Swampy's War

Task Force Yankee and the Confused, Idealistic Western Volunteers in Ukraine

Swampy is 38, thin, scruffily handsome. Read about him online – in some of the many very stupid articles and posts that have accumulated about him over the years – and he sounds like bad news or, as one blogger wrote, ‘a troubled young man’: left the British army with an injury before the end of his term of service, did time for attempting to rob a gas station, ‘bounced around’ between Burma and the UK, served with the Azov Battalion in Ukraine in 2014-15, had a spell of internet infamy when RT News caught him on camera in Donbas and used the clip to prove that there were ‘American mercenaries’ in Ukraine.

But war shows you different sides of people, and when I meet Swampy in Lviv in March, he’s sort of in charge of a very ad hoc, somewhat ragtag group of Western volunteers who have taken it upon themselves to set up a supply corridor leading from Poland through Lviv and Kyiv and to the front line. And, in his low-key way, he’s a natural leader and magnetic to everybody passing through – it’s very hard to conduct an interview with him at the Lviv depot given all the times somebody shouts for his help: there’s a call from a volunteer trying to get into the country or there’s a package at the door and somebody is needed who has familiarity with the culture or there’s a decision to make about which driver to send to Poland to pick up a round of supplies. “I just want to go outside and smash heads together is all I want to do,” he says – but, as it happens, deals patiently with each problem as it comes up.

“Swampy.” Courtesy Chris Garrett.

The group I’ve come across has styled itself ‘Task Force Yankee’ – founded on February 25th, the day after Russia invaded Ukraine. There’s probably nothing very special about them, a fly-by-night idealistic operation configured out of some ancestral memory of the Lincoln Brigade, bound sooner rather than later to collapse from personality clashes or lack of funding, but they’re my favorite people I come across in Ukraine and, if it’s hard to know whether they’re making any actual positive difference, what I’m at least impressed by is that they’re genuinely trying.

The founder of Task Force Yankee is Harrison Jozefowicz, 25 years old, who served five years in the U.S. Army and then quit his job as a Chicago police officer to travel to Ukraine. “I asked for one month of unpaid leave, the Chicago PD is short-staffed so they said no, so I said, well why don’t I just resign,” Harrison says. He met Swampy during a brief spell training with the Georgian National Legion and then the two of them peeled away to focus on the supply chain and on providing support for the often-rudderless volunteers who had been streaming in from the West without much idea of how they could be useful. 

By the time I meet Harrison and Swampy, they’re startlingly well set up. They have a van and a house – which has the feel of an unusually disgusting youth hostel, with sleeping bags laid out on the upstairs floor and cigarettes smoked indoors all day long – and they have a small army, British, American, Canadian volunteers, almost all ex-military, most of whom had been disabused of their first thought of joining the International Legion or Georgian National Legion and have the buoyant sense of having found the right band. “I have tried to talk a number of people out of being in a rush to get to the front line,” Swampy says. “They’re people coming in from a military background, they’ve come in wanting to fight, but have realized since they’ve gotten here that there’s a bigger picture here and that is the ability to get supplies into the right place.”

By this time, Harrison and Swampy have settled also into what seems to be a seamless division of labor. They’ve known each other for less than a month but, as Harrison says, “He and I would call each other best friends – you become friends quickly, especially in an environment like this where you don’t know who you can trust.” Harrison is focused on managing the house and trying to smooth out the often-tangled supply lines. “I quickly realized that this is a wartime Amazon fulfillment center,” he says. “We get these medical requests from the front, find suppliers in Poland who can fulfill the requests – we are middlemen if you will.” He’s very conscientious, always looks worried, is in a constant state of frustration with better-established NGOs that allegedly have warehouses stocked with needed supplies and that have been slow to push them out. And Swampy – his real name is Chris Garrett but everybody calls him by his nom de guerre and it suits him perfectly – is reverting to what is for him a familiar role as adventurer, pushing ahead to Kyiv with a small contingent to try to make closer contact with the front line, to check on supply distribution, and to get the medics in their group to where they’re needed.

Harrison at Lviv depot. Courtesy Harrison Jozefowicz.

