybe a dozen of them,
Speaker 3: all for them had sort of got to know each
Speaker 3: other during all this periods sitting around waiting in the
Speaker 3: barracks sort of worked out, Yeah, this guy doesn't look
Speaker 3: too look sensible, that guy doesn't look too much like
Speaker 3: a water emittee, so on and so forth, and yeah,
Speaker 3: they they they would form these little units and then
Speaker 3: they would try and bypass the leaching bureaucracy essentially just
Speaker 3: go off and you know, tout their services around the
Speaker 3: front lines, like like you know, laborers looking for work
Speaker 3: really And usually what they'd do is that there'd be
Speaker 3: one person who maybe spoke a bit of Russian or
Speaker 3: Ukrainian who could do the introductions to certain commanders or
Speaker 3: some guy who maybe knew a Ukrainian command or who
Speaker 3: knew a man who knew a man, and they would
Speaker 3: they would chase down those leads sometimes and hope in
Speaker 3: the hope that one or two of those Ukrainian commanders
Speaker 3: would say, yeah, I can use some guys.
Speaker 2: You know, you can try us. We'll try you out
Speaker 2: for a couple of weeks.
Speaker 3: But it was very much on probation, and unfortunately, the
Speaker 3: because there had been a few waltamities and bad apples already,
Speaker 3: you know, sort of earning the leagion a bad reputation.
Speaker 3: A lot of the Ukrainian commanders are actually quite unwilling
Speaker 3: to take them, and they would find themselves just being
Speaker 3: told thanks, but no thanks or whatever, and quite a
Speaker 3: sort of unusual experience if you go to a war,
Speaker 3: respecting the fight and then everybody's just saying, don't need you.
Speaker 1: You know, we're good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, normally, you.
Speaker 3: Know, you hear a lot of stories in Militarist about
Speaker 3: soldiers dreading the front line and trying to get out
Speaker 3: of it. Here here it was the opposite, and people
Speaker 3: sort of you know, hunting for the front lines, like
Speaker 3: a kind of military Eldorado and has found himself in
Speaker 3: that situation. I think they eventually got down at some
Speaker 3: place in mick Alive in the South where they got
Speaker 3: a little bit of action but nothing very much, just
Speaker 3: sort of you know, and eventually he decided, look, I
Speaker 3: can't keep you know, I can't stay here forever. I've
Speaker 3: been here three months of running low on money and
Speaker 3: payment wasn't very regular in the legion then it is now.
Speaker 3: And so he went back to the UK and I think, yeah,
Speaker 3: pursued a job guarding a diamond mine in Congod. I'm
Speaker 3: not sure whether he ever got it or not, but
Speaker 3: he did resurface again in October of that same year
Speaker 3: of twenty twenty two and joined a unit that was
Speaker 3: you know, offered much more scope for action, and they
Speaker 3: were they were out in some islands down on the
Speaker 3: in in southern Ukraine, on the on the Delta area
Speaker 3: of the Dnipro River, Ukraine's main river, where there's lots
Speaker 3: of islands at the mouth of the river as it
Speaker 3: leads into the Black Sea, and on those islands, Russians
Speaker 3: and the Ukrainians would often occupy one half, you know,
Speaker 3: sort of rival halves of the islands, and it was
Speaker 3: Pez's job and that of his team to sort of
Speaker 3: try and keep you know, keep it retained their section
Speaker 3: of the island. And pretty scary stuff because there's nowhere
Speaker 3: to run to if you if you get stuck, you know,
Speaker 3: there's there's not going to be a boat that's going
Speaker 3: to let you off the island if you if if
Speaker 3: the Russians start to do is start to really pile
Speaker 3: the pressure on. And so yeah, he was there for
Speaker 3: a few months. There was a few gunfights, and I
Speaker 3: think he had one or two disagreements with his with
Speaker 3: his colleagues occasionally when things went wrong. There's an account
Speaker 3: of that when a gunfight goes wrong and Pears gets
Speaker 3: blamed for not having his weapon there at the time.
Speaker 3: There were reasons why that happened, But again I use
Speaker 3: that example to sort of explain why, you know what,
Speaker 3: he nearly let the fistfights afterwards, and again it's it's
Speaker 3: what anybody else would have is just as a bad
Speaker 3: day at the office with these guys is a you know,
Speaker 3: a bad day at work where.
Speaker 2: A few mistakes are made out of the side.
Speaker 3: It leads to people potentially getting killed and feelings running very,
Speaker 3: very high, especially when once again these people don't know
Speaker 3: each other it.
Speaker 1: Pears continued, but can you can you finish the story
Speaker 1: about how he narrowly avoided capture because I remember he
Speaker 1: like had to jump off a balcony or something like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, yeah, I can. I can plunge it in
Speaker 2: a bit more detail.
Speaker 3: They were They were basically in a house doing you know,
Speaker 3: an op and observation point in a house on this
Speaker 3: island one night, and a whole lot of Russians suddenly
Speaker 3: surrounded them. It's not clear whether they actually surrounded them
Speaker 3: knowing that they were there were legionnaires there, or that
Speaker 3: there were Ukrainians there or whether they actually thought again,
Speaker 3: this is the element of confusion on the battlefield, that
Speaker 3: they these Russians actually thought it was a Russian occupied
Speaker 3: op because apparently some Russian went knocked on the door
Speaker 3: of the house, I think, expecting to be let in.
Speaker 3: One of the other legionnaires inside challenged him with a password.
Speaker 3: The Russian was unable to produce the password. At that
Speaker 3: point they both realized that, you know, each other were
Speaker 3: enemy forces, and I think one of the legionnaires fired
Speaker 3: a burst down the down the stairway to keep the
Speaker 3: Russians at bay. After that, all hell broke loose, as
Speaker 3: you would imagine, and they were having there were there
Speaker 3: was machine gun fire coming in through the windows, there
Speaker 3: were smoke good aides coming through the windows. The Russians
Speaker 3: were surrounding them, shouting them in English as well, shouting
Speaker 3: come out, come out your bitches, and so on. So
Speaker 3: it was clear that I think they'd identified them as
Speaker 3: foreigners at that point and that they would obviously be
Speaker 3: potentially quite a big prize.
Speaker 2: A gun battle ensued for quite a long time. I
Speaker 2: quite can't quite remember how long.
Speaker 3: I don't think it was perhaps more than about half
Speaker 3: an hour, but I think it probably seemed like forever
Speaker 3: at the time. And eventually, as the as the upstairs
Speaker 3: we were filled with tear gas and smoke grenade gas
Speaker 3: that the Russians had chucked in pairs, sort of decided
Speaker 3: that you know, it was you know, he couldn't see
Speaker 3: his colleagues and his comrades anymore, and leapt out of
Speaker 3: one of the windows, the upstairs window about twenty feet
Speaker 3: nearly broke his ankle, smashed into aside, you know, the.
Speaker 2: Wall of the building.
Speaker 3: He just jumped out of, smashed his head up, and
Speaker 3: then kind of basically ran off through the back gardens
Speaker 3: of the house that he was in and somehow managed
Speaker 3: to get to safety, and by some miracle when when
Speaker 3: they were at the wrong they agreed Rendezvy point that
Speaker 3: they would go to in eventualities like this, met up
Speaker 3: with his comrades who who had also survived. Again, I
Speaker 3: think they were also all like, was convinced that, you know,
Speaker 3: everybody else was dead, and as it turned out, nobody
Speaker 3: actually got killed in that particular incident. But I've watched
Speaker 3: sort of video grabs something, I mean, you know, it's
Speaker 3: absolutely terrifying, and of course the consequences of being caught
Speaker 3: in that situation would have been you know, would have
Speaker 3: been die. If you weren't killed, you'd have been taken
Speaker 3: Russian prisoner of warning. I mean that is something that
Speaker 3: happened to some of the other legionaires, which we can
Speaker 3: perhaps talk about as well.
Speaker 2: But yeah, Peirs continued there.
Speaker 3: He parked the company with that particular unit and there
Speaker 3: went joined another unit. And then in October twenty twenty three,
Speaker 3: which I think was sort of later that same year,
Speaker 3: after that gunfight on the island, he was on another
Speaker 3: operation near Snake Island in the Black Sea and he
Speaker 3: was killed by mortifier.
Speaker 2: I believe. I don't know any more details than that.
Speaker 3: Nothing ever else was ever released, but as you know,
Speaker 3: the Ukrainians are often quite secretive about the details of
Speaker 3: military operations when casualties have been sustained.
Speaker 2: But yeah, he was.
Speaker 3: He was one of one of a number of people
Speaker 3: who are in the book who you know, who are
Speaker 3: not you know, southly not around to have seen it
Speaker 3: seen it published.
Speaker 1: I do want to ask you about the guys who
Speaker 1: were taken as prisoners of war. Those are some of
Speaker 1: the crazier stories in this book. There were a couple
Speaker 1: of differ for guys you profile I believe who were captured.
Speaker 1: Can you tell us about them a bit?
