Interview with a member of the International Legion for the Defence of Ukraine: the REAL Zero Line

Hello, this is Matthew Parish from the Lviv Herald, and I'm here with Justin, who is a member of the International Legion for the Defence of Ukraine. And as the readers will know these are foreigners who've come to fight for Ukraine, and Justin has been in Ukraine for a while.

So I'm very pleased to have the opportunity to interview you Justin. Welcome to the Lviv Herald.

Awesome. Sounds good.

Justin, can you tell me where you're from, and what your background is?

Sure. So I'm from the US, I'm like an hour north of Chicago, so right next to Wisconsin, basically Illinois.

My background is I was in the Marine Corps for five years; before that as an infantryman in 2003 to 2011, and then in the Marines from 2011 to 2016. Did an Afghan deployment in 2012, did a 31st MU in 2013, 14, and then after that I was a crucible instructor for recruits. And then, you know, got out, went to college and worked a little bit and then came here basically.

And what motivated you to come and fight for Ukraine?

So, I've actually been watching the war since it started in 2014, back when Vice had that giant long list of videos, remember that. Right? And so I've been watching it since it started, , and I was in the Marine Corps at the time, so I'm like, well, I'm not gonna go.

I can't, right? And then, um, you know how it kind of slowed down after a little while and I was in college and busy and married and all that stuff. And then, the funny part about why I'm here to begin with is in, you know, middle of late 2021 when the Afghan pullout happened, me and a bunch of guys got together on Signal and we're talking to each other about going to help, you know, the remnants of the Northern Alliance there.

And that whole thing never panned out. And we were planning on like flying to Pakistan, smuggling ourselves across the border, buying guns and, you know, going to fight. And then this started and we're all like, well, let's just go here instead. And, you know, I'm not very right wing in the US, but very, very anti-communist.

And I still see the Russians as communist and I see them trying to reconstitute the Soviet Union basically since Putin, you know, got the power in the late nineties. So I'm trying to keep that from happening. The other funny bit of it is I'm ethnically Russian. One side of the family, my mom's side, and they moved from St. Petersburg in 1908. My great-grandpa moved. First he was a Russo-Japanese war vet and went all the way from St. Petersburg all the way across Russia, into Siberia, into Alaska, then Canada, and as port of entry into the US instead of being somewhere like New York City was actually Detroit. So he kind of saw the writing on the wall and was like, well, I'm not gonna live under that.

And so I still kind of feel that way too. Even it being, you know, a hundred, almost 120 years ago.

And when did you arrive in Ukraine?

I got here the first time, March 8th, 2022.

And you went straight into the International Legion?

No, so I actually worked on the Polish border for a little while of all places, having like a medical tent, me and a couple buddies.

Okay. And then?

Yeah, so anyway, we had a medical tent at the border there. We were at the main border crossing, Rava-Rus'ka, and we stayed there for like two or three weeks and that was pretty fun. And just dealing with refugees and helping with medical stuff and that. And then we came into Lviv and actually worked with HUGS [a Canadian NGO operating in Ukraine} for a couple weeks.

While we were working for HUGS, we were just trying to find something to do basically, me and all the guys I was with were definitely not NGO type people. So then we left from there and met up with a group that was supposedly training TDF [reserve forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine] at Ternopil were called the Wolverines, if you remember them, but they were kinda like an early war weird thing.

And we were with them for like two or three weeks. Turns out that they, you know, weren't doing things like we thought they were doing things. So then we started our own group called The Dark Angels, if you remember that. So like Dan Burke, Sam Newey, and me and a bunch of other guys. And, we were actually quite popular on like the Sun that summer, if you remember seeing those videos.

And so we did that. And so when we started that group, uh, half of us went down to [withheld information] and then the other half went down to [withheld information]. And I was part of the group that went to [withheld information].

This was with the Army at that point?

No, no. You just went down to me and my friend. Right.

You just went down to do NGO type support work for civilians.

Right. Training. At this point, we were into training, like military training. So you were training Ukrainian soldiers. Right. So we get down there. And this is kind of how, I mean, you know how the early war was, it was like the Wild West. And so we actually went down to Odesa first. My buddy met a lady on Badoo and told her that we were medical trainers and he got to go to a military base and do some medical training for a day with her.

And she's like, you're not a medical trainer, are you? And he was like, no. No, I'm not. She goes, okay, that's perfect. Actually, that's what I'm looking for is guys to do military training and she goes, go down to [withheld information] with me. The 28th Militarized Brigade needs help. Uh, when it comes to training, because this was during the Battle of Mykolaïv.

