Cpl Bryan Budd of 3rd Battalion The Parachute Regiment assaults a Taliban position near Sangin, Afghanistan on 20th August 2006 to allow the recovery of wounded men.
For this selfless act, and in recognition of his inspirational leadership and supreme valour, Cpl Budd was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.
Politicians refer to themselves as public servants. Swamp creatures like Joe Biden will extol their many decades of employment in Washington DC as though they had been some kind of galley slave toiling away on an Athenian man o’ war. I have actually met a couple of those guys. Their idea of selfless service does not quite match my own.
American legislators spend money like drunken sailors. Actually, that’s not true. Drunken sailors couldn’t even begin to burn cash in as profligate a manner as might your typical freshman congressman. They’ve raised wasting money to an art form.
You think I’m kidding. Back when I was a soldier I spent a week as a local liaison officer for a group of congressmen on a fact-finding mission after the First Gulf War. It was amazing just watching them eat. They’d go to the nicest restaurant in town and order one of anything they might be curious about. Then they swapped plates around so everybody got a taste. One of my several duties was to scurry back and forth to the Officers’ Club cashing $500 government traveler’s checks to pay for it all. It was surreal.
Everybody in DC has sold their soul to somebody. I’ll champion the folks on my side of the aisle in the vain hope that they might someday just leave me the heck alone, but they are all irredeemably corrupt. The system perpetuates itself. It will never get better.
On May 31, 2002, Pat Tillman and his brother Kevin walked into a local recruiting office and enlisted in the US Army. Pat walked away from a $3.6 million professional football contract and Lord knows what else so he could serve his country in the immediate aftermath of 911. Pat Tillman’s story is that of a conflicted man and a horribly flawed system. However, his is a tale of epic sacrifice and genuine selfless service.
Pat Tillman was the eldest of three sons born to Patrick and Mary Tillman in Fremont, California. By NFL standards, Tillman was not a terribly big man. He stood 5’11” and weighed 202 pounds when dressed out as a safety for the Arizona Cardinals. Pat personified the axiom, “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”
In high school Tillman preferred baseball, but he failed to make the team as a freshman. At that point, he turned his attention to the gridiron. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, Pat was powerfully close to his friends and family. He married his childhood sweetheart just before he enlisted in the Army. He and his brother Kevin enlisted together, trained together, and were eventually both assigned to the 2d Ranger Battalion based at Fort Lewis, Washington.
Pat Tillman attended Arizona State University on a football scholarship and excelled as a linebacker. An exceptionally deep young man, Tillman was well read and made good grades. He maintained a 3.85 GPA in marketing and graduated in 3.5 years despite the rigors of starting on his college football team.
Pat thrived in the NFL. Sports Illustrated writer Paul Zimmerman named Tillman to the 2000 NFL All-Pro team based upon his stellar performance as a defensive player. He turned down a $9 million offer to move to the St. Louis Rams out of loyalty to his Arizona team.
Eight months after the 911 attacks and with the remainder of his 15 games completed from his 2001 contract, Pat Tillman left $3.6 million on the table to go to Army basic training alongside his brother. Pat’s brother Kevin gave up a burgeoning career in minor league baseball for the same path. These two men put their love of country ahead of the sorts of things the rest of us would just about kill for.
Appreciate the details here. I’m a happily married hetero man, and even I admit that Pat Tillman was an exceptionally good-looking guy. Intelligent, articulate, and well-educated, Tillman had the world by the tail. Once his time in the NFL was complete Pat Tillman could have easily parlayed his gifts and experiences into a career on television or in Hollywood. Instead, he opted for the Ranger Regiment.
I was an Army aviator, but I worked with those guys on occasion. Theirs was an absolutely miserable life. Junior enlisted soldiers don’t get paid beans, and the optempo in the Ranger Battalions is utterly grueling. In less than two years on active duty, Pat Tillman completed basic training and AIT as well as the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program. He was deployed to Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom in September of 2003 after which he attended Ranger School at Fort Benning. Once a fully tabbed Ranger, he returned to Second Bat at Lewis and deployed to Afghanistan where he was based at FOB Salerno.
