140. PERSPECTIVE: Former US soldier Carl ”Grinch” Larson on fighting in the International Legion for the Defense of Ukraine
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Welcome to the War in Ukraine update from Kyiv podcast. I'm Jessica Gnauer, a senior lecturer in international relations at Flinders University in Australia. And I'm talking today with Carl Larson. Carl, also known as Grinch, is a former American soldier who has served in Iraq.

And then more recently in 2022, spent four and a half months fighting in the International Legion of Ukraine on the battlefront in Ukraine in the war against Russia. So thanks for joining me on the podcast today, Carl. Of course. Thank you for having me, Jessica.

So firstly, I'm interested to understand more, you know, we have Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. What motivated you sitting in the United States to decide to actually pick yourself up and go over to Ukraine and fight there in an international legion? That's a great question and one that I get asked a lot. So the easy, quick answer is I went to Ukraine to fight for America because

because I believe that Ukraine is fighting for democracy in America and in Europe and in Asia. Look at Taiwan, look at South Korea.

I didn't go there for the adrenaline. I didn't go there because I wanted to relive my glory days 20 years ago in Iraq. I have a very comfortable, wonderful life here in Seattle. A good job, a very supportive wife. But, you know, I looked at the situation and I do have these soldier skills. I'm in decent physical shape and had enough money to go over and outfit myself. And I felt that this was the time to go and do something directly,

to oppose the Russian invasion of Ukraine and really the Russian destruction, attempted destruction of the post-World War II international order, which says, you know, we can disagree about a lot of things, but you can't invade your neighbors and steal their land. And our whole society now for the last 70 years has been based on that aggravation.

agreement, let's say. And of course, there's been breaches of that and there's numerous problems. But by and large, if you look at history in general, that has been an incredible boon for humanity is the fact that governments around the world, strong autocratic countries might look at their weaker neighbors and really want their land

but they know what will happen if they invade their neighbors. And if we allow Russia to take over Ukraine, of course, that'll have all sorts of negative consequences to Ukraine and to Western Europe and to democracies. But also it will empower China to do the same thing with Taiwan and any strong country is going to start looking at their neighbors and say, you know, sanctions don't matter. The UN doesn't matter. Well,

Well, all that matters is having enough tanks and bombs and guns and being willing to commit enough atrocities to do whatever we want. So that's why I went over there to make a strong statement against that. And can you share with listeners, what was that experience like going over and fighting in Ukraine? You were fighting with other foreign fighters, I assume, as part of an international legion. What you went through in those four and a half months in Ukraine? Yeah.

Sure. Happy to answer that. Yeah, so I was in Ukraine actually for six months, but I was in the Legion for four and a half, and then I was stationed at the front lines for two east of Kharkiv. It's not the front lines anymore, so I can say, I can actually point it on the map. It's a little town just south of Stary Saltiv along the Severodonetsk River. So to answer your question, I mean, it was miserable. It was horrible. It was an experience that I wouldn't wish on anyone. War is hell. It's true.

And I, you know, I saw death and destruction up close and personal. My uniform still spattered with the blood of my one of my fallen comrades that we worked on for an hour. And he didn't he didn't make it, you know.

We didn't have anywhere near the same logistical support that I had 20 years ago in Iraq. I mean, we didn't have any air support. We had old rattletrap vehicles that were constantly breaking down. We had in my platoon, we had three night vision, old British night vision with lots of spots on them that hurt your eyes if you look through them for more than an hour or two. And we were so angry that this was all that the Ukrainians gave us.

And we thought, oh, man, they're really abusing us by giving us these crappy old things. And then we talked to the Ukrainian units around us and they look through there. Oh, you know, we don't have any for the entire company. And we realized how lucky we were actually to have those. So, you know, Ukraine is not a rich country. They've got lots of strong, brave men and women at the front lines. What they don't have is much equipment.

