I want to tell you a story.

If you followed Joel Francis' original Give-Send-Go campaign, called "Helping Haywards", you already know a different story, almost a prelude to the one I want to tell you today.  THAT story is about how an ex-Army-Special-Forces medic woke up one morning in February of 2022, and found out that the Russian army had invaded Ukraine. So I went to Ukraine. But that's a different story -- and the one I need to tell you now is still being written.

THIS story starts on June 6th, 2024.  That was the day I crossed the English Channel, with my 24-year-old daughter, my 27-year-old son, and a 28-year-old volunteer British paramedic.  We had with us a barely-operational Ford ambulance that was significantly older than every passenger aboard except myself, and packed to the roof with almost twenty thousand US dollars worth of medical supplies, warm socks, camping gear, a Starlink, assorted comms gear, helmets, IFAKS, and body armor.

June 6th has always had an odd dual significance to me personally.  Thirty-one years previously, I had been baptized on that day.  And eighty years previously, in 1944, June 6th was also the day when roughly 140,000 young men and women, from every branch of service, and every remaining free country in the world (with particularly heavy representation from Great Britain and the United States), had embarked on the most audacious amphibious landing and airdrop in human history.

When I was younger than my companions were on D-Day 2024, I studied European history, from before the founding of Rome to the present day. To say that it was both bloody and repetitive is a profound understatement. But perhaps the most extraordinary thing that can ever be said about the Second World War is that it was different. The Allies who fought their way ashore on D-Day were perhaps the first massed army in European history who weren't fighting purely to replace one tyrant with another. They weren't risking their lives for wealth or glory; they hadn't come to loot and pillage and conquer; they were putting everything they had on the line to restore the freedoms which the Axis tyrannies had stripped away by force of arms from the free citizens of Europe. And when our little team went ashore in Normandy on June 6th of 2024, the more than four thousand immaculately maintained graves that met us there, and the monuments and memorials at every other road crossing, bore indisputable witness to the fact that even eighty years after the Normandy landings, the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those liberated citizens still gathered to remember, and pay their respects, to the men and women who freed them from Nazi occupation.  Eighty years later, places like Oradour-sur-Glane are as well known to the average Frenchman as the more infamous European slaughter-houses like Auschwitz and Dachau and Bergen-Belsen.  And after the Nazis' unconditional surrender, the "ordinary" Germans, who thought to shield themselves from accountability by claiming that "nations have always gone to war with other nations," and "we were only following orders," were tried and largely executed for what an utterly appalled community of nations described as "crimes against humanity" -- acts so barbaric and savage that the phrase "never again" still resonates.

Or at least, I thought that phrase still meant something, when I crossed the Atlantic on my way to Ukraine for the first time, in 2022.

But 2024 was not 2022, and while my companions shared my interest in history and my support for Ukraine, they were skeptical about my almost incoherent frustration with US foreign policy.  In my opinion, many of the political blunders that had led to World War Two were being repeated verbatim, as the world appeased Russian tyranny over and over "because nukes", and gave just enough support to Ukraine to keep Ukrainian troops fighting on the battlefield without being sufficiently armed or authorized to win a decisive victory against the Russians.  In 2022, the US State Department's conviction of Ukraine's imminent collapse had led to such strategic idiocies as sending Javelin missiles with only one battery per launcher and zero training kits for young Marines who had never seen a Javelin but were expected to figure out how to use them while in combat with Russian armor.  Only the direct intervention of Alaska's Senator Lisa Murkowski had gotten the DOD to send Javelin training kits to the Ukrainians in late summer of 2022.  As for the batteries?  The homemade battery packs we had prototyped in 2022 were still in use in 2024.  As my children and I wiped sand onto the engraved cross that marked the resting place of one of our own family members who hadn't made it home in 1944, I thought about the purpose of this year's mission to Ukraine.

