What drives someone to join Ukraine’s foreign legion? For David King, it was to escape a life derailed by conspiracy theories
eavy-set and garrulous, David King stood out from the other foreign volunteers at the Cicada Hotel in Korczowa, a town on the Polish-Ukrainian border. Wearing camouflage fatigues, he was sipping from a bottle of beer and smoking a cigarette, waiting for a bus that would take him 30km east to the Ukrainian foreign legion barracks at Yavoriv in western Ukraine.
King liked the army’s sense of discipline and patriotism. After 9/11 he wrote a poem called “My Brothers” that was published in the: “It’d make you tear up if I found you a copy”. The highlight of his time in the forces was learning to fly helicopters. When he talks about this, his eyes light up and his Midwestern drawl becomes bouncier. “The helicopter is the most complicated machine ever invented by man,” he likes to say. “And I’m a fucking badass pilot.
Then he found the chance to fly again. In the late 2010s, King worked in Afghanistan as a commercial pilot, carrying everything from troops to post to ammunition. He liked the work and it paid well. But going to Afghanistan was “disheartening”: after more than a decade of liberation from Taliban rule, the Afghans were still selling their children into slavery, “burning goat shit” to stay warm, baking bricks for pitiful wages and getting lung cancer in their teens.
In Ukraine, David King encountered what he calls an “operational morass”. He had flown thousands of miles to help, but there was virtually no order to anything he saw when he got there. When he arrived at the base at Yavoriv, he found it odd that the Ukrainians had no apparent command structure. He asked a colonel for a pair of socks; the colonel claimed he didn’t have the authority to hand them out.
King baulked at the idea. How many troops were in the village? What was their armament? How quickly could they be reinforced? Where were their weaknesses? No one seemed to have thought any of it through. “You don’t just show a picture on your cell phone of a village the Russians had captured and tell 20 guys to go take it,” King says. At that point he got a taxi to Lviv in western Ukraine. From there, he eventually hitched a lift back to Poland with a group of humanitarians.
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