To get back to your question, it wasn't fun. I've talked to dozens, dozens of guys, a few gals too, who either were planning to go over or did go over. And 80% of them, I tried to talk out of it because either A, they weren't ready or B, they weren't properly prepared, either physically, financially, or psychologically, let's say, because the experience was, you know, the most difficult.

stressful experience of my life, even more stressful than when I went to war for the first time. The situations that you're put in, the orders that you have to follow, the lives of your brothers and sisters that are dependent upon your decisions is just incredibly stressful. And I'm

I'm lucky I didn't come back with any symptoms of PTSD, but I do know several other soldiers who did and I'm not surprised. And I'm interested, I mean, how did you actually find the International Legion to fight with? I mean, when you decided, okay, I'm going to go over to Ukraine, how did that process work in terms of fighting?

foreign fighters hooking themselves up with a unit to fight with? Well, it's a funny story. So there's actually a very well-trod path to the International Legion. Now there is. When I joined, so I went into Ukraine with two other Americans from different parts of the United States. We all three of us flew into Poland and then we met up and then we crossed the border on March 8th

So just about two weeks after the initial invasion, you know, they were going to join the Legion and I was just there to babysit them. And then, of course, you know what happened, right? They went home and I joined. But we went to the recruitment depot. So the way it works is if you want to join the International Legion, you contact the Ukrainian embassy.

embassy in DC or one of the consulates. And I was unable to get through to any of them in the chaos right after the invasion. However, the San Francisco consulate responded to texts. So I have this series of rather cryptic texts

from someone at the San Francisco consulate. I met the consul general Dimitri from San Fran a few weeks ago. I was like, Oh, you know who sent me these texts? So they send these texts. There's a, I'm not going to say exactly what, but you go to a border crossing and there are certain there's people who meet you and there's a certain way that they identify themselves and you go there and then they take you to a

you know, like a hotel or a staging area. So we got there in the morning and the recruiter was a little weird. Like he wouldn't give us a copy of the contract we would have to sign and he wouldn't let us take a picture of it. So, I mean, we found a copy of it online, you know, different guys had copies of it. So then we hung out there at this location, you know, guys started trickling in throughout the day.

And we talked to him and, you know, we got a little concerned at some of the people that were there. And then, you know, time went on and we knew the bus was taking everybody to the recruitment center at 10 p.m. And, you know, we were talking to all these guys and it was just, you know, they were all drug addicts and suicidal and criminals and

You know, they really had some problems. And so we were really concerned about the guys we were going to be sharing foxholes with, you know. And so we kind of got freaked out and we left. And the two guys, they got discouraged and they went home to America. And I was like, well, I got six months leave off of work. So I went and I tried to volunteer in various places around Ukraine. And finally, what I ended up doing is volunteering for the actual Legion at the recruitment center.

at an undisclosed location. I'm not going to say exactly where, but somewhere near the Polish border, obviously.

I worked there for three weeks for the Ukrainian recruiters. I'm still friends with them, still talk to them. We instituted stringent background checks, criminal checks, physical fitness checks, psychological checks as best we could in that environment. And then we set up little Ukrainian language programs so guys would at least know some basics. And then after three weeks, it seemed like the process was pretty well dialed in and the quality of the guys was much higher.

I think part of that was just like right afterwards, there was a bunch of guys who were just like, oh, it's either this or jail or, you know, I got a thousand dollars in my bank account. I'm just going to go for it. Let's see what happens. And then after a month,

people were, it was more thoughtful guys who were going over there for the right reasons, not for the wrong reasons. So at that point, I figured it would work to join. Oh, and we had a fantastic platoon commander. We had this guy, oh my gosh, incredible guy, Brad Crawford. He's back over there now. I learned more from that guy in four days than I learned in just about all basic training. So he was the platoon commander. So I'm like, all right, all right, I can trust this guy. I'll follow this guy, you know. And the day we shipped out to the training center, you know, they had the

buses out there and everything. And Bradley goes by Top, it's a military term meaning first sergeant. He comes and he's like, man, I got some bad news. Apparently I've been poached by ground forces command. I'm going to go and train Ukrainian Marines. And we're all like, okay. The recruiters come and they say, but we have good news. Your new platoon commander is Grinch. And they all turn and they look at me and they're like,