It was a spring summer 2022. So at this point, it's probably like late April, I wanna say 2022. The fighting was still going on just south of basically. And so we get down there, they're like the 28th needs help training, and we're like, cool, we can provide that. It was me and a couple buddies and first, the, the first group of people we trained down there was actually a group of police officers from Kherson, like the Kherson riot police.

And they were doing military stuff, working outta their riot vans. And it was the funniest thing ever. You've seen 'em pile out of this riot van, right? With, you know, PKM's [a Russian general purpose machine gun] and RPGs and all the military stuff, right? When they're usually carrying like Cranks and MACs [submachine guns] and stuff. And the one cop I remember with the PKM and RPG guy, both big painted white, oh.

You know, the old WWE wrestler, Dave Batista, looked just like that big guy. And so we trained them for, I wanna say a week or two. And then we started training guys from the 28th Mechanized Brigade and then the 36 Marine Brigade. Found out we were down there and had them train, or had us train, uh, platoon their guys as well.

And this platoon from the 36 was supposed to be like a instructor after we were done teaching 'em there. So they were gonna be, it was like a train the trainer program more or less. We ended up meeting like the Ukrainian Marine Commandant at the time. We got t-shirts and coffee cups and stuff that I've lost already at this point and or used up basically.

But it was a good time. And then we went back to training the 28th.

And you were a volunteer all this time.

Mm-hmm. Absolutely free at this point for free.

So what actually happened before that?

So the same lady that we met up with that gave us all these training gigs was like, hey, can you go get my ex-husband's body back from one of these towns?

And we're like, okay, what's going on? She goes, well, he died trying to throw garbage away in this van. And I forget what the Russians hit it with, artillery or mortars or something like that. But the Ukrainians were in a town, I forget the name of now, it was like low ground and the Russians were up in this like elevated town. So they really had no, no chance, right? And then we found out that there was a Russian T 90 tank watching that exact vantage point where the guy died - watching that exact spot where the guy died. And we're like, well, why do you need us to get the body back? And she goes, well, he's my ex-husband and my son feels bad that his Dad's still out there.

We're like, okay. And we're like, are we gonna get any support for this? And she goes, yeah, I think so. [The dead man's] Dad is a colonel in the SBU. And we're like, oh, okay. So she said, write up a gear list and a gun list and we'll give you whatever you want. So we did. And they did. It was the craziest thing.

At this point you weren't in the military.

No. God no. Nope. But they just handed you some guns and gear Mafia [style]. Well, we had our own gear. But they dropped off additional gear and they dropped off two Javelins, two SVDs [a Soviet sniper rifle], two PKMs [a Soviet-era general purpose machine gun], like six or seven modernized AK 74s [a Soviet assault rifle] and three AKs 74 used [not modernized].

My interpreter at the time had asked for an AKMS [a variant of the AKM Russian assault rifle with a folding stock], the under-pulled 7.62 AK with a PBS-1 suppressor and subsonic ammo. And they actually found all that stuff too for us, so they just said we could have whatever we wanted, they were like, okay, these guys are important, we gotta give 'em this stuff. Right. And so that went on for a little while.

I wanted to train another group of guys. The other guys went down and actually blew up a Russian BMD [a Russian tracked infantry fighting vehicle] with a Javelin. And we thought that was pretty cool. And so we get back to them after they get back from doing that and they're like, yeah, it's a suicide mission down there to get that guy's body.

You know, we're all gonna die doing this. We're gonna just tell 'em no. So we told 'em no, and then we went down and just told the 20th Mechanized Brigade, Hey, we'll just fight with you instead. How does that sound? So we went and took all these SBU guns down to the 28th, right?

And we just started doing missions for them. At the time we showed up, they're like, holy [expletive], are you the American training guys? And we're like, uh, yeah. They're like, do you know how to use a Javelin missile? And I'm like, uh, sure. They're like, oh, thank God. And they gave us a command launch sheet computer and five missiles, which was like $450,000 worth of gear, right.

And I'm walking back where we were staying with my buddy. I'm like, man, we're gonna probably have to read the manual on this [expletive] thing. This is way above my pay grade, you know, figuring this [expletive] thing out.

And we started doing missions for those guys, and it went pretty well that summer. It was a lot of fun. No drones, no nothing. The Russians that we were fighting were VDV [Russian airborne forces, an elite branch of the Russian Armed Forces], but they were super tired. Today they were the guys that had taken Kherson and then tried to invade Mykolaïv and all their officers were dead, and so they were [expletive] really lax and ill-disciplined and everything else.