Up until this point, Pat Tillman was the US Army’s poster child. An American superhero with a face right out of central casting, Tillman’s story could not have been any more compelling had it been drafted by an action novelist. Then Something Truly Horrible happened.
Combat is an ugly, filthy, chaotic thing. It is seldom as tidy or predictable as the movies and sand table exercises depict it to be. On April 22, 2004, the fog of war claimed a genuine American hero.
On a forgotten road leading from the Afghan village of Sperah about 40 klicks outside of Khost, Pat Tillman’s small HUMVEE-mounted patrol ran into trouble. Their mission that day was to retrieve a disabled HUMVEE. This tale is made all the more tragic in that we abandoned tens of thousands of these vehicles when we fled Afghanistan recently. The details are fiercely debated to this day, but here is the official description.
Tillman was in the lead vehicle designated Serial 1. Serial 1 passed through a mountainous pass and was roughly one kilometer ahead of Serial 2, the following HUMVEE. At that point, Serial 2 was purportedly engaged by hostile forces.
Upon hearing of the ambush, the Rangers in Serial 1 dismounted and made their way on foot back toward an overwatch position where they could provide supporting fires for Serial 2. In the resulting chaos, the Rangers of Serial 2 lost touch with the specific location of the lead Rangers. In the violent exchange of fire that followed Tillman’s Platoon Leader and his RTO (Radio Telephone Operator) were wounded. An allied member of the Afghan Militia Force was killed. Pat Tillman caught three 5.56mm rounds from an M249 SAW to the face from a range of 10 meters and died instantly.
First introduced in 1984, the Belgian-designed M249 Squad Automatic Weapon was an Americanized version of the FN Minimi. An open-bolt, gas-operated design, the M249 was conceived to provide the Infantry squad with a portable source of high-volume, belt-fed automatic fire. The M249 has seen action in every major military engagement since the US invasion of Panama in 1989.
The M249 weighs 17 pounds empty and 22 pounds with a basic load of 200 linked rounds. The weapon fires from an open bolt and features a quick-change barrel system. The gun will feed on either disintegrating linked belts or standard STANAG M4 magazines. In my experience, the magazine feed system was never terribly reliable.
USSOCOM adopted a lighter, more streamlined version of the M249 titled the Mk46 for use with special operations forces. The M4 magazine well, vehicle mounting lugs, and barrel change handle were all removed on the Mk 46 to save weight. The USMC has aggressively supplemented their rifle squads with the HK M27 Infantry Automatic Rifle in lieu of many of their SAWs. These weapons are currently issued at a ratio of 27 IARs and 6 SAWs per rifle company. The Next Generation Squad Weapon-Automatic Rifle program is tasked with finding a suitable replacement for the aging M249’s in the Army inventory.
What happened next was a blight on the US Army. To have Pat Tillman, the real live Captain America killed due to friendly fire in a botched combat operation was not the story the Army wanted pushed. As a result, several senior Army officers moved to massage the narrative and outright suppress the story to both the media and the Tillman family. The end result was an absolutely ghastly mess.
There were allegations that Tillman, by now disillusioned with the war in Iraq, was about to offer an interview with controversial activist Noam Chomsky upon his return from his Afghanistan deployment that would be critical of the Bush Administration.
As Tillman’s death occurred in a crucial time leading up to the 2004 Presidential elections conspiracy theorists even proposed that he had been intentionally murdered. However, interviews with his fellow Rangers verified that Tillman was a popular and selfless member of the team. In the final analysis, it all seems to have been a truly horrible mistake. After several investigations undertaken by the military, three mid-level Army leaders purportedly received administrative punishment as a result.
A word on the conspiracies. Soldiers don’t fight for mom, apple pie, and America. They fight for each other. There’s just no way you could get a Ranger to intentionally shoot another Ranger to protect the reputation of a sitting President. This was simply a horrible accident.
The sordid circumstances surrounding the death of Pat Tillman in no way diminish the truly breathtaking scope of the man’s patriotism and sacrifice. Tillman was an avowed atheist throughout his life. After his funeral, his youngest brother Richard asserted, “Just make no mistake, he’d want me to say this: He’s not with God, he’s f&%ing dead, he’s not religious.” Richard added, “Thanks for your thoughts, but he’s f&%in’ dead.” It was an undeniably strange end for a genuine American hero.
