“There was a moment that I thought we were actually going to go to war with America. It felt like Order 66 from Star Wars [where the Jedi are designated traitors to the Empire and the order is given to kill them],” said “Dutch”, 25, from South Carolina. “It was like, oh, shit, all my friends are going to try to kill me now.”
7–9 minutes
The Americans were pinned down, lying prone among sunflower stalks as they took rocket fire from Russian positions across the fields. Then, mortar burst in the air above them. All seven of Delta Team were wounded, some repeatedly.
“I remember looking at one sunflower that was taller than the weeds while I was holding pressure on Dubs’ wounds, thinking we are all going to bleed out and die here,” said “Tango”, the Delta Team medic who was hit with shrapnel four times. One of the 24 shards that entered his body and sliced into the sciatic nerve in his leg.
Tango and his brothers-in-arms in Chosen Company, 59th Brigade, are among hundreds of US veterans fighting with Ukrainian forces. Many of them have shed blood, some have made the ultimate sacrifice, to defend American values on Ukrainian soil.
Now they feel betrayed by the Trump administration’s approach to Ukraine, a marked departure from that of the Biden administration. In particular, they feel betrayed by what they see as his parroting of Russian narratives.
Tango, 35, is from Texas, a deeply conservative state. “A lot of my friends and family are hard-right Republicans. Even people I know, that I’m really close to, I’ve seen their rhetoric change just as Trump and his media have spun it,” Tango said on a break between missions.
“I’m like, Hey, you’ve been speaking with me about this war. You know what’s actually happening here, yet you’re still just voicing things that you know are not true. It really blows my mind how easy it is to manipulate public opinion in the way that it’s being done. It does feel like a betrayal. America is now just a business being run by a businessman.”
Tango fought al-Qaeda with the US 3rd Infantry Division, 315 Infantry Regiment, in Iraq, but says fighting the war in Ukraine gives him a far clearer sense of purpose. “Ukraine is a sovereign country that was invaded by a foreign power and we’re here defending it. That’s the fact of the matter and nothing’s going to change it,” he said. “It’s nice to be resolutely on the side of right, this time around.”
Tango survived that spring day in 2023 but two of his teammates, Lance Lawrence and Andrew “Dubs” Webber, did not. During the Ukrainian counterattack in the Donbas, his team had advanced too far ahead of the rest of the company and were stranded two kilometres from the nearest evacuation point.
“We ended up hitting a Russian position, which we fought with for a little bit and we thought we cleared, but then we started getting hit with rockets and mortars from a trench and tree line to our right,” Tango recalled.
They took one casualty and tried to pull back, but got caught out in the open in a weed-infested sunflower field. After being hit in the leg by the mortars, Tango could only crawl to his comrades to try to stabilise them.
“I had four people there with me that I was trying to stabilise,” said Tango. Dubs he said, “was checking out my leg, when he got hit with something that penetrated his lungs”. He died before they could be picked up.
The mission was a disaster for the company, which was forced to retreat with 90 per cent casualties, mostly wounded but two dead, Tango said. In the months that followed, he had to go through a long period of rehabilitation. Now he has returned to his unit, despite the dangers.
For Tango and other Americans who thought their country was behind them in their fight with Russia, the sudden shift in rhetoric from the White House has come as a blow.
The acrimonious meeting last month between President Zelensky, Trump and his vice-President JD Vance, whose cousin Nate has also fought for Ukraine, was perhaps felt none more keenly than by the Americans here.
“There was a moment that I thought we were actually going to go to war with America. It felt like Order 66 from Star Wars [where the Jedi are designated traitors to the Empire and the order is given to kill them],” said “Dutch”, 25, from South Carolina. “It was like, oh, shit, all my friends are going to try to kill me now.”
Dutch had just returned from the front lines when we met at the base of his new unit, Ukraine’s lethally effective Third Assault Brigade. Before arriving in Ukraine in April 2022, he fought for the French Foreign Legion alongside American troops in Mali and Iraq.
He has served in many of Ukraine’s fiercest battles, including the 2023 cross-border incursion into Russia’s Belgorod region, where he and three other Americans masqueraded as Russian resistance fighters attached to an anti-regime Belarusian Legion under the command of Ukraine’s military intelligence, HUR.
Dutch calls himself “right wing” and shares many of Trump’s views on traditional family values. Yet he is appalled that the US president has allowed Vladimir Putin to present Russia as a fellow champion of them.
“From what I’ve seen on the battlefield and the way that they behave, you see that they don’t share those values at all,” he said. “The Russian military is a lot more violent than what you see on our news, they’re savage. Rape, executions, torture, they’ll post it on social media, they’ll send it to their friends and family, openly bragging about how they are war criminals.”
Dutch, too, has spilt his blood on Ukrainian soil in a battle that he sees as essential to preserving the very notion of freedom. “I was on an assault mission and went into a trench, more like just a hole, not dug out in the back. An RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] fell right behind me. I had bits of shrapnel in my ass,” he said, laughing.
He had not slept in two days because of the Shahed drone attacks that accompanied Putin’s pledge of a ceasefire on energy infrastructure this week.
Many of the soldiers have made extraordinary sacrifices, upending their lives to fight for Ukraine. “Clutch”, 35, a former army reserve officer also from Texas, sold his house, packed his bags and took up volunteering last autumn to help Ukraine before enrolling for its armed forces this month. He is determined to fund himself through the war, not wanting to burden the Ukrainian state. “I just kept seeing all the kids dying and then ladies, too. It didn’t seem fair … I wanted to come out here and help people, even if I’m playing a small, insignificant part.”