Speaker 3: Yeah, sure, I mean the I think there's three who
Speaker 3: were profiled in the book. A British guy named Andrew Harding. Sorry, yes,
Speaker 3: and Andrew Harding, Yes, so I may have to check
Speaker 3: his name. Andrew will call him here from from now,
Speaker 3: and it's been a while since I've read the book.
Speaker 3: And then a two Americans, Alex Druki and Andy Queen,
Speaker 3: who may be familiar to some of your listeners. They
Speaker 3: were the first Americans to be taken captive in June
Speaker 3: of twenty twenty two. And yeah, so Alex was a
Speaker 3: was a was a classic legionnaire in many ways. He
Speaker 3: had served in a rock as a top gunner in
Speaker 3: about two thousand in Baghdad, which as anyone who's spent
Speaker 3: time in Baghdad during those years, we'll know, it was
Speaker 3: a very dangerous job. You're driving around in a humvey.
Speaker 3: He scored in convoys and vps and generals, so you're
Speaker 3: big target. And Alex's job was to be in the
Speaker 3: lead humbie with a fifty cow, you know, so he
Speaker 3: if anybody, if any snipers or car bombers or insurgent
Speaker 3: gangs were waiting to try and take out the convoy.
Speaker 3: Alex would probably be the first to know. So after
Speaker 3: he came back from Iraq, he had quite bad PTSD
Speaker 3: and he tried to get other civilian jobs. He tried
Speaker 3: to become a police officer, for example, and found that,
Speaker 3: you know, I think partly because of his PTSD, he
Speaker 3: couldn't really deal with it, and also the rules of
Speaker 3: engagement as a civilian police officer are very different from
Speaker 3: those as a you know, a lead gunner in Iraq,
Speaker 3: and he began to feel like it was a bit
Speaker 3: of a failure in life. And also being an ex
Speaker 3: military man, you know, a career military man, you know,
Speaker 3: he sort of felt that his life had lost purpose.
Speaker 2: When the Iraq War.
Speaker 3: Started, he decided to go despite having a one hundred
Speaker 3: percent veterans pension with PTSD. Many would have queried that decision,
Speaker 3: you know, saying you're you know, you're only likely to
Speaker 3: make your demons far far worse.
Speaker 2: Surely, his view was, you know.
Speaker 3: These are demons that haunt me while I'm in civilian life.
Speaker 3: But you know, it's a case of conditioned reflexes, and
Speaker 3: if I'm back in a combat zone that there will
Speaker 3: be they will serve a useful purpose, and so hopefully
Speaker 3: will I. By serving in the legion. I think there's
Speaker 3: I've listened to enough military podcasts to know that there
Speaker 3: are people who might dispute Alex's diagnosis of that sort
Speaker 3: of thing. But that was that was Alex's version of events,
Speaker 3: and he said it worked. So for the first few
Speaker 3: months when he was there, he was training Ukrainian sort
Speaker 3: of military volunteers, and he was an ex staff sergeant
Speaker 3: US Army staff sergeant, so he was used to dealing
Speaker 3: with sort of groups of twenty or thirty men under
Speaker 3: I think he felt it was, you know, he's making
Speaker 3: a lot of difference effectively as a force multiplier, more
Speaker 3: useful really in some ways than what he could achieve
Speaker 3: individually as a you know, as a combatant.
Speaker 2: But that that training work.
Speaker 3: Stopped after a while, I think fell foul of Ukrainian
Speaker 3: military bureaucracy, as the things often do. And I think,
Speaker 3: like many people, he was keen just to sort of
Speaker 3: see what the combat was like. So he joined a
Speaker 3: volunteer up in Kharkiv. They were sent to do a
Speaker 3: drone Wreki one day on his very first mission and
Speaker 3: about they were up in some forests outside of Kharkiv
Speaker 3: and they were ran into a much larger Russian unit
Speaker 3: that effectively ambushed them. The unit he was with scattered.
Speaker 3: There was about and they all scattered in different directions.
Speaker 3: Alex and his companion had been told to look for
Speaker 3: another guy who had gone missing. They felt reluctant to
Speaker 3: leave the area while this other guy was unaccounted for,
Speaker 3: mainly out of a sense of duty. That meant that
Speaker 3: they were still there when the Russians started infiltrating through
Speaker 3: what they were they saw through the woods in the
Speaker 3: enormous tracked vehicle going along like a you know, like
Speaker 3: some kind of prehistoric dinosaur. That was the sort of
Speaker 3: first glimpse of the Russians, with a whole other Russian
Speaker 3: soldiers wandering by them.
Speaker 2: They then tried to escape out there.
Speaker 3: I think they walked for about eight seven or eight
Speaker 3: hours through the Ukrainian forest trying and head back roughly
Speaker 3: in the direction of Kharkiv.
Speaker 2: No idea who they might be running into.
Speaker 3: Got chased by a wild boar at one point, and
Speaker 3: eventually I think just at the point when they were
Speaker 3: hoping they might have got back to sort of what
Speaker 3: looked like a familiar village, they realized that the soldiers
Speaker 3: ahead of them were in fact a big, a large
Speaker 3: gang of Russians. By the time the two groups laid
Speaker 3: eyes on each other, it was too late to run
Speaker 3: and they had to surrender basically. And then Alex uh,
Speaker 3: he was he was roffed up a bit at the time,
Speaker 3: not too badly, I think, he said. The Russian soldiers
Speaker 3: that caught them were that sort of yeah, you know,
Speaker 3: you're another soldier. Yeah you're a foreigner, but you know,
Speaker 3: we're all soldiers here together. So just the usual kind
Speaker 3: of customary kicking and then a few conversations about you know,
Speaker 3: what's you know, what's Joe Biden like, what's you know,
Speaker 3: what are American women like? You know, they heart all
Speaker 3: this sort of stuff.
Speaker 2: Here, have a cigarette, mate, have a drink and water.
Speaker 2: That then abruptly.
Speaker 3: Changed when they were handed over to the Russian intelligence services,
Speaker 3: and Alex spent about five weeks in a Russian black
Speaker 3: site prison we'll call that. He doesn't really know what
Speaker 3: it was, but it certainly wasn't an official prison anywhere
Speaker 3: somewhere probably in the the Nets People's Republic, the Separatist held,
Speaker 3: but of Ukraine, where he was tortured pretty much non
Speaker 3: stop by Russian secret police who thought he was a
Speaker 3: spy of some sort and were perhaps not surprisingly reluctant
Speaker 3: to think that any American would be crazy enough to
Speaker 3: join the International Legion.
Speaker 2: You know, he was sort of saying, yeah, he was
Speaker 2: a volunteer, and they're saying, no, you wouldn't.
Speaker 3: You wouldn't do that, you know, you wouldn't be mad enough,
Speaker 3: which was which was a hard one that dissuade them of.
Speaker 3: And he was electrocuted quite a few times, you know,
Speaker 3: fairly badly, which he said was far worse than the
Speaker 3: other treatment that he tortured that he suffered. They also
Speaker 3: did noise you know, noise torture on them, putting them
Speaker 3: in a cell, and you know, playing really very loud
Speaker 3: music at them, although rather amusingly they played band heavy
Speaker 3: lots of heavy metal bands like Ramstein and other people,
Speaker 3: you know, sort of death metal and speed metal American stuff,
Speaker 3: which I think they thought would be the epitome of
Speaker 3: torture and.
Speaker 2: Might well have worked quite well.
Speaker 3: Again, you know, on Gan tanam Obey INMTES. But for Alex,
Speaker 3: it was exactly the sort of music that suburban teenagers
Speaker 3: of Alex's generation grew up with in America.
Speaker 2: Says, oh, you know, here's Ramstein.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a bit loud, and it's you know, it's
Speaker 3: the third time I've heard this one to day. But
Speaker 3: it was manageable and it kind of reminded him from home.
Speaker 3: And I think they played played this this thing on
Speaker 3: a kind of loop of eighty tracks a day, and
Speaker 3: it allowed Alex to keep time in a way that
Speaker 3: he couldn't otherwise because the lights were switched all the
Speaker 3: whole time, and that they had this sort of slightly
Speaker 3: surreal experience when his captors told him that they were
Speaker 3: actually going to try and negotiate for his release via
Speaker 3: a prison swap or something like that. And he assumed,
Speaker 3: I think, as we all, would you know somebody, you know,
Speaker 3: the Russian secret police, secret services would have some sort
Speaker 3: of hotline to the b I or the CIA that
Speaker 3: they could do for you organizing these sorts of things.
Speaker 2: They didn't.
Speaker 3: They presented Alex with a downloaded list of phone numbers
Speaker 3: for various US departments U S government departments that they
Speaker 3: printed off the Internet and said, right, you start ringing
Speaker 3: around these And so he was ringing around, you know,
Speaker 3: the Department of Homeland Security switchboard and various other places.
Speaker 2: And you know, most of the time never getting through
Speaker 2: to anybody.
Speaker 3: And on the and on the ed occasion where you know,
Speaker 3: he did get through to some switchboard operator, you know,
Speaker 3: when when your spiel as hello, my name is Alex Druki.