Soldiers in combat will often pen a “just in case” letter to be opened in the event of their death. Pat’s note to his wife Marie said, “Through the years I’ve asked a great deal of you, therefore it should surprise you little that I have another favor to ask. I ask that you live.”
And live she did. Marie Tillman today is Chairman and Co-Founder of The Pat Tillman Foundation. This non-profit works to “unite and empower remarkable military service members, veterans, and spouses as the next generation of public and private sector leaders committed to service beyond self.” The Foundation has sponsored 635 Tillman Scholars and invested some $18 million in philanthropy. Marie has since remarried and is the mother of five children.
As nearly 13,000 rebel soldiers streamed forward across open fields with the dream of breaking the center of the Union line on Cemetery Ridge and achieving a war-winning victory for the Confederacy, the steely-eyed 22 year old Wisconsinite gave every ounce of his devotion to the defense of the threatened Federal position.
Struck by a searing hot piece of shrapnel during the Confederate artillery barrage that preceded the assault, both Cushing’s thighs and his stomach were ripped open. With all of his officers dead and only two of his guns still operational, the first lieutenant did not waver, holding his belly to keep his entrails from spilling out and continuing to perform his duty. As other artillery units withdrew from the ridge, Cushing ordered his remaining guns moved up to the stone wall at “the Angle” to meet the enemy onslaught head-on.
Despite pleas from his subordinates urging him to go to the rear for medical treatment, Cushing remained firm: “No, I stay right here and fight it out or die in the attempt.” With the Confederates less than 100 yards away, he grasped the lanyard that fired his gun and shouted, “I will give them one more shot!” As his weapon roared one last time, the young artilleryman was shot in the head and fell dead beside his gun.
Alonzo Cushing gave the last full measure of devotion in defense of the Union center and played an unforgettable role in the resistance that broke the back of the Army of Northern Virginia on July 3, 1863. One hundred fifty-one year after his heroism at Gettysburg, Cushing was posthumously awarded the United States military’s highest decoration for valor under fire, the Medal of Honor.
Read the full story of the epic Battle of Gettysburg in this three part series: Day One – The Armies Collide, Day Two – A Time for Heroes, and Day Three – Triumph and Tragedy.
Sources
American Battlefield Trust: Alonzo H. Cushing.
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson.
Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg by James M. McPherson.
National Park Service: Lt. Alonzo Cushing at Gettysburg.
by By Ian Lovett and Brett Forrest
Daniel Swift’s nerves were shot. By the start of 2019, his Navy SEAL colleagues said, he was hardly eating or sleeping.
He had separated from his wife. A court had barred him from seeing his four children, and he was facing legal charges for false imprisonment and domestic battery.
Mr. Swift told fellow SEALs in San Diego, where he was based, that he was planning to go to Africa to fight wildlife poachers. They brushed off the comment, convinced that Mr. Swift, a soldier’s soldier, would never abandon his post.
A week later, he disappeared. Navy investigators searched for him, but Mr. Swift was always a step ahead.
He resurfaced in March of last year when he slipped into a group messaging chat of current and former SEALs. He was now fighting Russians in Ukraine, he texted. He petitioned the group for supplies, and later invited members to join him on the front lines. None did. Some advised him to come home. Others marveled as word of his exploits spread.
Mr. Swift was among thousands of young men who flooded to Kyiv from the West, including American veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many said they were drawn to the cause of a democratic country resisting a larger autocratic one.
But there was another side to Mr. Swift’s quest, as revealed in interviews with his colleagues and a memoir he published online under a pseudonym. Mr. Swift was part of a large group who spent years fighting America’s war on terror and have struggled to settle back into civilian life.
The military has acknowledged the impact on servicemembers and their families, particularly special forces, who suffered the outsized casualties during the later years of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.
Long deployments have pushed up divorce rates, while suicides among special forces spiked to the highest in the military. The government has launched programs to help lessen the psychological burden on spouses as well as troops.
