Interesting read about trying to adjust when coming back home. The Navy SEAL Who Went to Ukraine Because He Couldn’t Stop Fighting
The Navy confirmed that Swift has been in “an active deserter status since March 11, 2019,” but did not provide any additional information. It wasn’t yet known how long Swift was in Ukraine and why he was fighting there. Swift, who is from Oregon, first enlisted in 2005, according to his releasable service records obtained by TIME. The records don’t detail any of his deployments or SEAL teams he may have served on. They list assignments with a Naval Special Warfare “Cold Weather Detachment” out of Kodiak, Ak. in 2007 and separate stints with two “West Coast-based Special Warfare Unit(s)” from July 2007 to January 2014. Beginning in August 2017, Swift was with a “West Coast Special Warfare Unit.” Exclusive: AWOL Navy SEAL Killed Fighting In Ukraine
I am assuming he was not active duty deployed by the US. The WSJ headline should be clear so they do not unintentionally, or knowing the WSJ, intentionally, feed Russian propaganda to try to undermine the West
While not that common it's also not without precedent. This is a article (almost 10 years old) about an American who joined the French Foreign Legion. As was the case with Swift Franks deserted and joined a foreign military because he had the desire for combat. The mysterious lure of the French Foreign Legion keeps drawing Americans The story is bizarre enough to serve as the plot of an action movie: 2nd Lt. Lawrence J. Franks Jr. quit his job in the U.S. Army, fled the country and secretly enlisted in the elite French Foreign Legion under an assumed name, authorities said. He deployed numerous times, including during a conflict in Mali, and then turned himself in to U.S. officials this year, seemingly at peace with what he had done. “I needed to be wet and cold and hungry,” Franks said, according to the New York Times. “I needed the grueling life I could only find in a place like the Legion.”
Yeah but it should have distinguished that he was never deployed to Ukraine, that he wasn't AWOL from a deployment within Ukraine. The Russians are making a big deal that they are actually fighting NATO troops. Obviously people who desert and/or volunteer are one thing. But they have already tried to create a lot of fiction that there are actively deployed NATO troops fighting them. That should have been made very clear.
The only thing close to propaganda are the comments the DoD is great at preparing forces for combat but poor at bringing them home. Article talks about him pulling a pistol on his wife and choking her sister, being denied entry to French foreign legion, etc etc. hardly anything resembling active US forces deployed in theatre. Can’t help but feel a lot of empathy or the guy. He lost everything.
It’s behind a paywall but did read it a number of years ago. Gist: ordinarily the readiness to kill another human being has to be trained into you. And once it’s trained into you … Also, kill readiness radically ‘improved’ from WWII (something like 1 in 15 American soldiers who stormed the beach during D-Day ever fired a shot) to much more ‘favorable’ ratios in Iraq … Trained to Kill