Speaker 2: You know, I'm a prisoner of war in Russia. I'm
Speaker 2: being held by the you know, the Russian Secret Police.
Speaker 2: The answer is yes, I'm sure you are, Thank you, sir.
Speaker 2: We do not take the nuisance callers here, you know,
Speaker 2: slams the phoner and eventually I think the Russian is
Speaker 2: Russian captors discovered a number for the veterans, the US
Speaker 2: Veterans Crisis Line, which is a real life, you know,
Speaker 2: help number on.
Speaker 3: Which Alex himself had rung several times when you know,
Speaker 3: in his bad days back in the in the US,
Speaker 3: when he was suffering badly from PTSD and overdoing it
Speaker 3: on the booze. So Alex said, now that this is
Speaker 3: not the right number to ring. This is a twenty
Speaker 3: four hour Veterans crisis line, to which his captor apparently said, well,
Speaker 3: you know this is a crisis though, and you are
Speaker 3: a veteran.
Speaker 2: Wring the line, Alex kind of went, you know what,
Speaker 2: I've had enough of this.
Speaker 3: You know you might be right, so he rang it up,
Speaker 3: and of course, being a veterans crisis line, you know,
Speaker 3: designed for people who were suicidal, there was actually a
Speaker 3: human being at the end of the phone who did listen,
Speaker 3: and who did sort of then say yeah, okay, I'll
Speaker 3: try and find a number for somebody who can help you,
Speaker 3: and short, you know, very shortly afterwards put him through
Speaker 3: to a state Department official who clearly knew who Alex
Speaker 3: was and who knew about the case, who was in
Speaker 3: a position to start the process for negotiations for Alex's release.
Speaker 3: And I won't give away too much in the book,
Speaker 3: but basically Alex spent about the next four months. He
Speaker 3: was transferred to a civilian prison with a number of
Speaker 3: other volunteers, about a dozen of them from various different
Speaker 3: parts of the world, include a few other Americans and
Speaker 3: some Brits, and they were held there and eventually released
Speaker 3: as part of a prisoner swap. But the conditions in
Speaker 3: that civilian prison, although they were not getting tortured on
Speaker 3: a regular basis anymore, were still pretty grim. Alex sort
Speaker 3: of as tells a story about it, was there was
Speaker 3: a trustee in the prison, another inmate, a Ukrainian inmate.
Speaker 2: Who was a.
Speaker 3: He was employed that sweet the cells and change the
Speaker 3: light bulbs on the cc TV in the cell. When
Speaker 3: that went wrong, and uh, the prison guards sort of
Speaker 3: took great delight in mentioning to Alex so that that guy, yeah,
Speaker 3: he was a cannibal. He's a convicted cannibal. He's serving
Speaker 3: several licenses for eating people. And one day they they
Speaker 3: sort of the prison guards asked this, this cannibal, you know, uh,
Speaker 3: which of the three prisoners in here would you would
Speaker 3: you prefer to eat? Because they had Alex and then
Speaker 3: they had Andy who was Asian, and they also had
Speaker 3: an African American in the cell as well as which
Speaker 3: ethnicity would you prefer to dine off? Which I think
Speaker 3: was an example of kind of a sense sort of
Speaker 3: dark Russian humor. And as Alex, you know, Alex later
Speaker 3: reflected her that this this, this this cannibal, I think
Speaker 3: his name was Ego, was actually you know, one of
Speaker 3: the few friendly faces in the prison, and he would
Speaker 3: occasionally give him his you know, his he's used cigarettes
Speaker 3: cast offs, which they would then Alex and his friends
Speaker 3: would then sort of dissect and make roll ups from
Speaker 3: from using bits of bits of paper, pets of newspaper,
Speaker 3: and you know, but he didn't sort of say, you know,
Speaker 3: when your idea of a good day is getting you know,
Speaker 3: cast off cigarettes were convicted, Cannibal does sort of suggest that,
Speaker 3: you know, he perhaps a bit of a low point.
Speaker 1: Another thing that I thought that I thought was very
Speaker 1: interesting was he mentions how the interrogators, I guess they
Speaker 1: were at the other place, at the at the black site,
Speaker 1: presumably FSB guys. They were very good at torturing the
Speaker 1: hell out of people, but they were very naive about
Speaker 1: how America works, like just oblivious.
Speaker 3: Yes, I think they they thought that Alex had been
Speaker 3: their official. Their suspicion was that Alex had been sent
Speaker 3: in bar by some US sort of secret service to
Speaker 3: equip the Ukrainians with the means to manufacture weapons of
Speaker 3: mass destruction. That the basis for this being that Alex
Speaker 3: had done a course while he was a US Army
Speaker 3: staff sergeant on WND disposal, which I think was a
Speaker 3: fairly standard course that a lot of US military soldiers
Speaker 3: did prior to the.
Speaker 2: Two thousand and three deployment in Iraq. What that meant was,
Speaker 2: you knew how to recognize.
Speaker 3: Potentially hazards materials, and the purposes, you know, the sort
Speaker 3: of procedures for potentially disposing of.
Speaker 2: Them or making them safe.
Speaker 3: They Yeah, they seem to have no real concept of
Speaker 3: who he was or anything like that, and no way
Speaker 3: of disbelieving him.
Speaker 2: In any way. And yeah, more generally, I think they're there.
Speaker 3: They're sort of a lot of their sort of experts,
Speaker 3: dictations or preconceptions about Americans seemed to be drawn from
Speaker 3: you know, reading US spy novels and so on. You know,
Speaker 3: it was it was quite commic. You would have thought
Speaker 3: perhaps it was a you know, just a play of
Speaker 3: a ploy of some sort to hide the fact that
Speaker 3: they actually knew what they were doing, But often it
Speaker 3: didn't seem like that.
Speaker 1: I and then tell us about the guys in Mauropaul.
Speaker 3: In Mariopol, Yeah, yeah, so Mario Paul, as most of
Speaker 3: your listeners will remember, was the city that the Russians
Speaker 3: really laid siege to at the beginning of the war.
Speaker 3: It's down down on the ass of I thinks on
Speaker 3: the on the ass of the coast of the ass
Speaker 3: Of seeing southeast on Ukraine's sort of southeastern border. And yeah,
Speaker 3: it was just basically raised to the ground by shelling
Speaker 3: and there was a big sort of the Ukrainian forces
Speaker 3: there mounted a last stand at as Of Steel Works,
Speaker 3: which is this sort of vast complex steel complex, one
Speaker 3: of the biggest in the world that runs for several miles.
Speaker 3: It's just an enormous steel refinery. So there's a million
Speaker 3: and one place is to hide there if you are
Speaker 3: a soldier. You know, there's gantries, there's pipes, there's underground bunkers,
Speaker 3: there's there's miles and miles of service tunnels. And also
Speaker 3: because there's a Soviet built facility, there are lots of
Speaker 3: purpose built military bunkers there as well that were built
Speaker 3: in the anticipation that Marion Paul and the rest of
Speaker 3: the Soviet Union would one day be attacked by the
Speaker 3: US or by the West. So you know, it's both
Speaker 3: a factory and the citadel. And so the Ukrainians mounted
Speaker 3: a last stand there, and among them was a British
Speaker 3: fighter by the name of John Harding, and you know
Speaker 3: he he'd actually joined the Ukrainian military several years before
Speaker 3: as a volunteer, having previously fought for the Kurdish as
Speaker 3: a volunteer with the Kurdish anti Isis forces in Iraq,
Speaker 3: and he was an ex parachute regiment soldier. He also
Speaker 3: for the Falkland's conflict in nineteen eighty two, which he
Speaker 3: was getting on by the time the war in Ukraine
Speaker 3: loomed and I think in fact, he was due to retire.
Speaker 3: It was his sixtieth birthday was coming up around in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty two sometime, and I think a month before
Speaker 3: the war started in January twenty twenty two, he'd said
Speaker 3: to his commander, I mean, I'm good at it's time
Speaker 3: I retired. My legs are not what they were, and
Speaker 3: you know, I don't want to be a liability. And
Speaker 3: the commander said, well fine, yeah, but do you know
Speaker 3: that the paperwork will be easier if you if you
Speaker 3: just wait waited out a month, I said, might.
Speaker 2: He stay on to the end of February? And John
Speaker 2: said yeah, sure.
Speaker 3: And at that time none of them thought the Ukrainian
Speaker 3: invasion was going to actually happen, that they just thought
Speaker 3: this troop build up was just another you know, not
Speaker 3: a saber rattling exercised by Putin.
Speaker 2: So he stayed on and then on the twenty third of.
Speaker 3: February, the night before the invasion, he literally had his
Speaker 3: bags packed to head back to the UK and then
Speaker 3: he got the message the next morning from his comrade saying, oh, yeah,
Speaker 3: the Russians coming in across the border, and John said,
Speaker 3: how many of them? And the reply came, all of them.
Speaker 3: And so it was that John found himself among the
Speaker 3: soldiers manning with the Azo Brigade who were manning the
Speaker 3: the sort of last stand in this steel factory and
Speaker 3: pall the as of steel factory, and he gives a
Speaker 3: pretty graphic account of that. It's you know that they
Speaker 3: held out for a long time and basically managed to
Speaker 3: slow the Russian advance across the rest of Ukraine quite significantly.