Daniel Glenn, a psychologist who works with veterans at the University of California, Los Angeles, said many tell him that the U.S. military does a great job preparing them to go to war, but not to return from it.
“They’ve been in some of the most intense, dangerous, awful situations. They’re really good at that,” he said. “Comparatively, back in the civilian world, everything feels mundane. It’s hard to have anything that feels like a rush or makes you feel alive.”
Daniel Swift serving in Severodonetsk, Ukraine.
Many of the men who fought with Mr. Swift said this feeling was part of what drew them to Ukraine.
“A lot of people won’t admit it, but lots of people are here because war is fun,” said a 43-year-old U.S. Army veteran. Civilian life, he added, didn’t offer the same camaraderie or sense of purpose: “War is easy in many ways. Your mission is crystal clear. You’re here to take the enemy out.”
Mr. Swift had wanted to be a Navy SEAL since childhood. After graduating from high school in rural Oregon in 2005, he married his high-school sweetheart and enlisted in the Navy.
Two years later, he enrolled in the SEALs selection program, a grueling process highlighted by “Hell Week,” when candidates train physically for more than 20 hours a day, run more than 200 miles and sleep for about four hours total.
The vast majority of candidates wash out. Mr. Swift, just 20 years old, made it. Soon after, his wife gave birth to their first child.
A teetotaler, Mr. Swift sometimes drove fellow SEALs on bar crawls, though he often stayed in and studied tactics in military manuals.
On deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, he won a reputation for dependability, a rare Legion of Merit award and a nickname, “Viet Dan,” inspired by his fondness for action.
“Tough kid, humble, quiet, and a little bit crazy,” said a SEAL who was the third in command of Mr. Swift’s first platoon.
In 2013, when his wife was pregnant with their fourth child, Mr. Swift decided to quit. “I thought maybe God was trying to tell me to settle down and be a family man,” he wrote in his memoir, which he self-published in 2020.
He joined the Washington state police and reveled in time off with his kids, exploring logging roads through the woods, cooking hot dogs and shooting guns.
The new job didn’t suit him, though. Police officers were rewarded for giving out tickets rather than helping people, he wrote in his book. Sitting in his cruiser scanning for speeders, Mr. Swift texted friends in the SEALs and told them he missed life among them, according to Navy comrades.
In 2015, a friend from the SEALs died, and Mr. Swift decided to re-enlist as a fight with Islamic State beckoned. “I wanted my piece of the pie,” he wrote.
In Iraq again, Mr. Swift took on Islamic State militants in city streets. Later, he deployed to Yemen.
Navy SEAL candidates train during ‘Hell Week.’ PHOTO: PETTY OFFICER 1ST CLASS ABE MCNATT/U.S. NAVY
Most candidates wash out of the SEALs selection program. PHOTO: PETTY OFFICER 1ST CLASS ABE MCNATT/U.S. NAVY
The overseas missions took a toll on his marriage. In October 2018, shortly after Mr. Swift returned from seven months in Yemen, his relationship with his wife collapsed.
In court documents, Maegan Swift said he’d returned home angry, prone to yelling at her. He disputed this account in his book, but both agreed that one night when they were arguing at home, she threatened to call the police if he prevented her from leaving with the kids.
Mr. Swift went to the bedroom and returned with a pistol.
He said in the book that it was unloaded and that he told her: “See what happens when the cops try and take my children from me.”
Ms. Swift moved the children to her sister’s house while Mr. Swift was traveling. When he returned, a scuffle ensued as he tried to put his younger daughter in his car and Ms. Swift and her sister tried to stop him. Mr. Swift said he was fending off the women as they attacked him; they said he choked Ms. Swift’s sister. The police arrived and arrested him.
Ms. Swift declined to comment for this article.
A Navy psychologist said Mr. Swift had adjustment disorder, a term for difficulty re-entering civilian life, Mr. Swift wrote in his memoir. He dismissed the diagnosis.
Mr. Swift was charged in state court with false imprisonment, child endangerment and domestic battery, which threatened his military career. If convicted of a felony, Mr. Swift would lose his right to carry a gun, and this prospect shook him, according to SEALs who knew him. Being a warrior was nearly all he’d known.
