Former Army Ranger who fought in Ukraine says conflict there is far worse than fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq

• A former Army Ranger who spent months in Ukraine said fighting there was worse than in Iraq or Afghanistan.
• He described getting less support and intelligence, unreliable comms, and little help for the injured.

A former Army Ranger who fought in Ukraine said he found the fighting there far worse than in Afghanistan and Iraq.

David Bramlette told The Daily Beast that when he fought in Iraq and Afghanistan he had air support, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.

"The worst day in Afghanistan and Iraq is a great day in Ukraine," he said.

Bramlette, who was a Green Beret on a counter-Russia mission and an Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan, said fighting in Ukraine had much more unknowns.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, "even when we thought it wasn't, we were always in control of the situation… versus as a commander of a team in Ukraine," he said.

He added that comms weren't reliable in Ukraine, so when they were doing reconnaissance missions they would sometimes have to wait up to two days until one of his men came back.

"If two of them get injured… there's no helicopter coming to get you… shit can go south really, really frickin' quickly. And that's the kind of stuff that is pretty hard," he said.

Troy Offenbecker, a former marine, gave a similar assessment to The Daily Beast.

"This is my third war I've fought in, and this is by far the worst one," he said.

"You're getting fucking smashed with artillery, tanks. Last week I had a plane drop a bomb next to us, like 300 meters away. It's horrifying shit," he added.

Offenbecker said he ignored requests from people he knew from the military about how to get involved in Ukraine. "To be honest it was pretty bad so I didn't want to bring anyone else into it," he said.

Offenbecker's comments echo those made by another former marine, Jason Mann, to CNN in February.

"Fighting in a trench, that's not something that someone's done in a long time," Mann said. "Like even World War Two is not really fought in trenches to this degree."

"Artillery is something we didn't have to deal with in Iraq and Afghanistan apart from just a random rocket or grenade coming in," he added. "And that's something you can't fight against. You just have to hunker down and get lucky."