The motives for everybody here are a tangle. Helping Ukraine is straightforward enough, but talk to anybody connected to Task Force Yankee and there’s also a sense of rootlessness – the usual combination for military veterans of craving action and camaraderie and of feeling some impossible-to-assuage guilt for not having done more in previous deployments. Harrison, who served in Afghanistan in 2018, talks about losing a friend in the 2021 terrorist attack on the Kabul airport. “On a personal level that made me go through a lot,” he says. “I told myself that if anything ever happens in the future that is like what Afghanistan went through I would help out however I can – and here we are, six months later with Ukraine.” Swampy insists that, exhausted from having spent years traveling back and forth to the Donbas War, he had planned to skip out on this conflict but “made the mistake” of agreeing to help facilitate volunteers traveling to Ukraine and then quickly found himself deluged with requests. “I wasn’t actually planning on coming out if I’m completely honest, but I sat at home and I was thinking, hang on, I’m sending a lot of people out here, and what if just one person died that I helped to facilitate to get here,” he says. “And, ok, dying in a firefight is one thing, but what if someone died because they didn’t have the right body armor or didn’t have medical equipment.” Which may sound very altruistic, but Swampy isn’t the sort of person to leave his deeper motives unquestioned. “If you’re anything like myself, on the hardest days [of war] you’ve had enough,” he says, “you don’t want to be shot at anymore, you’re bored of being shot at, and then the second you get home you miss it, it’s just a craving, I forget who said it, that once you’ve hunted man you care for little else.”

Sleeping quarters. Lviv depot.

In terms of backstory, Swampy grew up on the Isle of Man, which he describes as being a tax haven and the home of the TT motorcycle races – “but you have to have a screw loose to do those.” He went to the Army Foundation School at 16, was out of the military before the end of his term of service, and, during “not the best time of my life,” found himself somehow fixated on Burma. “I wasn’t really doing much,” he says, “but my grandfather was a Burma Star recipient so I was paying attention to Burma anyway and thought I’d like to go out, see what’s going on, see if I can help in any way.” In Burma, supporting the Karen National Liberation Army, the great need was for land mine clearance given the presence of unexploded ordnance from decades of conflict, and, although focused on humanitarian work, he picked up the rudiments of mine clearing. He returned from Burma just as war was breaking out in the Donbas. “My bags were already still packed from Asia so I thought I’ll see what happens,” he says. At the time he arrived in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, it was “quite a mess” – Ukraine wasn’t remotely set up for war – and Swampy joined the far-right-affiliated Azov Battalion, which actually wasn’t as fraught of a decision as it might sound. “At that time they were the only ones doing anything,” he says. In January 2015, though, RT News posted a video of him in combat fatigues holding his hand up to block the camera and saying “Outta my face, outta my face,” and the internet was not so understanding of a Britisher (most posters assumed American) fighting Russians in Ukraine and being connected with Azov. “I feel nothing but pain,” he wrote on Instagram at the time. “That those back home sit in their nice comfy homes and have nothing better to do than bad mouth the fact that i saw a problem and i am addressing in a way that I know how.” Speaking about this now, he says, “Azov is something that I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life,” but adds that, if many of the Azov soldiers had far-right or neo-Nazi political views, it didn’t come up much in practice – Azov functioned like any other military unit. And such is Swampy’s charm that he can make the Azov Battalion sound like the most natural, reasonable thing in the world. “The bulk of the guys were not far right, they wanted to serve their country,” Swampy says. “Did I hear racism? Yes. Did I see it? No. You will find far right people in most militaries unfortunately. I had to work with them to get a job done but socially some of them were not the kind of people I’d want to know now.” (By the way, Swampy’s account is consonant with what I heard from many moderate Ukrainians – that they don’t endorse Azov, but at the time of the outbreak of war in 2014, the far-right Azov and Right Sector were the only elements in Ukraine truly prepared to fight Russian aggression.)