Most of all, he worried about losing his kids, the oldest of whom was the oldest of whom was 11.
Mr. Swift wrote that while the U.S. government has helped veterans cope with war trauma, “what we don’t seem to care about is when they return home to things they’ve been fighting for, only to have them ripped away.”
“I have been face to face with death multiple times, and it has never been more traumatic than having my children taken away,” he wrote.
In the early months of 2019, Mr. Swift disappeared. His passport pinged at immigration control in Mexico, then in Germany, a former SEAL colleague said.
Mr. Swift tried to join the French Foreign Legion, according to another SEAL colleague, but was rejected because the recruiters worried his kids could be a distraction. He ended up in Thailand where he fought kickboxing matches and taught English.
He wrote his memoir, he said, to explain himself to his children. “If you ever want to talk to me just make a Facebook page,” he wrote, addressing his kids. “I look.”
He titled the book “The Fall of a Man.”
After Russia invaded Ukraine in February of last year, news reports of the war’s child victims reminded Mr. Swift of his own children and stirred him to action, he later told friends.
He entered Ukraine in early March and joined a platoon running missions behind enemy lines near Kyiv, according to soldiers who fought with him there.
During his first operations, he taped body armor to his chest under a white Fruit of the Loom T-shirt because he arrived without a vest to hold bulletproof plates. His teammates called it the “Dan special.”
Conducting reconnaissance and hunting armored vehicles with a Javelin antitank missile, he soon developed a reputation as highly skilled, methodical and most comfortable in the middle of a firefight, according to men who fought with him.
Adam Thiemann, a former U.S. Army Ranger, recalled one mission, where he and Mr. Swift set off with five others to ambush a Russian barrack. Outside the compound, they surprised a handful of uniformed Russian soldiers and quickly killed them. The Ukrainian commander ordered a retreat. Mr. Swift, who’d been quiet up to that point, was incredulous.
“Retreat?” Mr. Swift said, according to Mr. Thiemann and another team member. “We didn’t even get shot at.”
When Russian troops pulled back from Kyiv at the end of March, many foreign fighters went home, feeling they’d helped fend off the existential threat to Ukraine. Mr. Swift stayed.
His foreign legion team—a unit of Ukraine’s military intelligence, made up of about 20 foreigners and a Ukrainian commander—was dispatched to the city of Mykolaiv in the country’s south.
There, Mr. Swift led the squad on aquatic missions, often using inflatable boats to travel across open sea at night to target Russian positions, according to several soldiers in his unit.
During down time, teammates said, he was quiet and uncommonly disciplined. He didn’t drink or smoke, and worked out obsessively. Even near the front, he’d go out for long solo runs.
Men fighting with Mr. Swift in Ukraine said he would accompany them for shawarma in Mykolaiv, walking around shirtless in jeans and sandals and getting waitresses’ phone numbers. In photos, he rarely smiled; he was more likely to crack a joke during missions, they said.
He told only a few comrades about his life outside the military.
One teammate, a 29-year-old American who goes by the call sign Tex, said Mr. Swift confided in him about his troubles at home.
“He loved his kids,” Tex said. “A lot of things didn’t bother Dan. But the thought of his kids maybe being told who he was and not actually knowing him, that worried him.”
Ukrainian soldiers in the eastern city of Bakhmut in January. PHOTO: EMANUELE SATOLLI FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
In early June, the team headed to the eastern city of Severodonetsk, which the Russians were flattening with artillery.
The group had earned a reputation for taking on missions that others turned down. As the situation in Severodonetsk grew worse, Mr. Swift joked that if they were surrounded, at least they could shoot in every direction.
On its last trip into the city, the team tried to hit a building where they believed about 10 Russians were hiding. As soon as they fired the first rocket, however, they found themselves under heavy assault. Dozens of Russians were in the building. Mr. Swift ended up trapped in a corner, trading machine-gun fire with a Russian.
The legion team’s Ukrainian commander, Oleksiy Chubashev, was shot through the neck.
With a Russian tank approaching, Mr. Swift laid down covering fire to free a group of pinned-down comrades, who put Capt. Chubashev on a stretcher and carried him out the back of the building.