Speaker 3: So the operation was a success from that point of view.
Speaker 3: But as as the siege went on, I think it
Speaker 3: lasted until early May, so you know, nearly three months
Speaker 3: they ran low on supplies and ammunition, and also on
Speaker 3: medicines and anesthetics. And then John gives a very vivid
Speaker 3: account at one point of having two you know soldiers,
Speaker 3: you know, suffering gangrene in their wounds and having to
Speaker 3: perform amputations without anesthetic, and you know, they would have
Speaker 3: a surgeon with a bone saw. They would do the
Speaker 3: job as quickly as he could on a leg or something.
Speaker 3: She used to take a couple of minutes, and then
Speaker 3: they would have about six other soldiers just there to
Speaker 3: hold the patient down to to try and keep them
Speaker 3: still when you know, on the operating table. And I
Speaker 3: said that, John, and what was yours sort of you know,
Speaker 3: what way did it was the only way to prepare
Speaker 3: people for this? And he said, no, not really. You
Speaker 3: know what he would say is this this is really
Speaker 3: gonna fucking hurt. And if you want, I can stick
Speaker 3: a piece of wood in your mouth that you can bite.
Speaker 3: But yeah, that's that sort of thing, you know, absolutely
Speaker 3: extremes of experience. And eventually, yeah, they were ordered to surrender.
Speaker 3: Put in sealed the place off. He actually realized that
Speaker 3: he couldn't actually get the soldiers get the ass off.
Speaker 3: He didn't want to send his own soldiers in because
Speaker 3: he realized they just still get.
Speaker 2: Keep getting killed.
Speaker 3: You sealed it off, and then the as of soldiers
Speaker 3: were agreed to surrender and internationally broken surrender on the
Speaker 3: condition that they would not actually be that they would
Speaker 3: be taken into Russian custody but not harmed, and of
Speaker 3: course they were all tortured to within an inch of
Speaker 3: their life. John was you got a really severe kicking
Speaker 3: during his spell, his five week spell in the Black Site,
Speaker 3: to which he tried to make it worse by saying
Speaker 3: to them, you know you hit like my sister, you
Speaker 3: or hit like girls, I think, basically actually trying to
Speaker 3: get them, daring them to kill him, you know, rather
Speaker 3: than sort of subjecting to really prolonged, serious, more you know,
Speaker 3: more considered torture. It didn't, but it did break his Sternham.
Speaker 3: And then later when he was released from captivity, I
Speaker 3: think he was taking the Hosport system a few months later,
Speaker 3: having suffered a suspected heart attack, and the doctor said, actually,
Speaker 3: the signs that you suffered at earlier heart attack, which
Speaker 3: is probably while you were in captivity, it's you.
Speaker 2: Know, it's a miracle you're still alive.
Speaker 3: So yeah, John is one of you know what, one
Speaker 3: of thousands of ours off soldiers who sort of went
Speaker 3: through that experience, but one of relatively few Westerners who's
Speaker 3: you know, who's been around to tell the tale. And
Speaker 3: I think that's one of the valuable parts of the
Speaker 3: book is that you've got American and British soldiers giving
Speaker 3: first hand accounts of what that brutality, what the what
Speaker 3: the brutality is like in the Russian system. Because with
Speaker 3: the best will in the world, to some audiences around
Speaker 3: the world, when they hear Ukrainians talking about what they
Speaker 3: often don't perhaps believe, you know, I don't believe the
Speaker 3: one percent because they feel these are people who've got
Speaker 3: skin in the game, whereas that's less likely when when
Speaker 3: it's Westerns who are giving those accounts.
Speaker 1: I mean, as you say that, it reminds me of
Speaker 1: an American World War Two veteran named Jerry Sage who
Speaker 1: was captured and he was held in that that that
Speaker 1: prison is like Stalog three. It was the Great Escape
Speaker 1: where they tried to dig out. He got transferred. He
Speaker 1: wasn't part of that. But anyway, his memoir what you're
Speaker 1: saying that reminds me of it is in his memoir
Speaker 1: he talks about the end of the war and he
Speaker 1: his position where he is gets taken over by the Russians,
Speaker 1: and so the Russians, you know, capture him, liberate him,
Speaker 1: and they're going to be the ones that repatriate him
Speaker 1: back to the United States. And he saw how they
Speaker 1: treated the Poles and other Slavic people in Eastern Europe.
Speaker 1: It was just disgusted by it. I think he actually
Speaker 1: got released through Odessa. I think from Odessa he sailed
Speaker 1: on a ship to Egypt and then the American military
Speaker 1: picked them back up. But history repeats itself.
Speaker 2: It does, indeed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's I mean one of the other soldiers,
Speaker 3: Andrew Hill, who the guy previously described as Andrew Harding,
Speaker 3: the British guy. Apologies Andrew, if you're listening. He when
Speaker 3: when he got back.
Speaker 2: To the UK.
Speaker 3: You know, he there's there's no real support for legionnaires
Speaker 3: who've who've been through trauma or injury because the British government,
Speaker 3: like the American government, does not sanction them going out
Speaker 3: there to Ukraine. It doesn't it doesn't stop, but it
Speaker 3: doesn't sanction them either. That doesn't doesn't endorse them going
Speaker 3: and so you don't get you know, you can't go
Speaker 3: to the US military hospital or UK military hospital and
Speaker 3: get medical or you know, mental health trauma help, and
Speaker 3: he ended up going to some local men's health group
Speaker 3: you know, near his house, are perfectly good, well run
Speaker 3: mental health charity that had been recommended to him by
Speaker 3: a friend. But you know, it was one of those
Speaker 3: things where you you know, you turn up and you're
Speaker 3: the new guy in the group, and it's like, you know,
Speaker 3: please share your experience, and he sort of said, like,
Speaker 3: you know, Andrew Hill, which military volunteer in Ukraine, I
Speaker 3: was taking prisoner of war by the Russians and I
Speaker 3: was tortured for five weeks and then held in a
Speaker 3: pow camp where I nearly staffed to death.
Speaker 2: And you can sort of see, he said, you could
Speaker 2: see some jaws dropping by a mile in this room.
Speaker 2: And you know the majority of.
Speaker 3: The other guys in there are people just with every
Speaker 3: everyday complaints about you know, drink problems, drug problems, arguments
Speaker 3: with the wife, depression, you know, very much sort of
Speaker 3: civilian first world issues. And I think he talked for
Speaker 3: about an hour and a half in that first session.
Speaker 3: It's supposed to be everybody had ten minutes each, but
Speaker 3: the rest of them all just like, really what happened?
Speaker 2: And I think it was an interesting evening for his
Speaker 2: fellow you know, he's felt the people also in the
Speaker 2: session and no doubt put their problems from the perspective,
Speaker 2: but it really wasn't suitable for him and I don't
Speaker 2: think he went back. He needed, you know, to be
Speaker 2: in with with other military But at.
Speaker 3: The same time, I mean that there wouldn't have been
Speaker 3: any other military people who would have had an experience
Speaker 3: comparable to that. There were you know, I don't know
Speaker 3: there's anybody in the British military living or dead in
Speaker 3: you know, in the last century who would have had
Speaker 3: experience of being tortured by the FSB. You might have
Speaker 3: had a few who'd been experiences of uh, you know,
Speaker 3: mistreatment in captivity and but yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe Andy McNabb in the in the Gulf War.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that would be the only sort of
Speaker 2: comparable experience and you know that that was a long
Speaker 2: time ago, and yeah, it's the experiences would not have
Speaker 2: been entirely comparable anyway.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know was special Forces Andrew Andrew Hill was
Speaker 3: not although he'd done you know, he'd done.
Speaker 2: Conduct under capture training.
Speaker 3: He was a training for try going I think actually,
Speaker 3: given what he's been through seemed to manage to.
Speaker 2: Cook quite well.
Speaker 3: Although I make a point I'm not talking specifically about
Speaker 3: Andrew's case here, but I never make any judgments about
Speaker 3: sort of you know, what kind of mental health state
Speaker 3: any of the people I interview are in when I
Speaker 3: interviewed them, because they may not, they may not well
Speaker 3: disclosed a lot about, you know, what they're feeling inside,
Speaker 3: even if often you know that they appear to be
Speaker 3: pretty pretty stable the outside.
Speaker 1: And the story about how these POW's got released is
Speaker 1: like one of the most bizarre stories that anyone's likely
Speaker 1: to read in quite a while.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, I think when they were there for about
Speaker 3: four months and they were all just they several of
Speaker 3: them have been sentenced, you know, appeared in court in
Speaker 3: Russian run courts where they'd been told that they were
Speaker 3: going to get the death sentence, and if if that
Speaker 3: wasn't gonna happen, they thought they'd get at least twenty
Speaker 3: five years in the jail they were in, which given
Speaker 3: the conditions there, would have meant the death sentence by
Speaker 3: the means, so very few I think expected to last
Speaker 3: more than about a year. Alex Druki, who we spoke
Speaker 3: about earlier, had a nail hidden in his mattress, some
Speaker 3: nail that he pulled out of the the metal struck
Speaker 3: for the mattress, which I think you said, you know,
Speaker 3: if I will use this to slip my throat, if
Speaker 3: this lasts to be on the point where I can
Speaker 3: stand it, you know, maybe in another year. They're pretty
Speaker 3: much given up vote. And then there was suddenly told, right.
