A Brit who fought in Ukraine reveals his war essentials: guns, grenades, and candy

Yahoo

08-04-2025

A British man who fought in Ukraine shared insights on essential gear for his reconnaissance work.
Macer Gifford, a former trader, fought with Ukraine's 131st reconnaissance battalion.
Equipment shortages in Ukraine make retrieving lost gear crucial for soldiers, he said.
A British man who volunteered to fight with a Ukrainian army unit against Russia's invasion told Business Insider about the standard — and unexpected — items he carried while he was fighting there.
Macer Gifford is the nom de guerre of former currency trader Harry Rowe, who has fought in both Syria and Ukraine as an international volunteer.
He spoke to BI's Authorized Account series about what it's really like to defend Ukraine.
He described the kit he found essential when carrying out missions in a reconnaissance unit and the simple rules he followed to keep it and himself safe.
Gifford fought with Ukraine's 131st reconnaissance battalion in 2022, fighting in places like Lyman and the islands of the freezing Dnipro river before later forming a specialized drone unit.
He told BI that he had different kit for different roles, but there were some constants, like his uniform.
"Broadly speaking, I would prefer to use a British military uniform, primarily for quality reasons," he told BI.
Gifford said that, during reconnaissance missions, he needed slim body armor to navigate tight spaces such as thorny wooded thickets or to squeeze through gaps in buildings. He'd carry magazines and grenades on a plate carrier vest, with additional magazines on a battle belt.
"There was a knife constantly on my plate carrier," he said.
He also had an assault pack for combat operations, though during hotter weather, he would don a Camelbak — a pack with an inbuilt water reservoir and tube, which also had space for more ammo and grenades.
Gifford said most of his time was spent in cold conditions.
As for his guns, he started out with the 131st's standard-issue AK-74. Later, he was given the Grot — a Polish rifle, which he said he customized with a full grip and a red dot sight with a magnifier. He also replaced the steel magazines with plastic, he said.
For a secondary weapon, he carried a US-made 40mm single-shot grenade launcher and carried 12 grenades slung around his neck.
While US and UK-made grenades were "prized" among Ukrainians, he generally used Soviet-made ones, he said.
He described how, for longer missions, his crew might carry an RPG, a shoulder-fired anti-tank weapon.
"But in regards to actually anti-tank, it was always NATO that would provide the best kits," he said, pointing to NLAWs, Javelins, and the Spanish-made Matador.
Gifford didn't bring any personal effects with him as he's "not a very superstitious person." But he did take two small luxuries that made all the difference.
One key item? Wet wipes.
Far away from hot showers, Gifford would wash with a quick "bird bath" using the wipes to bring "some level of civility" to missions that could last up to a week, he said.
On top of basic food and drink, there was one other essential: candy.
Looking forward to eating one piece of candy each day "helps you regimen your days, which are so incredibly long," he said.
Ukraine's ongoing equipment shortages mean that every piece of kit is precious. Gifford said that he had to fundraise for much of his equipment, and losing it was a serious matter.
"You can lose something that's incredibly valuable, very fast," he said. "It could be some night vision goggles that cost like two grand, three grand — gone, like that."
Soldiers have reported risking their lives to retrieve lost gear.
Oleksandr Pleskov, a soldier in Ukraine's 125th Brigade, previously told BI of a perilous attempt to retrieve a drone that had malfunctioned and landed in no-mans-land near Bakhmut. The $6,000 drone was recovered — but the risk involved was "stupidity and audacity," Pleskov said.
Similarly determined, Gifford recalled running into a burning house the Russians had just shelled to retrieve precious kit.
"I was just running through this burning building, just collecting gear, even stuff that other guys had dropped, and bringing it out," he said.
There's a strong incentive to retrieve even ruined kit, he said. Soldiers are heavily scrutinized if they report losing a weapon, something that Gifford attributes to Ukraine's efforts to counter procurement corruption in the military.
He recalled returning to the burned-down house later to retrieve a PKM machine gun that had been "burned to a crisp" just so they could account for it to their higher-ups, he said.
"You have to prove that the weapon is lost in combat," he said. "And if you can prove that, there's obviously no punishment, and you'll be reissued a weapon."
One of Gifford's passions has been to fundraise for thousands of IFAKs, or Individual First Aid Kits, and for soldiers to be trained in using them on the front lines.
He said IFAKs were essential to his own missions, ensuring that soldiers could provide each other with tactical combat casualty care, or "TCCC," even if they didn't have a combat medic.
"There's nothing worse than having a casualty and not being able to treat them effectively," he said. "Not just for the person who's suffering, but also for the people who are having to work around them and to watch them suffer."
In Syria, where he was from 2015 to 2017, he saw deaths from what he said were "very survivable" injuries due to a lack of TCCC knowledge, he said. Some people died of hypothermia even before they bled out — making temperature regulation an overlooked issue for TCCC, he said.
The kit and training allow for basic medical treatment while under fire, giving soldiers "the treatment they need to extend their life just as long for them to get to the hospital," Gifford told BI.
Read the original article on Business Insider