His outing by the RT had the silver lining of making him known as the point of contact for Westerners looking to get involved in the Donbas War. “After the initial carnage, in amongst the hate mail I received online, I started to receive hundreds and hundreds of messages of people saying hey I want to come out, I can do this, and I can do that, I can offer this, I can offer that,” Swampy says – the sideline that’s continued into 2022 and created a sort of schism for him, on the one hand people-managing, “which is not my strongest point,” he says, “but it’s absolutely fine, I can meet-and-greet,” and on the other hand the very difficult, dirty frontline work at which, as far as I can tell, he excels at and has an almost mystical connection to. Initially, in 2014, he was assigned to a reconnaissance unit with other foreigners and on subsequent trips moved to a scout and sniper unit, but it was the mine clearance and EOD (explosive ordnance device) skills he'd picked up in Burma that turned out to be in high demand. “I got whored out to anyone that needed EOD support,” he says. Putting things more grandly, his Azov commander told the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal that “Swampy’s work has saved a lot of lives.” By the time I meet him, mine clearance has come to be a central part of his identity – his patch that says ‘Have C4 Will EOD,’ which is like an inside joke’s inside joke, or, most conspicuously, the dynamite tattoos that run up both his arms. “That’s the joke,” he says – that if a mine does go off it will follow the path of the explosion up his arms as already laid out by the tattoos.

“Swampy.” Courtesy Chris Garrett

There’s a certain gallows humor, as well as serenity, that comes from getting tattoos like that – and the way he talks about demining is a bit different from the way he talks about anything else, where the default attitude is ragged and laidback – “keep the sinking boat afloat for as long as it needs to be” is, he says, his usual approach. When he talks about demining, his posture changes, one hand slips behind his back – a deminer’s trick, safeguarding one hand in case the other gets blown off – and he describes the mental chess game he had to play, thinking “where would a Russian put a mine, where would a separatist put a mine, where would our side put a mine, what if there’s a type of ordnance I haven’t come across before” and inching forward through the dirt to find the explosives, although, in practice, he says, the psychology was often easier than that to pierce through: he would find a ring of vodka bottles and a little further out into no-man’s-land was where the mines were sewn. And for somebody who’s very verbal and really extraordinarily good with people, these kinds of ‘dirty, smelly’ run-down environments have an appeal that seems to surpass everything else. “I don’t have a problem sleeping in trenches and living in trenches and living with few supplies, you just make do, it’s not a problem,” he says. “I’ve spent most of my adult life either living in vans or living in boats or living outside so I’m used to very confined spaces, few supplies, I kind of thrive on that, I find that an easy way of life to be honest.” And, certainly more so than the U.K., eastern Ukraine turned out to be a very congenial place for that mindset. “People forget that there weren’t always supermarkets, you couldn’t order from Tesco’s on your mobile phone. And I much prefer that way of life. I fish a lot, I hunt a lot, I’m used to putting food on my table, even if there is a supermarket I prefer that way of life, it’s a skill base that will never let you down, and to see that in the east of Ukraine, I kind of fell in love with that.”

***

Swampy’s band pushes off from Lviv at 7 in the morning hoping to get through all the checkpoints and reach Kyiv before curfew. In the back of my mind I’m counting down the minutes until this group starts to fray at the edges – there’s no real organization, no pay, everybody involved is coming, really, from wildly different backgrounds. But it turns out to be an opportunity to see a gifted leader keeping control in a situation that could easily go sideways. What the group has most obviously in common with one another is – no other way to put it – a disgusting sense of humor. A cop by the side of the road is “obviously wanking – that’s a proper cum face.” The butt of a woman passing by is her ‘fart box.’ Rest stops are brought to an end with the cheerful call, “All aboard the nonce bus.” And Swampy, who is obviously used to wayward soldier-types, is like a popular camp counselor, speaking the language of his charges but also laying down rules. When the teasing turns to the lone woman in the group, a medic, he breaks in: “Careful what you say to her. Otherwise, when you’re a stretcher bleeding out, she’ll peg the shit out of you. Field prostrate exams are no joke.”