Speaker 2: You're all moving from this jail.
Speaker 3: They weren't told why, and initially I think they thought
Speaker 3: this was possibly the month where they're going to be
Speaker 3: taken and said a firing squad. They were then loaded
Speaker 3: into a lorry in extremely uncomfortable stress positions, all kind
Speaker 3: of bound up together and driven from about twelve hours
Speaker 3: to an unknown destination, all blindfolded, almost willing death by
Speaker 3: the time they got there, after being twelve hours of
Speaker 3: being trust up in stress positions, and then they found
Speaker 3: themselves at an airport in I think Rostov on Don,
Speaker 3: which is one of the Russian cities actually is a
Speaker 3: forward base for the for Russian operations in Ukraine.
Speaker 2: And so this is we're out in the you know,
Speaker 2: we're out of Ukraine. Something's clearly happening. And then they uh,
Speaker 2: they were then put on a plane with a whole
Speaker 2: load of Arabs on the plane, Arab men in expensive dress,
Speaker 2: you know, expensive suits, and they're thinking what is going
Speaker 2: on here? They're still not told what's going on really.
Speaker 3: And thinking maybe you know these Syrians and we're being
Speaker 3: transferred to present the sad tender mercies was a mate
Speaker 3: of prudence at the time. Or it's just the plane
Speaker 3: going to get got up in the sky and you
Speaker 3: know what we're gonna We're going to be told that
Speaker 3: we're on a prison swap and then it's just going
Speaker 3: to get shot down or developed mysterious mechanical failure and
Speaker 3: that would be the end of that. But anyway, they
Speaker 3: duly landed in Saudi Arabia and at that point they
Speaker 3: met the US diplomats and were told like, yeah, you've
Speaker 3: you've been. There's been a prison swap. You're free to
Speaker 3: you know, head home. And some of them have added
Speaker 3: ink this was happening on the plane on the way over,
Speaker 3: and the main reason for that was that they had
Speaker 3: there was this sort of wealthy looking businessman who wandered
Speaker 3: up and down the plane at one at one point,
Speaker 3: and he had a striking resemblance to a man called
Speaker 3: Roman and Vramovich. I don't know how well he is.
Speaker 3: He well known in the US. Well, he's he's a
Speaker 3: Russian oli guard and he's he's famous in the UK
Speaker 3: because he owns, or he used to own, Chelsea Football Club,
Speaker 3: famous football club in the UK. There's a billionaire, and
Speaker 3: he'd been sanctioned subsequent to the start of the Ukraine
Speaker 3: what he'd been sanctioned for his alleged links to President Putin.
Speaker 3: But he's familiar to a lot of these legionaires who
Speaker 3: are keen footballers because of the fact that he had
Speaker 3: owned Chelsea Football Club. And one of them said to
Speaker 3: said to this chat as he wandered past this man
Speaker 3: in the in the you know, in the World Cup
Speaker 3: suit said you don't matter what, mate, you look just
Speaker 3: like that guy roaming a Braanvitch, the guy who owns Chelsea,
Speaker 3: who heard of him. And this man turned to him
Speaker 3: and sort of said, yes, that is because I am
Speaker 3: Roman Abradovich.
Speaker 2: And it turned out that Roman Abravitch had.
Speaker 3: Organized this this prisoner swap, broken a deal between well,
Speaker 3: I suppose essentially Britain, America and the Russians whereby the
Speaker 3: foreign volunteers and about two hundred and fifty other Ukrainian
Speaker 3: prisoners of war were freed in return for a number
Speaker 3: of Russian prisoners of war. And a Bravich had done this,
Speaker 3: I think apparently partly to sort of, I think, to
Speaker 3: you know, sort of mend his reputation with the West
Speaker 3: and presumably hope long term that he, you know, he
Speaker 3: would be able to regain ownership of his assets in
Speaker 3: the UK, including Chelsea Football Club. There's also no coincidence
Speaker 3: that the plane landed in Saudi Arabia. Who's Who's president
Speaker 3: President Leader mohammadan Salman, the Crown Prince was, you know,
Speaker 3: was also in the diplomatic doghouse at the time over
Speaker 3: the the killing of a Saudi journalist, Jamal Kashohji, which
Speaker 3: he was accused of giving the red light the green
Speaker 3: light too, so both of them had a bit of
Speaker 3: reputational laundering to do. But that led to the freeing
Speaker 3: of about you know, twelve or thirteen legionnaires and many
Speaker 3: Ukrainian soldiers who were otherwise have probably still been there.
Speaker 3: And that's how Alex Druki, for example, came to fly
Speaker 3: home at the tail end of twenty twenty two and
Speaker 3: was then Julie Grill for another three weeks or for
Speaker 3: several hours by him some FBI guys, which he didn't
Speaker 3: really want, but he gave lengthy descriptions of the people
Speaker 3: who tortured him and hopes to this day, I think
Speaker 3: to maybe one day see them across the dock of
Speaker 3: a war crime squad.
Speaker 1: But yeah, another person mentioned in your book who has
Speaker 1: been a guest on this show before is Ryan O'Leary.
Speaker 3: Oh yes, yes, yeah, I mean Ryan I never met.
Speaker 3: I think we did try to interview once, but just.
Speaker 1: The times never we have like a three and a
Speaker 1: half hour episode with him.
Speaker 3: He had a lot Yeah, you know, yes, you'll know
Speaker 3: most of Ryan's history then. But I interviewed one of
Speaker 3: the soldiers in the book, Jack Knight, worked for Ryan,
Speaker 3: worked under Ryan and as part of Chosen Company, and
Speaker 3: fought a number of battles with them. They were a
Speaker 3: volunteer unit made up mainly of legionnaires, and the interesting
Speaker 3: thing about Chosen Company, apart from the battles that they
Speaker 3: they fought in, was that they were essentially essentially an
Speaker 3: effort to sort of improve the professionalism of the Legion.
Speaker 3: I think it had gone a bad reputation because of
Speaker 3: the Walter Mitty characters within the Legion and the sort
Speaker 3: of fantasists and so on. Other legionnaires Legion units had
Speaker 3: a bit of a reputation for the only fighting one
Speaker 3: week in three and spending a lot of time in
Speaker 3: bars and brothels and brawling and other stuff. And then
Speaker 3: there were a few other Legionaire units that you know,
Speaker 3: we were okay, but didn't really do much, didn't really
Speaker 3: see much action, and Chosen was sort of formed, i
Speaker 3: think as a sort of a more serious elite legion
Speaker 3: within the Legion, as it were, and the selection criteria
Speaker 3: was pretty rigorous. You had to have had i think
Speaker 3: prior combat experience was certainly prior military experience. And also
Speaker 3: you know, the idea was that you would be you
Speaker 3: would be on prolonged deployments, no sort of spending one
Speaker 3: week in the don Bass and the next week in
Speaker 3: a bar in Kiev. And also that you would be
Speaker 3: they were they were going to be frontline combat specialists,
Speaker 3: doing trench charges and so on, and that you should
Speaker 3: expect to be injured or killed. No no windin or
Speaker 3: winding if that happened. So the pretty serious unit and
Speaker 3: Jack Knight, you know, signed up to serve with them,
Speaker 3: having had I think a slightly frustrating tour to start
Speaker 3: off with where he'd you know, he'd done his best
Speaker 3: to get stuck in in the action down south in
Speaker 3: hous On in twenty twenty two, but then the Russians
Speaker 3: rather unsportingly then pulled out of hers on, so the
Speaker 3: big bat off of house on which I think he
Speaker 3: was hoping to take part in, didn't happen, and he
Speaker 3: sort of the count in the book him sort of
Speaker 3: wandering about liberated her soon and being about the only
Speaker 3: person who isn't, sort of cheering and waving, sort of
Speaker 3: thinking like, you know, it's it's it's nice to be
Speaker 3: here to see everybody free. But I would have liked
Speaker 3: to have played more of a role in it. And
Speaker 3: Jack joined the Chosen Company, I think partly to sort
Speaker 3: of hope to get some proper action. And he had
Speaker 3: partly in his in his sort of military in his
Speaker 3: family history, his great great great grandfather had won the
Speaker 3: Victoria Cross in World War One, and he was keen
Speaker 3: to try and following his great great grandfather's footsteps because
Speaker 3: he was from a military family and that kind of
Speaker 3: thing runs quite thick in the blood if you've got
Speaker 3: a distinguished ancestor. And yeah, during one of the battles
Speaker 3: in the Don Bass, where they were trying to take
Speaker 3: some trenches, things did not go according to plan. There
Speaker 3: was a large number of soldiers of Chosen Company were
Speaker 3: injured early on in the battle, and Jack, who was
Speaker 3: staying at the back at the time because he was
Speaker 3: there as a sapper ready to go in and clear
Speaker 3: minds later on, realized that the he wasn't going to
Speaker 3: be doing much mind clearance if everybody got killed and
Speaker 3: didn't come back alive, so he volunteered to go into
Speaker 3: the combat zone and try and stretcher a few people out,
Speaker 3: and did so, I think, at one point, having to
Speaker 3: rescue a bunch of Ukrainian guys who'd strayed into a landmine.
