CULLMAN, Ala. – The Cullman Lions Club on Monday evening welcomed special guest speaker Sean Schofield, a local veteran who volunteered to assist Ukraine in its war with Russia.
Club President Milford Parrish introduced the Cullman County VFW’s Ken Brown, who thanked the group for its continued support of Cullman County’s veterans. The Lions Club previously donated to the VFW to assist in its mission to provide Stellate Ganglion Block (SGB) shots to treat local veterans with PTSD.
Said Brown, “We know for a fact that we’ve prevented 14 suicides in the last two years.”
A fourth-generation Marine, Schofield was one of the first in the county to receive the SGB shot and has since advocated its benefits in the community.
“When I got back from Iraq, probably the biggest struggle I went through was I was dealing with some significant issues, as they say, and trying to find my own personal solutions for those issues,” he said. “I had forgotten all the things that come from service.”
He said the SGB project was an incredible program that significantly helped him. “After I got the shot, I was feeling a lot better about just the general situation and myself and my life.”
Schofield was honorably discharged from the Marine Corps in 2005 after a tour in Iraq as a part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He recently returned from a volunteer mission in Ukraine. He was one of the approximately 6,000 international volunteers who have made the trip since Russia invaded Ukraine in February of this year.
When the war broke out, Schofield said, he was happy at first to be able to sit it out. However, he said, “It became clear that it wasn’t necessarily going to be a war of conventional tactics where soldiers square off on a battlefield and engage each other for technical and tactical superiority, earn real estate in a conventional way, win battles and eventually determine the outcome of conflict- it was going to be one of mass terror.”
After seeing the many horrific scenes from the conflict and the groups of international volunteers rallying to assist the Ukrainian people, Schofield said he knew he had to join them. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy invited any international parties with military experience who wished to help to do so.
Schofield said, “I think the response that they got was so overwhelming that they hadn’t even planned for it. I can tell you just from my time there talking to people, they said of all the countries in the world that contributed, America was by far the biggest influx of foreign fighters they had.”
The Ukrainian government gave the foreign volunteers housing and food, but the volunteers had to pay all of the other expenses, including airfare. The VFW and the Lions Club, among others, helped fund Schofield’s trip.
Schofield participated in active combat and assisted with escorting civilians through combat areas. He said one rewarding moment of his time there was a mission given to him and his team to extract an American citizen in a high-risk area. The citizen turned out to be a seven-day-old baby. The baby had been adopted by American parents while his mother was pregnant.
When the baby was born in a hospital in Mariupol and placed in the nursery, his biological parents were in another section of the hospital that was hit by a tank round that killed them both. Before the extraction team was put together, there was no way for the infant to be transported to Lviv to be taken across the border into Poland to his adoptive parents.
To perform the extraction, Schofield and his team borrowed an ambulance to make the journey. The Swedish Parliament had been developing a program to send ambulances to Ukraine to help with combat and civilian casualties, he said, so the ambulance would not cause suspicion. The team removed all the medical equipment from the ambulance and filled it with as much tactical equipment it could. It made it through every checkpoint without firing a single round. The group was able to make the extraction safely and return the baby to the border.
“That was the highlight of the trip,” said Schofield. After that, for about a month, he said, he spent time in Kiev training soldiers from other parts of the country. He taught lessons beginning in weapon safety all the way up to advanced tactics in about a week.
Stated Schofield, “The Ukrainians have been ground zero for wars that have nothing to do with Ukraine since the beginning of time. So, it’s a long history of tragedy for this country. I think it’s almost become part of their blood to be in situations like this. They are just like us – all they want is to be free. Having a history like that has contributed to some of the strongest-willed, resilient individuals you’ll ever meet.”
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