So it was actually pretty easy. Then at a certain point, the SBU came back down and were like, can we have our guns back? And we told them, no, we're using them. They're like, can we, can we please have the ones back that you're not using? We're like, sure. We gave 'em back a couple that we weren't using and then like two or three weeks later, they came back down and said, can we actually have all those back now please?

We're like, yeah, we added them to the 28th. They do stuff. But here you go. But we kept one of the PKMS and I remember going back to the 28th the next year, and still with that PKM, so they never got one PKM back.

in July of 2022 we actually got to shoot a few of the Javelins the 28th gave us. Blowing up a truck and bunker supposedly down there south of Mykolaiv.

So what did you do after Mykolaïv?

So I ended up leaving in 2022, right at the beginning of August. I went home relaxed for a little while.

I came back and went right back to Mykolaïv to meet up with a buddy because when I had left like a couple weeks after that, all my buddies that I was with there got wounded all in one day. And so they were all just getting outta the hospital and that, and so met up with them and then we went and rejoined the 28th and they were up by [name of town redacted for OPSEC reasons] and we did a lot of op work, just south of on the road of life there.

That went alright for a couple months, but then they're like, Hey, you know, we're not gonna let you guys do missions. You guys are too valuable. Can you guys please be trainers for us again? And we're like, no, man, we wanna fight. And they're like, nah, man, just please be trainers for us. We'll pay you the full pay and you can have whatever you want.

We're like, that's great and all, but we want to fight. Right? So we probably waited them, you know, amicably. And then me and a buddy, uh, joined GUR [Ukraine's military intelligence service] for a little while, did the GUR training for GUR International. And then it was so [expletive] stupid by the end of it, we told 'em to [expletive] off and all kind of like, you know, and this was not under contract with them yet, and they were keeping us on this base training for a month with no pay.

We couldn't leave on the weekend. And they were, there was like outta the 10 guys that were there, like seven or eight of 'em already had combat experience in Ukraine. The guys training us did not have combat experience in the world. They were just random [expletive] Ukrainians.

So, um, told them to [expletive] off and then I went to the second battalion of the Legion because they were also training there at the same time. Then I stayed with them for like five or six months. And we were up in Chernihiv and Sumy oblast at that time, Sumy first and then Chernihiv. And in Chernihiv we were doing the antennae or anti-partisan mission up there on the floor.

Those same guys that died finally, all of them, I think January 24, they were all like wearing like [expletive] the leaf camel suits. And what they were doing up there was basically drop across the border and execute the civilians and then leaving as like a terror campaign. We supposedly killed a couple of 'em on, uh, booby traps and eggs, and the rest of 'em got ambushed and killed, you know, January [2023].

So then I went home again, probably September, Early September 23. And then I came back again in April of 24. And First Battalion.

So at this point you signed a contract?

Oh yeah. The previous year I did. Yeah.

So everything you'd been doing up till then voluntary?

Everything I did in Mykolaïv was basically was voluntary, was voluntarily for free.

I was actually, and, and being, and the GUR training camp, you weren't paid right for that, but I had already signed a contract with the 28th before that, so I was already in the military at that point, and then broke the contract, went to the GUR thing, no contract, no pay, and then signed a contract a second time.

But yeah, that whole entire first year was no, no pay. Completely for free. And we were doing missions on the front in between Mykolaïv and Kherson, just as random dudes, randomly flooring dudes for free. And I remember talking to the platoon commander guy that we were working for at the time, and I'm like, Hey man, me and my buddy are thinking to going to Mykolaïv today.

Buy some gear and maybe eat some good lunch, and he's like, you're not, you're not under contract, right? We're like, no. He's like, you guys can literally do whatever the [expletive] you want. He goes, if you leave though and you're leaving for good, just give us the rifle back. We're like, oh, okay. Well we're going to Mykolaïv. I'll see you later. You've been great. It like a real thing, you know?

Because we were living with them, fighting with them, eating with them, everything. Right. Living in the same place. And after he said that, I'm like, oh, well, I, we should probably maybe sign some contracts, you know, and get paid. Yeah, so did Second Battalion in 23. Came back to the first battalion in 24 and you know, did all the fighting last year.

Kind of like south east of Pokrovsk, and ended up losing my left eye last July.

Tell me about what happened.

Yeah, so, uh, we were in a, a bunker, what they call a, a blend dodge here, me and my squad guys.