Mr. Swift joined them outside to help carry the stretcher. A video seen by The Wall Street Journal shows them hauling the body through the city in daylight, without cover, while artillery shells whistle and crash around them.
After about a half a mile in the June heat, an exhausted young soldier dropped his corner of the stretcher.
“Dan just tore into him,” a member of the team from Minnesota recalled. “He never yells. But he screamed, like, ‘What are you saving your energy for?’ ”
Capt. Chubashev died before making it back to base.
The next morning, Mr. Swift sat down beside several teammates who were drinking coffee. He said he was thinking about calling his children.
The men were shocked. They didn’t know he had kids.
Soon after, Ukrainian forces started to retreat from Severodonetsk. Several of the men on Mr. Swift’s team decided they’d had enough. They went home.
Mr. Swift, by contrast, began setting up for life in Ukraine. He was looking for an apartment in Kyiv and sorted out a Ukrainian visa for a Thai woman he’d met when he was living there. He spoke of establishing an academy in Ukraine after the war to teach military tactics.
He returned to Mykolaiv, where he again led aquatic missions into Russian-held territory.
In August, Mr. Swift led an attack on a Russian-held village across the Inhulets River. Working with Ukrainian special forces, the team forced the Russians to retreat, calling in a strike on a house full of enemy soldiers and taking seven prisoners.
But they ended up sheltering in a basement under Russian artillery fire. Mr. Swift called the unit’s new Ukrainian commander, asking to pull back, according to team members. The commander said no.
Mr. Swift pulled the team out anyway. In the middle of the night, he and the team medic swam upriver to retrieve a half-inflated boat to bring their comrades and gear back across to Ukrainian-held territory. When they got back to the base, Mr. Swift quit and moved to another foreign legion team.
A spokesman for Ukraine’s foreign legion declined to comment.
By the new year, Ukraine’s hold on Bakhmut, in the eastern Donetsk region, was tenuous. Mr. Swift’s unit, dispatched there, found Ukrainian troops scattered in basements around the city sheltering from withering Russian artillery fire.
“I’m just here in the basement,” Mr. Swift said in a phone call with a former Green Beret, who’d fought with him earlier in the war. “Trying to plan missions that are not going to get us killed.”
Mr. Swift was scheduled to leave Bakhmut later in January and planned to meet the Thai woman in Romania and bring her to Kyiv.
On the night of Jan. 17, Mr. Swift led a small team of Western fighters into a cluster of homes and began clearing them of fighters from the Russian paramilitary group Wagner, according to Mr. Swift’s unit commander. As Mr. Swift led his squad between buildings, a Russian soldier fired a rocket-propelled grenade.
A projectile, either shrapnel or a bullet, penetrated Mr. Swift’s helmet and lodged in his brain.
His commander found Mr. Swift lying prone, yet coherent. As the unit hurried to evacuate, Mr. Swift fought to remain lucid and asked for help getting to his feet. “I’ll walk out,” he said.
He lost consciousness and died three days later at a trauma center in Dnipro, a nearby regional capital. He was 35 years old.
A memorial service for Daniel Swift in Lviv, Ukraine. PHOTO: STANISLAV IVANOV/GLOBAL IMAGES UKRAINE/GETTY IMAGES
Mr. Swift died while still a SEAL, though AWOL, in a war to which the U.S. hasn’t committed troops. This has complicated his family’s effort to collect benefits from Washington.
A Navy spokesman said Mr. Swift was considered to be an active deserter at the time of his death, and that “we cannot speculate as to why the former Sailor was in Ukraine.” The Pentagon has yet to make a ruling on the family’s petition.
On Feb. 11, several SEALs attended Mr. Swift’s funeral in Oregon. In a video viewed by the Journal, one by one they punched metal SEAL pins into the surface of his casket, a SEAL ritual to the fallen.
Nikita Nikolaienko contributed to this article.
The Wooden hand of Captain Jean Danjou the most sacred icon of the FFL.
The Battle of Camarón, (30 April 1863). Was a defensive action fought with suicidal courage during France’s ill-fated intervention in Mexico. The Battle of Camarón founded the legend of the French Foreign Legion.