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A former Army Ranger who fought in Ukraine said he found the fighting there far worse than in Afghanistan and Iraq.
David Bramlette told The Daily Beast that when he fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, he had air support, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.
“The worst day in Afghanistan and Iraq is a great day in Ukraine,” he said.
Bramlette, who was a Green Beret on a counter-Russia mission and an Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan, said fighting in Ukraine had much more unknowns.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, he said that even on more difficult days, “we were always in control of the situation … versus as a commander of a team in Ukraine.”
He added that communications weren’t reliable in Ukraine, so when they were doing reconnaissance missions, they would sometimes have to wait up to two days for one of his men to come back.
“If two of them get injured … there’s no helicopter coming to get you … shit can go south really, really fricking quickly,” he said. “And that’s the kind of stuff that is pretty hard.”
Troy Offenbecker, a retired marine, gave a similar assessment to The Daily Beast.
“This is my third war I’ve fought in, and this is by far the worst one,” he said.
“You’re getting fucking smashed with artillery, tanks,” he added. “Last week I had a plane drop a bomb next to us, like 300 meters away. It’s horrifying shit.”
Offenbecker said he ignored requests for information from military people he knew about how to get involved in Ukraine.
“To be honest, it was pretty bad, so I didn’t want to bring anyone else into it,” he said.
Offenbecker’s comments echo those made by another retired marine, Jason Mann, to CNN in February.
“Fighting in a trench, that’s not something that someone’s done in a long time,” Mann said. “Like even World War II is not really fought in trenches to this degree.”
He added: “Artillery is something we didn’t have to deal with in Iraq and Afghanistan apart from just a random rocket or grenade coming in. And that’s something you can’t fight against. You just have to hunker down and get lucky.”
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