And when was this? Was this last July, 2024?

Yeah, July of 24. Yeah. Yeah. And in the Pokrovsk direction.

Yeah. So we were in a dodge and, uh, the Ukrainian unit that we were working with at the time were actually honestly using us as bait. Because we speak English over the radio and the Russians got to get super, super excited. Right? And the whole war, you know, both sides have been able to intercept each other's radio messages.

It's not so [expletive] hard. we were in this hole, and it was like 1200 meters past the next close to Ukrainian position, like past the zero line basically. And for the zero line at this point we were the zero line.

You were the Zero Line.

I was the Zero Line, yeah. In that hole. And, the Russians just got super excited that we were in there.

'Cause we were planning on taking back some bunkers that the Russians had previously overran earlier in the week. But by the time me and my guys got down there and got to one of the positions, it was like [expletive] smashed in with artillery and mortars. I wasn't gonna have my guys standing outside in the [expletive] middle of the day, you know, 200 yards past the [expletive] zero line at this point, and 1400 meters past the next closest Ukrainian position digging out, not what I was gonna do.

So we went back to the hole we were in and, and, yeah.

So anyway, we were, you know, out there by ourselves more or less. And, as soon as we got back from looking at that other bunker and finding out that it was, you know, basically unmanageable because there was nothing there anymore, it was all blown up, went back to our hole, and we had maybe an hour or two hours, three hours later [to wait].

I got a call over the radio saying, Hey man, get prepared because the Russians are planning an assault on your bunker and there's five or six armored vehicles and like 45 dudes. And I said, well, that's bad. That sucks. And so I look around at what we brought with, we brought with a lot of rockets.

But I think we had one or two AT4's [American 84mm rocket launchers]. We had, I think two Bulgarian bull spike rocket launchers that were anti-tank. And we had one or two Bulgarian bull spike rocket launchers that were anti-personnel. And then we had two M320 grenade launchers, and we had a 240, you know, an M240 machine gun.

And I said, okay, well, we'll use the two AT4's first. And then we'll use the bolt spikes, you know, anti-tank ones next. And then if it keeps going, we'll use the anti-personnel bolt spike from the vehicles, right? If it keeps going after that, we'll use the 320 on 'em, and if it keeps going after that, we'll use the 240.

And if it keeps going after that, you know, just our M4's instead. You know, we're waiting and getting the stuff ready. And then about five minutes later got a call over the radio that said, Hey, don't worry, Ukrainian mortars and the Ukrainian javelin team, like Javelin team blew 'em all up and you guys are fine.

And like, oh, okay, cool. That's great. Talk to you later. And what that meant was we were basically out there as bait for the Russians to get up there. For the Ukrainian mortar team and Javelin team to not be in any danger and they could just kill 'em really easy. And we're like, okay, that's great, whatever.

And then right about that same time, Mavic drones started dropping grenades right in the entrance to the bunker. And this went on probably every, every five or 10 minutes for the rest of the day. You hear it drop, you hear poop. You hear bang and you're like, whatever. You're not getting 'em inside the door anyways, I'm not worried about it at all.

And then they figured that out like probably four or five hours into it. They're like, well, this isn't working. We'll switch to something different. And one time a drone came over and I heard it come over and was waiting for the grenade to [expletive] fall off and blow up. I heard click and then, you know, thing hit the ground.

Instead of hearing bang, I heard 'shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh'. And I look up and a bunch of like a greenish yellow gas starts seeping in and the first thing I thought was, holy [expletive], that's mustard gas. I'm gonna die. Because we didn't bring gas masks with us. I went, holy [expletive], we're getting gassed. And so we ripped off a bunch of like, basically insulation, like, basically insulation off the walls and we're using those as fans to clean the gas back up.

We ended up finding a gas mask, so I had one of my guys wear it and the rest of us just took it on the face the entire time. So I started fanning it out and they just kept hitting us with gas at that point. And like two or three hours later, got a call over the radio and said, Hey man. I'm like, what's up?

He goes, well, are you ready? You got three Russians are gonna be at the front door of your bunker in about 15 seconds, so get ready. I'm like, oh, okay, I guess we're ready. Because you know, 15 seconds doesn't give you much time to do anything, right? And so the next thing I remember, they get to the bunker and I see a grenade get thrown through the door, and I look at it as it comes in and I look at it on the ground and it [expletive] blows up right in my [expletive] face.