The concern on this drive is making it past each of the checkpoints – and the block post guards clearly have no idea what to make of a van brimming with tough-looking military types, none of whom, Swampy included, speak Russian or Ukrainian. Each checkpoint is like its own set of riddles – sometimes the answer is a call to Swampy’s progressively-irritated contact at the Ministry of Defense, sometimes it’s a box of plantain chips that has been brought along for exactly this purpose, sometimes it’s a password (which nobody has), sometimes it’s just the statement that everybody is here to join the Ukrainian army, sometimes it’s a very easy call-and-response, the question being, “Putin is….” and the answer being “An asshole!” Swampy clearly has no intention of doing much of anything on the drive – he’s in the back, napping, on his phone, humming along to ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ when it comes up on the stereo – but as the van gets lost and then comes closer to Kyiv, he finds himself exercising more and more leadership. The guys have gotten increasingly free about wandering to the woods to piss in the moments when the van is paused, and Swampy, clearly annoyed that he has to say this, puts a stop to it. “Pissing in the woods is not a good idea,” he calls out from the back. “Number one, you’ll freak the guys out at the checkpoints, and number two, it’s quite likely that they’ve mined the woods.” And, eventually, he gives up on the idea of the laidback drive, makes his way to the front seat to become the navigator and lead negotiator at the checkpoints.

I keep expecting that there will be pushback at some point, but there is none. The guys in the van quote different sayings of Swampy’s (“like Swampy said, this place brings all kinds of weirdos”). The youngest one, recently out of the U.S. Air Force, tells me that, even if it hasn’t worked out with the International Legion or Georgian National Legion, that everything’s gone much better for him than expected since he’s been in Ukraine. “I haven’t been here that long and, already, Swampy’s chosen me to be part of the first group to Kyiv,” he says. And, most surprisingly for me, when the first videos of the Bucha massacres start to appear on Twitter feeds and Swampy is clearly shaken by them, the rest of the van drops the clowning and picks up his tone. In various interviews I’ve seen with Swampy from the past – usually as part of a chorus of the Azov Battalion, with the interviewer clearly probing for extremism – he has always hit a reasonable note. “I don’t hate the Russians, I just don’t think they should be fighting in this country,” he’ll say, or “No side is right in this conflict, no side is right in any conflict,” but here, quietly, he says, “There can be no forgiveness for this, truly no forgiveness.” He calls back to Lviv to request “body bags – a lot of them, literally pallets of them – and silly string, don’t ask, just fucking cases of it,” and, as if on cue, the Red Hot Chili Peppers are turned down on the stereo and one of the group says, “That’s pretty smart actually. I wouldn’t have thought of silly string.”

The van ride turns out to be an adventure – the van gets in well after curfew, there’s a missed turn somewhere and the van is driven for a disconcertingly long time on the wrong side of the highway, at the final checkpoint in Kyiv the commander is less than amused by the plantain chips and seems convinced that the female medic is being trafficked – and, just as everybody’s laid out to sleep on the living room floor of an apartment, there’s one last scare. A call comes in, saying, “Get the fuck out now! There are 300 Syrians and ballistic missiles on the way! They’re going to level Kyiv!” And Swampy, for the last time that day, exercises his very gentle style of leadership – he asks that the volume be turned down and the call taken off speakerphone. “What are 300 Syrians going to do?” he says. And then everybody from the group goes back to sleep.

In the next weeks it continues to be Swampy season. Mine clearance is a rare specialty and badly needed – the expectation is that the Russians have sewn mines everywhere, and, even in the best-case scenario of a Russian withdrawal or ceasefire, it may take years to clean up eastern Ukraine – and everybody seems to have their own idea of where best to place Swampy. He’s been leading EOD trainings and expects that for the time he’s here he will be evenly split between training and frontline EOD work. Placing the rest of the contingent seems to be its own challenge, but a group has pushed on towards the front line in Dnipro, and, on the logistics side, Task Force Yankee has partnered with a group called Kharkiv SOS which is currently the main point of contact for shipping supplies. So far, the group has been casualty-free, although Swampy had an unexpectedly close call in training when an old ordnance he was working with exploded in front of him. In the bar that night he spins it as pedagogically useful. “It was perfect,” he says. “Just at that moment, I was explaining how if you don’t know where an explosive comes from you have to assume that it will go off.” And on it goes. The war deepens, and little by little, Westerners, many of whom had never been to Ukraine before, who don’t speak the language, have no particular connection to the culture, are drawn – through some combination of idealism and restlessness – into the thick of it.