PARMA, Ohio — Manus McCaffery lived for three months as a member of a volunteer division of the Georgian military in Ukraine's fight against Russia.
That was before an injury forced him to return home to Parma.
"We rolled out, we were there to hit an armor column, unfortunately there wasn't an armor column, but there was jets overhead," McCaffery recalls. "So me and my friend got precision strikes with a rocket from a jet and it blew my left eye all over the place and shot a wall in my face. My friend got some rebar through his leg."
McCaffrey had just gotten back from serving in Afghanistan in December, then suddenly Russia invaded Ukraine in February. He says he felt called to serve and was there by early March
"I might as well. I figured I would help a lot more people doing that. So that's what I did. I just bought a plane ticket and flew over there, linked up with the right people, and I started," he says.
Several surgeries later, McCaffrey says he's looking to return to the fight. Injury aside, he says the people he fought with all across Ukraine are family. He also saw firsthand the brutality that citizens continue to live under.
"The Russians, they don't care about civilian casualties," he explains. "They'll shoot artillery from one side of the city and just walk it across the entire city over all the people's houses for really just making the city unlivable and spreading terror."
The war has also brought him closer to another community, the Ukrainian Americans right in his local Parma. McCaffrey will be selling t-shirts to raise money for his regiment all weekend at a festival at St. Andrew Ukrainian Catholic Church in Parma.
"We're raising some money to get them more western high-tech equipment like night vision, thermal optics," McCaffrey says.
McCaffrey wants this emphasized: He is a trained soldier. He went over there following all the proper Ukrainian and Georgian Army channels to volunteer.
He advises against anyone with no military experience, or trying to go over unofficially, to fight.
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