And when that happened, in my left eye, I saw like a flash of light, some sparks, and then it shut off. And, and that was it for my left eye. And I was like, holy [expletive]. And then I tried to shoot my rifle, got one round out of the rifle, and I was holding it at such an odd angle in a weird position to be able to shoot out the door.

I accidentally blocked the ejection port cover with my hip and caused a malfunction on myself. And so I tossed the rifle down and then we just started having a grenade fight back and forth. And we must have thrown probably 25 to 30 grenades back and forth between us and the Russian guys, I think they threw probably 15 and we threw probably 12 or 14.

And then I made one good grenade throw. And then after that it seemed like they [past tense expletive] off. And then we were getting called over the radio that they had run off. And then all my guys were like, can we go outside and shoot at 'em? And I'm sitting there bleeding, and I remember taking my glasses off and looking at my lens on the, you know, the left eye lens of the glasses.

And there was a perfect round hole right through the middle of them. I looked at it and I went [expletive] and [expletive] it. Right.

That's when you realised you'd been hit in the eye.

Yeah.

By a piece of shrapnel from the grenade.

Yep. And I was pretty delirious at the time. Uh, so after that happened, I remember calling over the radio 'cause a couple hours previous I had told my buddy who was doing radio watch that they should get some Ukrainians to man the positions that were behind us that weren't manned.

The Ukrainians said no. And then I said, okay, well that's all well and good, but we're gonna have some wounded guys here at the position in the next couple hours they'll get a casevac [casualty evacuation] plan ready. Mm-hmm. And evidently they didn't do that either. And so I called over the radio and said, Hey, me again.

We're not doing too good now, you know, from the gas. And a couple of us were wounded by that, you know, in that grenade exchange. And I said, yep, just like I told you a couple hours ago, there's some wounded guys here now, including me, and I remember telling my buddy that I got shot in the face because the Russians had actually poked a, I wanna say it was a PKM, but we never found it.

So maybe a, maybe it was an AK and it was just really loud inside. Uh, they were poked their rifles around the corner and shot at us, and I thought I'd gotten shot in the face. And so I'm on the radio going, I got [expletive] shot in the face. Send help. Right? And then all of a sudden they're like, oh, okay. Yeah.

And then they tried to figure out you know, what the help would be. But so my guys eventually went outside like five minutes later. Saw a Russian dude in the middle of a wheat field behind our position getting bracketed by mortars, and then saw him die. And then, you know, shot a little bit.

They dropped a drone, dropped a grenade on him, nobody got hurt, and they came back in the bunker. And then, maybe like an hour later, two hours later, they gassed us again. Really, really, really bad. And, the gas that they used this time instead of being, like greenish yellow in color was, like black in color.

And we knew they were using chloropicrin and phosgene on us, but we didn't know what that black stuff was. But it was making everybody hallucinate and shit their pants and puke. So that wasn't good. And then about that time, one of the guys in my squad who had thrown that gas canister outta the front door.

And actually that probably helped. One of us actually went crazy from the hallucinations, you know, the hallucinations and ran outside of the bunker, ended up stepping on the mine and bleeding out. So eventually, maybe two or three hours later, they finally have a casevac plan situated, and they wanted me and a couple of my guys that were hurt.

To move from our position all the way to where this armored truck was gonna come pick us up like [expletive] a mile away or two miles away. So we ended up doing that. We found the guy that had stepped on the mine at that time and I sent a guy over there to help him. But I think by that time he was pretty much gone already.

And the only reason we left is 'cause we thought all of us were getting relieved and we thought we were just gonna go first. We ended up getting picked up and then I, you know, I started the whole hospital thing. And then, instead of the remaining guys getting picked up that night, they stayed in position, woke up the next morning, got into another really bad firefight, another guy died, who was actually my best friend from home.

And then the two guys that were left in the position there. Basically had to fend for themselves over the next like 12 hours, which they did, successfully. And the Russians in that first exchange, the day before all three of them died, I later found out. Obviously the guy that was getting bracketed by mortars, in the field died.

And then the other two guys, including the guy that threw the grenade that got my eye, they made it to a different position. And I was talking actually to a lady who was in the casualty point at the time when it happened and said that they heard [the Russians] talking on the radio for a little while, you know, to their command.

And then eventually they bled out and died. And what I think happened was, was the guy that got bracketed by mortars and killed in that wheat field was their medic. These two other guys didn't know how to patch themselves up, so they just bled out in a hole and died the next morning. When that happened, I think one of my buddies got a couple of them with the 240 and, before he got blown up by an FPV [drone] and the other couple might have been shot, but then the British kid I was with or that was still there, ended up calling mortars on top of their position.