This guy? So I was the platoon commander all during training. You know, it was ridiculous because I was only in the U.S. Army for three years. I got out as a corporal and I was a combat engineer. I was not infantry. So I was learning a lot of stuff late at night. Let's, you know, all the basics like patrolling and, you know, react to contact, react to artillery, etc.

you know, basic medical first aid, trauma, you know, medical, um, tourniquets, uh, wound sealing, all that stuff. So that was it. So, so I had a very long convoluted process, unlike most guys, but I really got to see a lot more than most, um, recruits, I would say. And I was pretty comfortable when I joined. And then there's many more stories that happened after that. Hmm.

So, yeah, I'm interested, once you were fighting on the front lines in Ukraine, what was that relationship like between like the foreign legions fighting or foreign units fighting in Ukraine and the Ukrainian defense ministry and then the sort of regular Ukrainian army, Ukrainian military forces who are operating?

I assume also fighting alongside or in close proximity to the foreign units. Yeah, so we've fought shoulder to shoulder with the Ukrainians, absolutely. The International Legion for the Defense of Ukraine, the ILDU, is a part of the Ground Forces Command Ukrainian military.

It's structured just on battalion NATO standard lines, just like almost every other Ukrainian unit. Their special forces have a different structure, but everything else is, you know, standard brigade, battalion, company, platoon, squad, fire team. And so the only major difference, at least,

Theoretically, is that is that a the language is English of the International Legion and be the commanders up to platoon level or international above platoon level. It's it's Ukrainian. And then C. And this is kind of important. International fighters can leave at any time. What this means is that there's a constant churn because there's no other military unit in history, as far as I know.

that you can say, wow, this is pretty rough life. I'm going to take a vacation. I'm out. Bye.

in the middle of a you know like close to the front lines like just i'm gonna go walk up to the highway and hitchhike back to harki even i'll be gone it's kind of a crazy situation so you have this constant churn which makes it really tough for the ukrainians i will say and just for your your listeners a quick overview would probably be helpful so there's four main parts of the ukrainian military there's the zacu which stands for ground forces army

And that's the part that the Legion is part of. And then there's territorial defense. That's like our National Guard, like reserves, Army Reserves.

And they're typically much, not nearly as well equipped as the ZACU because they are equipped from their oblast, right? And if you're from a rich oblast, great. If you're from a poor oblast, especially one that's far from the fighting, then A, you're not going to get your stuff in very quickly. And B, you may not get stuff. So the TDF folks are really less equipped. And

And then there's National Guard. And the National Guard there is different than the National Guard here. The National Guard there, they do have military personnel, soldiers. But also, I think they do a lot of policing, like guard duty type stuff. And they also are typically not as well equipped. I mean, they're never as well equipped as they seem.

And then the fourth is PUR, G-U-R. It's their special forces and they have a different reporting structure. They report up through the, not the Ministry of Defense, but the Ministry of Intelligence, I believe. And they're not structured in NATO lines. They're structured in special forces teams of like 12 to 15 men.

And they'll always have a Ukrainian commander. And so when we were in recruiting, we would, you know, once we figured out a guy was a good fit, we'd ask him, do you have any combat experience? And if he'd say yes, we'd say, would you like to go to special forces? 75% of the time, he'd say yeah. And then if the guy says, no, I don't have combat experience or, you know, I was a submariner.

or a helicopter pilot or a helicopter mechanic or something, we'd say, "Okay, you are going to the battalions," which is where I went. I chose that. I do have combat experience, but I wanted that training and I wanted to be part of a cohesive unit. In Special Forces, you show up, or at least at the time, I think they have more training now, but at the time you show up,

They give you a rifle and you go fight. To give you an example, in my platoon in the training base, we had two gentlemen, Andy Quinn and Alexander Drucke. For some reason, our training lasted five weeks. It was crazy. It lasted a really long time, which was good because it gave the platoon was super solid. And we still talk to this day. A ton of them are talking. Those two guys got sick of the train. A lot of guys got sick of the train. Five weeks in the woods, you know, it's just kind of miserable.