Speaker 2: A minefield, and.
Speaker 3: The way he told it's just decided to he had
Speaker 3: no choice but just to walk randomly into the minefield
Speaker 3: himself to get them and hope that he wouldn't get
Speaker 3: blown up himself, basically ignoring everything he'd spent years training
Speaker 3: to do during his Royal Ordnance and Supper Awareness course,
Speaker 3: you know, which is always about probing the ground carefully
Speaker 3: in front of you, if you're in a minefield with
Speaker 3: a product thing and taking each sort of step, you know,
Speaker 3: like an in time. He said, there's no time for that,
Speaker 3: and you know, there were drones ahead, this machine gun fire.
Speaker 3: I've just got to go for it and try and
Speaker 3: get these guys out and hope for the best.
Speaker 2: And that's what he did, and he ended up.
Speaker 3: Getting himself a medal, and I think he felt that,
Speaker 3: you know, he'd you know, to some extent at least
Speaker 3: followed in his ancestors footsteps. So again, somebody who was
Speaker 3: who was there very much looking for purpose, who didn't
Speaker 3: really feel terribly happy in civilian life, and I think
Speaker 3: certainly found it in Ukraine.
Speaker 2: Doing things like that despite the sort of very high
Speaker 2: risks that you were running.
Speaker 1: And then kind of on like the darker side of things,
Speaker 1: you talk about two international volunteers who were we think
Speaker 1: murdered by their own people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've got to be a little bit careful about
Speaker 3: what I say on these ones, because I've written about
Speaker 3: these cases extensively, both in the book and the you
Speaker 3: know and and in the Telegraph, the newspaper I worked for,
Speaker 3: and they both live cases as in there are you know,
Speaker 3: nobody has been arrested in either case, yet there is
Speaker 3: a particular suspect in one case. What one case involves
Speaker 3: a guy called Daniel Burker, military volunteer that I interviewed
Speaker 3: for the book several times and who I spent time
Speaker 3: without in Ukraine. He had fought, like many of them have,
Speaker 3: for the with the Kurdish antony Isis forces in in
Speaker 3: in in Syria, and so when he came to Ukraine,
Speaker 3: he brought a certain amount of experience as somebody who
Speaker 3: was used to fighting, you know, the people's wars. He
Speaker 3: he knew it would be disorganized, He knew you would
Speaker 3: probably have to sort of get quite a lot of
Speaker 3: things done for yourself. You couldn't expect to bure opposite
Speaker 3: to do.
Speaker 2: It for you. And it was a sort of mascot
Speaker 2: in some ways for the for the volunteer, for the volunteers.
Speaker 3: Early on he ran a unit called the Dark Angels
Speaker 3: that did some earlier operations, that who posted details of
Speaker 3: themselveshooting up a Russian tank on social.
Speaker 2: Media that got huge numbers of followings.
Speaker 3: And you know, it's kind of very much summarized the
Speaker 3: kind of thing that a lot of volunteers wanted to
Speaker 3: be doing I think, you know. But anyway, in late
Speaker 3: twenty twenty September twenty twenty three or so, he'd actually
Speaker 3: diversified into running a humanitarian mission instead, a sort of
Speaker 3: frontline rescue and support mission, and he went missing for
Speaker 3: several weeks.
Speaker 2: Nobody knew what had happened to him.
Speaker 3: It was the first maybe just been on a you know,
Speaker 3: sort of a bit of a boozebender or something for
Speaker 3: a few days. And if you know the legion are
Speaker 3: as well, you'll know that it's not unusual for someone to,
Speaker 3: you know, if they've been on a boozebender.
Speaker 2: Don't expect that he had. Don't expect them to declare
Speaker 2: the missing for at least about a week. But anyway,
Speaker 2: he had indeed disappeared.
Speaker 3: A police investigation was launched out of actually and his
Speaker 3: body was recovered from under a sewer or a culvert
Speaker 3: near a firing range in the countryside outside of Zaparista
Speaker 3: in eastern Ukraine. And I think initially people thought, well,
Speaker 3: maybe you know, of Russian has done this or something
Speaker 3: like that, but it later became clear that a fellow
Speaker 3: volunteer had carried out well, it appeared to have carried this,
Speaker 3: this this killing out. This volunteer later claimed that he'd
Speaker 3: shot Daniel by mistake, having sort of pretended to what
Speaker 3: was it he said, He said, I think I think
Speaker 3: the term is fragging, where you point a weapon at
Speaker 3: somebody when you shouldn't do and you know it's violating
Speaker 3: basic military procedure. Apparently Daniel had said to him, you're
Speaker 3: fagging me while they're out of this range, just having
Speaker 3: a practice shoot or something.
Speaker 1: Flagging, flagging, flagging or fragging flagging. So flagging is when
Speaker 1: you're going over with your muzzle over friendly guys that
Speaker 1: you don't want to shoot. Fragging is when you actually
Speaker 1: kill one of your own guys intentionally.
Speaker 2: Flagging.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, basically when you're pointing your weapon at somebody.
Speaker 3: Sorry for anyone listening, I'm not I'm not an ex soldier,
Speaker 3: So worries when you point a weapon at somebody you
Speaker 3: know who's a friendly force. You know something that you
Speaker 3: know every boy whatever given a gun or an air
Speaker 3: gun from you know, the death from the age of five,
Speaker 3: which is the first rule of weapons craft you ever told.
Speaker 3: Never point a gun at anyone, whether it's loaded or not.
Speaker 3: Apparently this this suspect in his shooting had he later
Speaker 3: told police that he had pointed the gun Daniel Daniels,
Speaker 3: don't do that, mate, that's stupid, remonstrated from UH, at
Speaker 3: which point the suspect and then apparently so they said,
Speaker 3: don't worry, the gun is not loaded, and then fired,
Speaker 3: you know, pulled the trigger on the gun at Daniel,
Speaker 3: and sure enough the gun was loaded. He emptied a
Speaker 3: burst into him and killed him, then panicked and hid
Speaker 3: him in his body in this sewer. This was the
Speaker 3: account that he allegedly later gave to police who arrested him.
Speaker 3: It's not verified, so I should put that whole warning
Speaker 3: on it. But as you can imagine, it raises more
Speaker 3: questions than it answers why I would experienced soldier ever
Speaker 3: point a gun at anybody in the first place, let
Speaker 3: alone then pulled the trigger on somebody, Because if you
Speaker 3: imagine that happening in real life, even if that gun
Speaker 3: was not loaded, the next thing that Daniel would likely
Speaker 3: have done, having already been annoyed, would probably give him
Speaker 3: a punch him in the face. They said, don't you
Speaker 3: ever fucking do that again? I would have done I
Speaker 3: think so the explanation sort of doesn't seem to sort
Speaker 3: of bear much truth, unfortunately, for reasons that I've never
Speaker 3: been made clear.
Speaker 2: The Ukrainian police then let this individual go.
Speaker 3: He was released on bail to a hotel, and then
Speaker 3: he then made himself scarce, perhaps not surprisingly.
Speaker 1: And he's on the lamp. So he's on the lamp still, yeah.
Speaker 3: And as well, perhaps this dayre unknown, but he is
Speaker 3: wanted by the Ukrainian police in connection with Daniel's death.
Speaker 3: I cover that one in the book quite a bit,
Speaker 3: partly because I knew Daniel, and partly I wanted to
Speaker 3: sort of try and give a deepailed account of what happened,
Speaker 3: because there was a lot of a great deal.
Speaker 2: Of claim and counterclaiming it, and.
Speaker 3: Partly because it's sort of when he disappeared, it was
Speaker 3: very very soon. The finger of suspicion pointed a fellow Legionnaires.
Speaker 3: Even though nobody knew what had happened at that point.
Speaker 3: It was just this sort of sense that there are
Speaker 3: a lot of dodgy Legionnaires out there, and it seems
Speaker 3: likely that Daniels as unfortunately, had some sort of running
Speaker 3: with one of them, and you know, it just pointed
Speaker 3: to the sort of the sense that there were a
Speaker 3: lot of unsavory characters out there, and that the Legion's
Speaker 3: vetting was not very good. It did not point a
Speaker 3: very good picture of the Legion at that point. And
Speaker 3: that was similar in the other case that I write
Speaker 3: about the book where a Legionnaire called them. Jordan Chadick,
Speaker 3: a British guy who was an ex member of the
Speaker 3: Well Scots Guards who was found in a reservoir in
Speaker 3: eastern Ukraine some way from the front lines in the
Speaker 3: summer of twenty twenty three, was lying in the dead
Speaker 3: in the reservoir and his hands tied behind his back.