When I first arrived in Ukraine in early 2022, I was shocked to find that people kept looking to me as an expected expert on the military hardware and equipment that were being frantically airlifted into Ukraine.  Given that most of these items hadn't even been fielded when I was in the Special Forces, my real contribution to the Ukrainian war effort, other than the battery packs, was frantically working through my list of contacts, finding people who had used specific recently-delivered anti-armor weapons during GWOT, figuring out how to scoop those experienced operators up from wherever they were, and relocating them to teach groups of Ukrainians who needed instruction on the particular weapons systems.  In short, I was a bus driver, with a cellphone, a spreadsheet, and a reckless willingness to put anything and everything onto multiple credit cards if it might give a bunch of twenty-year-old volunteers an incrementally better chance of living through their first contact with what was allegedly "the second-best army in the world."

Well, by 2024, all of that had changed.  Russia was no longer regarded as the second-best army in the world; after Ukraine invaded Kursk, there were significant indications that Russia was probably the second-best army in Russia.    As for the Ukrainians, they now knew more about modern warfare than any other army in the world, in particular about how to fight a war against an enemy with seemingly limitless equipment, despite having almost no air force.  Ukraine doesn't have a navy -- but they had cleared the Russians out of the Black Sea.  The only thing the Russians really had going for them was the cowardice of the Western leaders, who refused to arm or authorize Ukraine to strike back at the launch sites from which Russia relentlessly pounded Ukrainian population centers with massive air-launched bombs.  And, the Russians had an almost unbelievable willingness to slaughter their own countrymen -- prisoners, migrants, ethnic minorities, anyone and everyone who WASN'T a "white Russian" from Moscow or Saint Petersburg -- and an apparently limitless supply not only of expired Soviet weapons and equipment, but brand-new weapons from Iran, North Korea, and ever-increasingly, China.

So while all this was going on, what was I doing on a historical tour of World War Two battlefields and cemeteries?

Well, thanks to almost twenty thousand dollars worth of donations from donors all over the US, I was shepherding forty-two pallets of surgical supplies to Ukrainian field hospitals, plus what would eventually turn out to be three NIH ambulances bought at auction in Wales and (yet again) delivered across the Channel to Ukrainian units desperately in need of anything with four wheels and an engine.  In addition, and thanks in no small part to my failure to read the fine print on what exactly was and wasn't part of my annual "continuing medical education" budget, I was also delivering close to $20,000 USD of personally-purchased dual-use equipment to Ukrainian field medics.  Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I was waiting for a friend to meet me in Berlin: a guy who actually understood how drones talked to each other, and therefore, how drone jammers really worked.

And THAT is the story you've come to hear.

Because by now you know that the new Axis of A**** are throwing everything they have into the fight in Ukraine, under the assumption (right or wrong) that anything they can pound into rubble before January 20th 2025, will be handed over to them in perpetuity at a conference table by soft-spoken men with thousand-dollar neckties who've never heard of Neville Chamberlain.   

Because if you followed my social media posts from this summer, you know that I've been working with Ukrainian surgeons, younger than my own kids, who are doing damage control surgery, on kitchen tables, lit by headlamps.

Because if you follow the news, you know the Russians are deliberately targeting the field hospitals where these young surgeons are operating.

And now you know: they've hit "my" guys.

They killed an international medic; killed the patient the surgeons had spent hours stabilizing; and gravely wounded the driver. And then they double-tapped the aid station with an incendiary drone.  

And "my" guys: with shrapnel wounds, with their clothes and their own skin on fire, fought like madmen -- to save their patients, their equipment, and their friends.  And as one of them said when he showed up the next day with second-degree burns covering his left arm from wrist to shoulder, "if we don't do it, who will?"

I don't know if having a drone jammer on that ambulance would have made a difference.  

But here's what I do know:

The minimum order for jammer components is ten each;

There's a team of technicians standing by who can build jammers better than anything off the shelf;

For less than $50,000 USD, we can deliver ten drone jammers (plus some VERY clever peripherals), to these medics' units, just in time for Orthodox Christmas.

So THAT is the story I want to tell you.

Ask me anything.

Share this story with anybody who has a heart to help.

And please, please, please, boost the signal.