And they're like, we're going to Special Forces. And I tried to talk. There was like 12 of them and I talked 10 of them out of it. But those two went. And so they got to the Special Forces unit. They got there in the evening. They were handed their rifles and some, I think, RPGs. The next morning there was a mission. They went out on the mission and they by afternoon they got separated from their unit. By the evening they were captured by the Russians. So they were in their unit less than 24 hours before.

before being captives and brutally tortured every day for the next three and a half months. I'm not going to go into all the details. It's all over the news. You can Google it. Only by the grace of God did they get repatriated and returned. Thank God.

So, I mean, I am interested to understand a bit more, as I mentioned at the outset, you did fight also with the US Army in Iraq, obviously very different context, completely different conditions. But could you reflect a little bit on what were some of those differences between fighting as part of the US Army and then coming in and fighting in Ukraine under obviously very different conditions? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it was just totally night and day. I mean, in the US Army, I was basically a tanker. I drove an engineering vehicle and we had so much support. You know, the APs, the little stores in the Army, they drove a trailer a few miles behind us. You could like literally walk away from the combat zone and go back and get candy bars and Snickers and, you know, Sprites and Mountain Dew and stuff like that. And we didn't. But the Air Force, they had these mobile shower things. They had flush toilets everywhere.

and hot showers in the middle of the desert. It was incredible. And I mean, you know, I think one time we used our, all our C4, we were blowing up a lot of arms caches. Our commander just called and they sent a helicopter over with crates of C4, you know, like we were in the middle of the desert, right? There's nothing around. And here come these helicopters. And they brought one crate, one crate of C4, you know, like two or three helicopters. I forget. I mean, it's just like the money that was spent is just astronomical and

And meanwhile, in Ukraine, I mean, first of all, you know, we're working shoulder to shoulder with Ukrainians. And I do not speak Ukrainian. I am not of Ukrainian, any Slavic descent. I use the hell out of Google Translate. You can be sure of that. There was that. There was the culture shock. And then the fact that, you know, it's a light infantry war. We were not...

mechanized. We rode in crappy old vehicles that were breaking down and then we got kicked out and we ran out to our observation points and our command headquarters and that was pretty much the last that we rode in vehicles. They might bring us some food now and then if we were lucky.

we ended up buying a lot of food from the civilians. I mean, we were not driving tanks anywhere. We were guarding guard posts and we were doing a lot of light infantry patrolling and that sort of thing. And then just the equipment. I mean, it was just constant, you know,

We just did not have the equipment we needed, like the night vision, you know. To give you an idea, there was a Mexican soldier there, codenamed Malo. I knew him ever since before training. He was at an observation point. I was not there. I was at a different observation point.

They did not have night vision. During the day, he wanted to go and, you know, relieve himself, as you do in the woods, right? He saw these two bushes there that looked kind of strange. He brings his rifle slowly up, and one of the bushes shoots him. It shoots him in the leg, right? So he drops to the ground, and he returns fire. He shoots the bush. It goes down. Apparently, he shot the Russian in the plate carrier.

And so the Russian was still alive. And so the two of them got away. And so, of course, you can imagine the rest of the guys in the back in the mud pit. You know, you can imagine how quickly armor went on and boots went on and things like that. And so they rush out there and they looked, couldn't find the Russians. The whole platoon came down, couldn't find the Russians. And then you can imagine that night when they did not have night vision.

you know, not able to see a darn thing in the woods. And so, you know, having the equipment there, I think I mentioned earlier, I think it might have been before we started recording, but yeah, I had a much beloved Legion brother die right next to me, actually at my feet. He was hit right next to me, but he basically died in my arms. He was hit by artillery and, you know, we didn't have a generator. So our radios were dead. We couldn't call for medical evac and we didn't have a vehicle. So we couldn't casually evacuate him.

So we sent a runner and we did what we could for him. But, you know, he bled out over an hour. Right after that, I bought a generator, put it on my credit card. And, you know, I paid more for the taxi to drive the generator out from Harkey than I did for the actual generator. But, you know, I didn't want to die and I didn't want my men to die.