Speaker 3: As I say, the reservoir was some way from the
Speaker 3: front line, so it was he did not appear to
Speaker 3: have been killed by Russian soldiers. There were no known
Speaker 3: Russian separatist crews operating in that area or indeed anywhere
Speaker 3: else in you know, Ukrainian territory, so it couldn't didn't
Speaker 3: seem like it was them either. And again suspicion quickly
Speaker 3: focused on his fellow Legionnaires and apparently had an argument
Speaker 3: the night before with a bunch of his fellow legionaires
Speaker 3: while drinking, and some sort of fight had broken out,
Speaker 3: and the next thing that anybody knew was that he
Speaker 3: you know, his body had shown up in this in
Speaker 3: this lake.
Speaker 2: There's a there's there's.
Speaker 3: A limit of what I can say on that one
Speaker 3: again because it's, uh, it's quite a complicated story. There's
Speaker 3: a lot of he said, they said, I probably couldn't
Speaker 3: do justice to on a podcast even if I even
Speaker 3: if I tried to.
Speaker 1: But the story is given about how he ended up
Speaker 1: in that reservoir just don't make sense.
Speaker 3: No, yeah, uh, you know, at one point it was
Speaker 3: said that he was being taken to a local police
Speaker 3: station where you know, he was going to be held
Speaker 3: because he was drunk, but instead he ended up in
Speaker 3: this in this reservoir instead. And you have to ask
Speaker 3: yourself if somebody is supposed to be getting taken to
Speaker 3: a police station because they're drunk and have you know,
Speaker 3: they're they've needed to be restrained by handcuffs for their
Speaker 3: own safety because they've been involved in the punch up,
Speaker 3: how does that end up with them then.
Speaker 2: Dead in a reservoir.
Speaker 3: You know, somebody somewhere who would have been you know,
Speaker 3: in charge of him as a you know, you know,
Speaker 3: in custody has some questions to answer, clearly, because even
Speaker 3: if somebody has been violent, even if somebody has been
Speaker 3: restrained as a prisoner, you know, at that point most
Speaker 3: soldiers would know, especially if they've ever taken prisoner as
Speaker 3: a war or anything, that there are certain proceedures you
Speaker 3: follow to you know, if only to prevent a prisoner
Speaker 3: harming themselves or or anything else. And clearly that wasn't
Speaker 3: that didn't happen. And the the tragedy of that case,
Speaker 3: and one of the tragedies is that, uh, quite apart
Speaker 3: from Jordan's death, is that you know, nobody has been
Speaker 3: brought to book for it, and there's a very little
Speaker 3: sign of any proper judicial process happening, and very little
Speaker 3: sign of the British government really doing anything to try
Speaker 3: and question the other British soldiers who were with him
Speaker 3: at the time. I've spoken several of them. I've asked them,
Speaker 3: you know, did you know, have you had any anybody
Speaker 3: from the Foreign Office or the British Police asking to
Speaker 3: speak to you about this? None of them have, you know,
Speaker 3: And that would not be that would not be difficult
Speaker 3: if I can find out who they are. The you know,
Speaker 3: the Ukrainian police know who they are, They interviewed them
Speaker 3: all afterwards. They just think what wise are wise are
Speaker 3: proceding not on the way so that Jordan's mother, among
Speaker 3: other people, can get some proper answers about what happened,
Speaker 3: even if it turns out it was some sort of misadventure.
Speaker 3: But that that that is life in the legion. You know,
Speaker 3: you're often not fighting with with with people who you're
Speaker 3: often fighting with kind of rough diamonds of different sorts,
Speaker 3: and some who are not diamonds at all. But you know,
Speaker 3: it's what also DAWs draws them to it.
Speaker 2: And it was one of them.
Speaker 3: I was speaking to him who fought in that same
Speaker 3: unit with Jordan. Uh, you know, in often very tough combat.
Speaker 3: That's why they're all pistols. Pistols, you know, is drunk,
Speaker 3: very drunk. So using the English leave was that was
Speaker 3: why they were all very drunk when this fight broke out.
Speaker 3: They were drinking off for stress and a very very
Speaker 3: tough few months of deployment to back Mud. And yeah,
Speaker 3: I said to this guy, what, you know, what was
Speaker 3: it like fighting out there? This other guy was in
Speaker 3: the unit, and he said, yeah, it was, you know,
Speaker 3: really really hard going, really tough, you know, And I said,
Speaker 3: you know, did you find it difficult?
Speaker 2: He said, yeah, but I fucking loved it. And I
Speaker 2: think that.
Speaker 3: Sums up the Legion experience in its classic sense for
Speaker 3: a lot of the movie.
Speaker 1: And I mean, taking it from there, I want to
Speaker 1: kind of ask you about any concluding thoughts you have about,
Speaker 1: you know, your work studying and interviewing the foreigners that
Speaker 1: served in Ukraine and sort of their impact in the war.
Speaker 1: I think at the end of the book you have
Speaker 1: an interesting segment where you talk about how, you know,
Speaker 1: every single person on the battlefield makes a difference in
Speaker 1: their own small way, but the foreigners and big picture
Speaker 1: were probably not strategically relevant to the overall scheme of
Speaker 1: the war.
Speaker 2: Not enough of them. Ye oh that's right, you yeah, yeah, sure.
Speaker 3: So as just said, I don't think the numbers ever
Speaker 3: reached money much more than sort of twenty or thirty thousand,
Speaker 3: maybe a few more over the years. But that's so
Speaker 3: rough bull puck figure. She's about to say much she
Speaker 3: has fought in the Spanish Civil War and coincidentally is
Speaker 3: about the same numbers that volunteered to fight for ISIS
Speaker 3: as in fighting as jahadists in Iraq and Syria from
Speaker 3: around the world, which puts it into sort of some
Speaker 3: sort of weird perspective. So with those sort of numbers
Speaker 3: in a war with you know, maybe about half a
Speaker 3: million competents on either side are possibly more thirty five
Speaker 3: thousand or so, Even if it was that many, it's
Speaker 3: not going to make that much of a difference. Where
Speaker 3: I think the legion did make a difference, there was
Speaker 3: just in morale Ukrainians, ordinary Ukrainians in the street would
Speaker 3: see these guys wandering around in you know, in Ukrainian uniforms,
Speaker 3: but with these little sort of shoulder badges denoting the
Speaker 3: fact that they were from the UK or the US
Speaker 3: or wherever.
Speaker 2: And it was a huge.
Speaker 3: You know, it was a sign to a lot of
Speaker 3: Ukrainians that look, you know, the world is with you here,
Speaker 3: we believe in your cause. And yeah, sure, foreign governments,
Speaker 3: Western governments might not be sending troops. They may not
Speaker 3: they may not be putting boots on the ground, their
Speaker 3: own private citizens are and they're here not just to
Speaker 3: handout aid and deliver you know, first aid packages and
Speaker 3: medical stuff. They're actually here to fight and die alongside you.
Speaker 3: That's a big morale booster, I think as well as
Speaker 3: the you know, the the the individual tactical contributions that
Speaker 3: they made, whether it was experienced US marines, for example,
Speaker 3: teaching Ukrainians certain tactical stuff, or whether it was individual
Speaker 3: groups of volunteers showing metal and initiative. Initiative on the battlefield,
Speaker 3: which might often just be like, you know, taking a
Speaker 3: Russian machine gun position there, or making a good judgment
Speaker 3: call somewhere else, saying now, maybe that that's going to
Speaker 3: be too tough, stay away from that, that's going to
Speaker 3: be too difficult, you know, just sound tactical advice. I
Speaker 3: think a lot of that percolated through to the Ukrainians
Speaker 3: over time. But yeah, one of the I think that
Speaker 3: because you had a lot of bad apples, and because
Speaker 3: they didn't have any huge struty victories were an individual
Speaker 3: battalion of Legionnaires kind of took a town or village,
Speaker 3: there weren't many good headlines that the Legions generated. Really unfortunately.
Speaker 3: A lot of the headlines were about Legionaires killed, legionnaires captured,
Speaker 3: legionnaires murdered by the Legionnaires, et cetera, and that perhaps
Speaker 3: did not encourage a you know, many others to sort
Speaker 3: of join up or certainly that.
Speaker 2: Perhaps not as many as might have done. And also the.
Speaker 3: The logistics around the Legion were pretty poor in terms
Speaker 3: of people coming in, you know and not sort of
Speaker 3: you know, the recruitment system was poor, the system to
Speaker 3: actually get them channeled out to the front was lousy,
Speaker 3: and so on. And I do make the point in
Speaker 3: the book that if they'd had a better recruitment system
Speaker 3: and sort of watermastering system and everything else it's just
Speaker 3: been better organized, you might have had far more Legionaires
Speaker 3: coming in.
Speaker 2: This is something I've interested in your opinion, or.
