Tip of the Spear Landmine Removal is an international humanitarian non-profit (501C3) organization. Donations are critical to the missions we conduct around the world to remove explosive hazards, mainly in rural areas that do not get the support needed. Our mission is simple; we go into these heavily mined areas to clear and remove these explosive hazards from villages and farming areas so civilians can safely start to rebuild their lives again without fear of injury or death from explosives.

In February 2022, when Russia escalated military operations in Ukraine, I felt a calling to do something. I wasn’t sure what, but this calling kept getting stronger every day. So finally, in mid-March, I decided to quit my job as a Government contractor and head to Ukraine. I am a retired US Army Special Forces Green Beret with eight combat deployments to Afghanistan, so I wasn’t interested in fighting. Instead, I wanted to make a difference in another way. That difference came from a humanitarian mission with a missionary group called YWAM. As a Christian, I believe God’s hand has guided me in this endeavor, but I had no idea what to expect. Going in unarmed and helping was a bit different than my standard deployments, but it felt right.

I left for Ukraine in the middle of March and hit the ground running. Whether we were picking families up from areas where the fighting was fierce or delivering food and life-sustaining goods to people who had lost everything, I felt like I had found my calling. But, during my two months in Ukraine, from Bucha, Irpin, Kharkiv, Severodonesks, and other dangerous locations, I saw a cruel reality of war, injuring and killing civilians daily; Landmines and boobytraps. Suddenly, things hit close to home. In Afghanistan, I spent most of my time on combat missions, clearing routes of IEDs and landmines as my ODA team would move to whichever target we had. I have found many IEDs and landmines during my eight deployments in Afghanistan, but there was one that almost ended everything for me.

On September 12th, 2010, I stepped on an IED while conducting a clearance operation, which almost killed me. After a long but successful rehabilitation, I went back to Afghanistan on seven more deployments so I could do everything in my power to ensure my teammates and my Afghan counterparts never had to go through that pain. While in Ukraine, I saw the dangers these Ukrainian civilians face, and again I felt the calling to do something. I knew I had so much experience from my time in Afghanistan finding and removing explosive hazards and I felt like I could be helping these innocent people who were stuck in the middle of the war.

So, after returning home on May 18th 2022, I immediately started planning my next trip back for August 2022. This trip was to conduct Emergency Response demining in support of humanitarian missions doing what I gained a lot of experience with in Afghanistan; finding and removing Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), landmines and booby traps. My mission took me into heavily mined areas clearing and remove explosive hazards in villages and farming areas which were littered with landmines and explosive hazards. Partnered with Ukrainian counterparts from the local area I conduct training on the CEIA Detector, real time training on ground sign awareness, indicators, and other early warnings to keep them safe while we conducted mine removal operations. This mission resulted in 334 TM-62 Anti-Tank mines being removed from the local farm fields giving the farmers the freedom to cut harvest in Sept 2022.

As Ukrainians return to what’s left of their homes and villages, they face these dangers. People have survived the fighting only to now face landmines, booby traps and explosive hazards, which injure and kill civilians daily. Most have lost so much, if not everything, and all they want to do is pick up the broken pieces of their lives up and move forward. Ukrainians have been driven by desperation to enter known minefields to fish, gather food, or collect firewood, only to be injured or killed by mines. Farmers working their fields hit landmines in their tractors as they cultivate the ground, and ranchers are grazing their livestock.

The Ukrainian military is so bogged down with the war effort that the clearance operations to make these villages safe for civilians are often neglected due to workforce shortages. The ugly fact is this; Ukraine is one of the most heavily mine-contaminated countries in the world and already had significant numbers of mines before the full-scale Russian invasion in February.

Both anti-vehicle and anti-personnel mines, trip wire devices, and booby traps were commonly planted by both Ukrainians and Russians before the intensification of the conflict this year. Moreover, landmines are indiscriminate: they inflict injury and death long after their military purpose has passed and ultimately terrorize the civilian population, cutting them off from using their land.

I have since returned to Ukraine November to December, where we successfully removed landmines, UXOs, and cluster munitions in Kherson Oblast, clearing civilian areas so the innocent civilians caught in the middle can start to rebuild their lives again.