A lot of guys end up paying for standard equipment, vehicles, night vision, drones, generators, radios out of their own pockets because the Ukrainian military just doesn't have the equipment. So that was a huge difference, I would say. Following on from that, I mean, I think you still know a whole bunch of guys who are still fighting over there in Ukraine. And I guess that lack of equipment continues for Ukrainian soldiers now.

as well, who are fighting, as well as foreign fighters who've gone to fight in Ukraine. I believe you've been involved in kind of organizing or activities around gathering funds to help out those who are still fighting in Ukraine and Ukrainians to provide some of that necessary equipment. So can you talk a little bit about what you've been doing in that regard since coming back to Seattle?

Sure. Yeah. So yeah, fundraising for equipment is, is maybe half of what we do. The other half is political advocacy, pushing the U S government to be more supportive of Ukraine. And then, you know, outreach to average Americans who maybe wonder about all this money going overseas. And I'm trying to tell this story to Americans about why it's in our national interest to support Ukraine. You know, I believe that they're fighting for our freedom. Uh,

And we're paying for it with a small amount of our defense dollars and they're paying for it in blood. So upon getting back August last year, upon getting back here to Seattle, I and a few other like-minded folks set up a group called Ukraine Defense Support, ukrainedefensesupport.org. So we're fundraising and doing advocacy. So we raised over $172,000 last time I checked. So we're buying night vision and GDF.

and generators and cars and drones. And we're not just supporting the International Legion. Actually, that's about a quarter of the units that we're supporting. Most of the units are, we're actually trying to support TDF units because they are woefully under-equipped, I would say, as opposed to the regular Army usually gets somewhat better equipment. So we're really trying to help the TDF

This war is strange. The Ukrainians, the doctrine is they oftentimes train up new units and send them right into the assault, and they save their elite units for the follow-up breakthrough. It is effective. There's some reasons for that. I testified to the European Parliament a few months ago about this. But anyway, the point is that these aren't just people behind the rear. These are...

units that are doing serious fighting with very little tools at their disposals. So that's what we're doing. There's about 43 active volunteers here in Seattle and all around Washington state. And then we're working with the American Coalition for Ukraine, which is the big umbrella group out of Washington, D.C. I'll be spending two weeks in D.C. at the middle of this month. They're having a big conference there. There's like 500 groups around the United States that are part of the coalition that are sending equipment or they are helping in

encourage Congress to keep helping Ukraine. So if anyone listening to this is interested in helping, of course, you can write a check. We would love that. But also, there are great ways to volunteer from anywhere in the world. You don't even need to speak English. We've got a ton of people in our group who speak Ukrainian, Russian, German, Spanish, French. You know, we'll work with any friend of Ukraine. And there's a lot of ways to volunteer remotely. There's

There's a lot of Internet research that needs to happen, a lot of PR, a lot of like looking up reporters names, looking up potential donors names, a lot of interfacing with Ukrainian military units. There's lots of ways to help this war. You know, this is history being made. I like to compare Ukraine in 2022 and 23 to Czechoslovakia in 1938. This is really the calm before the storm and appeasement didn't work well.

in Czechoslovakia and it won't work in Ukraine, we've really got to stop him in Ukraine. And so I'm going to keep working on this as long as my Legion brothers and sisters are over there fighting and bleeding and sweating and dying, then this is going to be my job. So I would ask that anybody listening to this who would like to also help Ukraine, feel free to reach out. The email is victory at ukraindefensesupport.org.

Thanks, Carl. And I'll add all of those links into the show notes as well of how listeners can get in touch or find out more if they're interested. Well, thanks so much, Carl. I really appreciate you being on the podcast and sharing a bit of your story here today. I feel like I could have asked many more questions and chatted to you for much longer, but it was really interesting and I'm sure that listeners found it interesting also. Thanks for joining me today. Of course. Thank you for having me, Jessica.

Thanks for listening and thanks to Gonk Overall for our theme music.