I don't know if the guys that died from that got killed by that or shot, but I later learned from a different guy that when they showed up to relieve a different group that had relieved us that day, they found a bunch of Russian dead bodies around the physician. So they died somehow from us and either by mortars or bleeding out after getting shot or whatever, or combination.

I later learned that my buddy who died the next morning had went outside with the 240 because they were told they were going to get attacked by 8 Russians and he was the only one left in the bunker able to pick the thing up and move it around. So he went outside with it got off I think 30 rounds then ran back into the bunker yelling FPV and an FPV came down and blew the 240 up. By that time the Russians were at the door and tossed what must have been a satchel charge or something down there because it left a small crater in the ground.

Also I learned that then the guy next to him got wounded in the leg and his rifle was blown up so then he had a one man grenade fight with them. And when he was down to his last grenade he kept it and grabbed his knife waiting for them to come in, but when they did that's when the British kid shot at them and either hit them with them bleeding out and dying right outside the door or being killed when he called in mortars.

Basically after that started the whole hospital thing.

Where did you go to hospital? How were you evacuated?

How so I, I got to that truck and, got inside there and I remember, 'cause I had two eye cups on. So I basically blind. I couldn't see anything.

And I remember a Ukrainian guy trying to hand me a bag to puke in. I slapped the bag out of his hand and puked all over him. He got just pissed. And, took that to a kind of like a casevac station or point. And I remember sitting in a chair and this person come up and talked to me in English and said, Hey man, is there anything you want?

And I said, do you guys have any cold pop, like any cold soda? And they're like, yeah, yeah, we, we actually got a fridge, we got cold coke. You want a, you know, a can of Coca-Cola? And I was like, yeah, that'd be [expletive] awesome. Do that. And then I remember they put me on one of those civilian yellow buses that just had civilians in it.

And I remember basically I think riding that stupid bus to the hospital. Of course I was pretty delirious at the time, but I do remember riding a stupid ass yellow civilian bus with just regular Ukrainians on it. And I remember that none of 'em would get up and let me sit down, so I had to hold onto the [expletive] railing on the bus, standing up, bleeding everywhere.

So that was cool of them, and I ended up going to the hospital in Zaporizhzhia first, and then I was there for a couple days and then I went to a hospital in Dnipro and was there for a couple of days. And then I actually got to go on a medical evacuation train ride from Dnipro to Kyiv. Then I was in the hospital in Kyiv, in clinical [care] for like, two weeks maybe.

And then I did a month of medical leave in Kyiv and then went back to my unit at that time.

How did they get the shrapnel out of your eye?

So, they found it. And, I remember waking up one day like, all right, we're gonna take the one piece out today. And I'm like, okay. And I went into a room and they knocked me out.

And I remember them talking to me later and I said, how did you get it out? And they said, well, we just put a big pair of [expletive], like tweezers, basically up your [expletive], you know, left nostril and it was in my sinus cavity. So they just took the tweezers up in there and grabbed it and pulled it out.

So you were pretty lucky actually, because if it, if it hadn't hit that cavity, it would've gone straight through your brain. You would think you'd be dead. That'd be it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yep. I just like to think I'm tougher than that. Yeah, there's still, there's still a piece in an eye muscle and there's two other pieces still somewhere in my sinus cavity, but they were a lot smaller, I guess, and they're not wanting to take those out for whatever reason.

So how long were you out of action for?

Oh, I was only in the hospital for like two weeks and then I was on medical leave for a month and then I went back to the unit, but they were already back west at that point. So I just helped train guys for a couple weeks. And then I went home again, and then I came back again in March [2025].

And What have you been doing since March?

So I hung around Lviv for a little while, trying to start this medical commission and then decided to just go back to the unit 'cause it would be easier to do it at that point. And then I could help train guys. And so ended up being in the unit and we're out east again this time by Kharkiv and, I've just been, you know, training the guys, doing radio watch, helping out wherever I can and trying to give like, guidance on gear to buy and teach 'em how to shoot and all that kind of stuff.

Well Justin, thank you very much for telling us your story. How long do you think you're gonna stay in Ukraine?

Oh no, I'm gonna leave eventually, uh, probably maybe mid or late summer. We'll just see how long it takes for everything to ate itself out.

Okay. Well thank you very much for your time.

Yeah, no problem.

You're a hero of Ukraine, thank you very much for telling our readers your story. We really appreciate it.

Yeah, no problem.

Glory to Ukraine!

To the heroes Glory!