He travelled shortly before Trump’s inauguration, expecting the new US president to strong-arm the Russians into a deal. “My thought going into it was we’re going to have the full backing of the United States, then he froze the aid. Now that I’m here I see it really affects morale, it was a big let down.”
All of the Americans who spoke to The Times were keen for a ceasefire to pause the fighting, although none believed Russia would give up on its long-term ambitions to take over Ukraine. “Russia is not going to stop coming, they see Ukraine as theirs,” said Clutch. “Even if there is a ceasefire, it’s just going to be temporary.”
Voyager has been good. They just implemented a custom emoji fix to that ensures emoji are the correct size regardless of their uploaded size.
Have you tried increasing the size of your swap memory in windows? Otherwise known as “virtual memory”. Depending on the speed of your drive and available space, you might be able to increase the vertual memory size to get more performance.
But what about using a page archiving service, even a self-hosted one, like Shiori. Shiori has an extension that can allow for single click page archiving right from the browser. The pages are saved as html files or txt files and it will create a readability version of the file which is just the text and images. You could then search the files and their contents using something like VS Code to search the whole directory where the files are stored. There are plenty of other ways to do that search once you have those archives, though. I think even Windows File Search will search the contents of a txt or html file stored on the device.
Shiori also has its own search, which is pretty fast, and searches the contents of the archives as well.
The shine job they did on Biden while he was VP in the Obama years really weathered strong. All that “goofy grampa” shit they wrapped him in, and published all over the place, really solidified Biden as America’s Grandad, to the point that some people are still looking at him in the same way you might look at your cooky 80+ year old pops at the family picnic. They gave him this aura of stateliness, like he’s the Washington Monument come to life. He’s been through it all, seen every face of America, he’s the golden boy, the old dog, the tough but fair, the heavy hand but soft heart, the elected official equivalent of a mid-90s Ford Ranger, classic like coca-cola, a cool Budweiser on a hot summer night, Fireflies on the Forth of July, you know all that paper thin Americana draped over the face of death.
This is what makes him so effective, and what gives everyone the license to walk beside him. No doubt in my mind, the level of resistance to the genocide in Gaza would be magnified ten times if Trump was in power now, making all the same moves as Biden is now. It’s because libs view Trump as “Fascism Manifest”. He is the doomsayer, a harbinger of the Apocalypse, and a “threat to democracy”, whatever that means to them. His aura is toxic, and liberal progressives wouldn’t be seen collaborating with him because he gives up the game too easily. He wears his class interests on his sleeve. Watching progressives line up behind a pro genocide Donald Trump would be far too much cognitive dissonance for the liberal progressive voters to handle. Watching them line up behind Grandpa Joe, however, well, that’s just party unity and liberal progressives hunger for party unity.
I think the American institutions are accelerationist, and anyone you get out of that system as leaders would be accelerationists. The heel sets the stage, reads the crowd, establishes clear red lines and invites the masses to cosplay as resistance fighters standing behind the Face. Once the Face takes the stage, in the afterglow of the resistance’s victory, the red lines are moved forward quietly. Without this performance, there is no acceleration to be had. Both the Face and the Heel have a vested interested in the show they put on, and they need each other to keep the show going.
Listen, if you set the bar that high you’d have to discipline the whole force.
Woof, did this guy see the writing on the wall or what?
Sounds like he hasn’t changed his opinion, but he also hasn’t made any efforts to amend or change the definition, not that it would matter at this point.
Please continue to deny reality. Tesla sucks, that’s why its stock is going down.
Emoji down! I repeat, emoji down!!
You replied to me literally stating that my opinions were flawed from the get go based on very big assumptions.
Typical Redditor behavior, you don’t even stop to look at who you are speaking with, you just assume every comment below yours is somehow the same person, and not possibly someone else who also thinks you’re a total chud.
On what basis do you make such a claim?
Archive of the full article.
This is rational from China’s perspective. Divesting in the American technology pipeline not only weakens America’s grip on the global economy but also positions China as the leader in global technology.
Also, we have more evidence of US putting back doors into technology than we do China. If you’re living in the imperial core, it’s far more likely that the US is monitoring your activities than China is.
Send an anonymous note about his rampant sinophobia to the administration. Probably wouldn’t fly in the uni near me because we have a high population of Chinese students. Not sure what the demographic is in your area, though.
Capitalism is optional after all.
Free = Freedom not free as in it costs nothing. Look it up.
We’re all ignorant until we’re not. Its more fair to say in my case that we’re reeducating each other, because I am not without my own reactionary tendencies. The key is a willingness to learn.
Yeah thats what I imagined the experience being like. It doesn’t sound like it’s much different then others dealing with falling out of their religion. This person wasn’t a random person, so I’ll take your closing sentence as an expression of frustration. We’ve both been doing a lot of learning in recent years and this is just another one of those moments. Confronting your own reactionary tendencies doesn’t happen all at once.
But thank you comrade for your perspective, its valued.
Jesus Christ. Where does one even start with a comment like this? Defending Andrew Tate, of all things, is something I didn’t expect to see logging into the Grad today.
You can go find the videos where he talks about how to abuse women, and how to entrap them so that they can become cam slaves. What on earth could he be talking about in those videos otherwise? What kind of comrade do you consider yourself, where you can see a guy like Tate and think “Yeah, this guy, he’s standing against ‘the system’ just like me.” What even is this “System” you’re talking about? The imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchical system? Is that what the “Matrix” is that Tate talks about? Because I’d love to see how you drew those conclusions from the man’s insane ramblings.
Since you quit watching all these “e-celebs” maybe you can spend some time reading a book.