Speaker 3: Actually because I know you've discussed people like outfits like
Speaker 3: Dying Core and Blackwater a lot on the podcasts in
Speaker 3: the past. My sort of theory, or one of the
Speaker 3: theories I advanced to the book is that, you know,
Speaker 3: if the West had been able to provide some sort
Speaker 3: of logistical support for the Legion along the lines of
Speaker 3: a Dying Core or a Blackwater training, that could have
Speaker 3: trained the legionnaires in the same way as they trained
Speaker 3: up the Iraqi Army and the Iraqi police or the
Speaker 3: Afghan army, and that that could have been done, you know,
Speaker 3: in ukrainive needs to be I think, or if need
Speaker 3: be elsewhere, and it could have been done on a
Speaker 3: private basis, that might have made a lot of difference because.
Speaker 2: Bruising experiences.
Speaker 1: You know, Putin got to have his little green Man.
Speaker 1: Why can't we have ours?
Speaker 2: Exactly? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean do you think I mean that there
Speaker 3: is a political difficulty with it in the British and
Speaker 3: American governments for example, might feel that it was a
Speaker 3: step too far, that it was it was one step
Speaker 3: off training troops. But I mean, you know, they were
Speaker 3: sending in heavy weaponry, they were sending in you know,
Speaker 3: they were training Ukrainians in their own countries.
Speaker 2: We have Ukrainian training facilities here in the UK.
Speaker 3: They were doing everything short of that, and in some
Speaker 3: ways things quite beyond that, with the heavy missiles and everything.
Speaker 2: Do you think that.
Speaker 3: Somewhere like Dying Core or Blackwater would have taken on
Speaker 3: something like that or do you think it would have
Speaker 3: been hard to get you know, PMCs to take on
Speaker 3: such a thing.
Speaker 1: I think yeah, you could. Probably. The thing with private
Speaker 1: military companies in the United States is that they don't
Speaker 1: really engage in offensive combat operations. We don't really have
Speaker 1: that much. We have intelligence contractors, we have logistical contractors,
Speaker 1: security contractors that do mobile and static security for diplomats
Speaker 1: and so on, but we don't have like executive outcomes
Speaker 1: that you know, the South Africans that fought in Angola
Speaker 1: and Sierra Leone and they really took the fight to
Speaker 1: the enemy and didn't take any ship at all. We
Speaker 1: don't really have an equivalent of that. And I guess
Speaker 1: the question is should we have something like that, and
Speaker 1: maybe maybe Yeah.
Speaker 3: I don't even think you need the equivalent of that though,
Speaker 3: because what this would be for would be for the training, and.
Speaker 1: It would be it would be a Ukrainian unit with.
Speaker 3: Military to the Ukrainian military units, right, so you wouldn't
Speaker 3: necessarily need the organizers at the you know, at the
Speaker 3: shop and a bit like what you You would have
Speaker 3: pretty much the same model as you'd have in a
Speaker 3: Rock and Afghanistan, a large scale sort of public sect
Speaker 3: to the large scale security set to training.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think that in the United States at least and
Speaker 1: to a lesser extent Western Europe. I think we're we
Speaker 1: were and we are a victim of you know, seventy
Speaker 1: seventy five years of analysis of the Soviet Union in Russia.
Speaker 1: That turned out to be wrong in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: And we had all these theories about escalation ladders and
Speaker 1: we're going to do this and then they'll do that.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think in retrospect, we probably should have
Speaker 1: just thrown up a no fly zone over Ukraine the
Speaker 1: day of the invasion and they're like no, like, no,
Speaker 1: this is unacceptable, and it called putin call him out.
Speaker 1: I mean, as we know, the Russians only respond when
Speaker 1: you punch them in the nose and tell them no,
Speaker 1: like that's not acceptable.
Speaker 3: Well, that's certainly there was a lot of Ukrainian is
Speaker 3: asking about that at the beginning of the war. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean I would have said that even that was
Speaker 3: that would.
Speaker 2: Have been riskier than yes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, what I'm sort of what I've sort of
Speaker 3: exploring the in the last chapter of the book. And
Speaker 3: also would I mean, it would have been valuable for
Speaker 3: the you know, the Britains, for the Western forces because
Speaker 3: you'd have had loads of people going out there and
Speaker 3: gaining first hand experience of what it was actually like
Speaker 3: to fight against the Russians, which would be, you know,
Speaker 3: which would be extremely useful. And I think it would
Speaker 3: have probably attracted a far you know, potentially far more
Speaker 3: soldiers you know, into the Ukrainian military fold, because there'd
Speaker 3: be a lot of people who probably like.
Speaker 2: Us, including serving US military soldiers.
Speaker 3: They might have had, you know, take a sabbatical of
Speaker 3: some sort, who would say that, you know, a few
Speaker 3: three months fighting in Ukraine on the front lines is
Speaker 3: worth several years of training back home. I mean, it
Speaker 3: strikes me as a little bit of a failure of imagination.
Speaker 3: I can think of all sorts of good reasons why
Speaker 3: it wouldn't happen. But that's always the case when you
Speaker 3: get a war. There's always people who are going to
Speaker 3: say we can't do this for reasons they be and c.
Speaker 3: And often it's it's when people kind of find a
Speaker 3: reason around that that.
Speaker 2: You get a breakthrough.
Speaker 3: I'd be interested to see, you know, I've not sort
Speaker 3: of found anybody who's who's really sort of been able
Speaker 3: to sort of argue the ins and outs of this
Speaker 3: will I'll be interested to see if any of your
Speaker 3: listeners have a reason to say, na, sorry, part of
Speaker 3: that wouldn't work, you know, which they may well be,
Speaker 3: but it seems a bit like a missed opportunity to me,
Speaker 3: I must say, and I do remember there's a guy
Speaker 3: in the book who I quote who sort of says
Speaker 3: it was a former US Army soldier I think he
Speaker 3: was unfortunately was actually killed out in Ukraine. And he says,
Speaker 3: you know, it surprises me. They're not fucked tons of
Speaker 3: guys from West point out here just learning the ropes,
Speaker 3: you know, like you.
Speaker 2: Know, he was amazed that the legion was as small
Speaker 2: as it was. And I think it's a telling point.
Speaker 1: So the book, for people who want to read it,
Speaker 1: I highly recommend it is The Mad and the Brave.
Speaker 1: It's a story of Ukraine's foreign legion. Available now. You
Speaker 1: can find it in bookshops or on Amazon wherever you
Speaker 1: want to go. Colin, What's what's the next book? What
Speaker 1: are you working on now?
Speaker 2: Oh? No idea I've done. I think I've done three
Speaker 2: year before.
Speaker 3: I've done one about my time in the one about
Speaker 3: being kidnapped in Somalia, otherwise about some other people being kidnapped.
Speaker 2: I have no idea.
Speaker 3: Books do not grow on trees where I know, either
Speaker 3: where I'm from. Sadly, I often think I would like
Speaker 3: to do another one on the Ukrainian Legion because every
Speaker 3: time I meet a Legionaire, even if it's just for
Speaker 3: a five minute conversation, they always tell me something that
Speaker 3: happened to them on the battle that makes you think
Speaker 3: Jesus Christ, I could have got a chapter in the
Speaker 3: book out of that.
Speaker 2: I wish I'd met you before. You know, that's on
Speaker 2: the basis of a five minute conversation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think you should.
Speaker 3: Millions, million and ones stories still to be to be
Speaker 3: written about the Legion and my one basically was kind
Speaker 3: of written to deadline to make sure it came out early,
Speaker 3: so you know you, I would not necessarily claim the
Speaker 3: stories I've done are necessarily the most thrilling stories that
Speaker 3: the Legionnaires have out there, but maybe the history books
Speaker 3: will give them.
Speaker 2: Maybe I'll do another we'll see that'd be great.
Speaker 1: And where can people find you online? Do you have
Speaker 1: a website or social media or anything.
Speaker 3: The easiest way to reached me is on my Twitter feed,
Speaker 3: which I'm also on the Blue Sky b or whatever
Speaker 3: it's called.
Speaker 2: The one.
Speaker 3: It's Colin Freeman nine to nine at so as upon
Speaker 3: Me at Colin Freeman ninety nine is my Twitter feed
Speaker 3: and also, to be honest, if you google me, you'll
Speaker 3: see me see the book and my Telegraph home pace
Speaker 3: on fairly easy to find you and I can also
Speaker 3: be found at Colin dot Freeman at Telegraph dot com UK,
Speaker 3: which is my generic Telegraph email.
Speaker 2: I do check my email and my Twitter feed pretty
Speaker 2: rankyly on my on my call it spams.
Speaker 3: So yeah, if anybody ever wants to get in touch,
Speaker 3: feel free to you. And thank you to anyone out
Speaker 3: there who's who's listening. And I hope I haven't made
Speaker 3: too many sort of faux pas or bloopers in terms
Speaker 3: of my military knowledge.
Speaker 1: No, no, it was great, and we'll have links down
Speaker 1: the description for all of that stuff that where you
Speaker 1: can go and find Colin in his book. Thank you
Speaker 1: for joining us tonight, Colin, I really appreciate you taking
Speaker 1: the time.
Speaker 2: I enjoyed it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and everyone else out there, we'll see you guys
Speaker 1: next time.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
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