Inside Ukraine’s Foreign Legion | Colin Freeman

**Jack Murphy** (0:00)
Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy. Here with tonight's guest, journalist Colin Freeman. He is the author of The Mad and the Brave, which is a book about the Ukrainian Foreign Legion, that is the foreigners from, I mean, he'll tell us, but 50 some odd countries that came to Ukraine to help defend the country from Putin's invasion, the Russian invasion, mostly starting on the 2022 full-scale invasion that began going forward is the context of the book.
Colin's also had an interesting career in his own right as a journalist, covering various combat zones. Thank you, Colin, for joining us and thanks for reaching out.

**Colin Freeman** (0:47)
Thanks for having me on the podcast.

**Jack Murphy** (0:49)
I just read the book, the PDF that you sent me. I'm going to, I need to order a hard copy for my library. I want to have it in my collection. I just finished reading it before we started this interview, and it was very, very good. Like I was telling you before the show, I wish I had written it because it was that good.
So Colin, let's start off a little bit with your origin story. How did you grow up? Where did you grow up, and how did that sort of take you towards journalism?

**Colin Freeman** (1:20)
Yeah, I grew up in Edinburgh in Scotland, and I think when I was young, I didn't have any interest in anything particular. I didn't want to be a banker, I didn't want to be a lawyer, that kind of thing.
Couldn't really work out what I wanted to do, and I realized that journalism was quite a good profession for people who aren't interested in anything in particular, because every day is essentially different. Certainly that's the case if you're working on a general, you know, current affairs newspaper. So after I left school and went to university, I think by the end of uni, I decided that I would try and become a journalist. I didn't do much at university in terms of journalism. I then got a job on a local paper in Grimsby, which is a town in the north of England, doing very kind of typical local paper stories, court stories, stories about animals stuck up trees, village shows, all that sort of stuff. You know, the kind of...
But it's a sort of microcosm of the world around us. And while it sometimes feels boring at the time, you do get to sort of see every side of human life from the, you know, life in the courts and the kind of darker underbelly of a place to the way the government works at local level, who the movers and shakers are, and of course all the human interest stories in between. It's more the sum of the stories rather than the individual stories themselves. It's a great chance really to just sort of see life upfront in all its different shades. Then I moved down to London, cut a long story short, worked on a tabloid news agency, chasing celebrities around. I've been told to get lost by all manner of famous British celebrities and some B-list ones as well, like the Oasis, the Spice Girls, all these people I think at one point or another said, no comment, please go away to me. Probably did some American ones as well, but I didn't get very far. And then that was a kind of stepping stone, that tabloid stuff to Fleet Street, which is where our national newspapers, the shorthand for our national newspapers, and it toughens you up a bit, gets you used to, gives you a bit of a thick skin. Then I worked on the London Evening Standard, which is kind of like the equivalent of the New York Post, I suppose. It's London's main newspaper, it sort of sees itself as a national paper. I was there for about four years, but I only got so far up the chain, really. I wasn't one of their, you know, their brightest rising stars. And if that's the case in a competitive newsroom environment, you tend to realize that, you know, you're never gonna do that well. And when the really big stories happen, such as the Iraq War when it was looming, you realize you're not gonna be part of the team that's gonna get sent. And I think it was, the Iraq War started in March of 2003, if I remember correctly, and many, as many of your listeners will remember, there was quite a kind of big roll-up to the war, run-up to the war, where it was pretty clear it was gonna happen.
You know, you had troop deployments to the Gulf and so on months in advance. And I think at Christmas of 2002, about three months before the war started, I was on another celebrity doorstep, and sitting outside some celebrity's house, waiting for them to comment on some story, not even sure if they were there or not. I was whinging to the photographer I was with about how the team to cover the Iraq war for the standard had already been picked, and I wasn't gonna be on it, not to any my great surprise. And he said, well, look, you know, rather than just sort of sitting there bitching, why don't you go and cover the war as a freelancer? And I said, well, can you do that? And it seemed a crazy idea, but it sort of lit a light bulb in my head. And I thought, well, you know, I'll go and try and do it. And if nothing else, it will be like a kind of a gap year or a backpacking adventure with a bit of a difference, maybe with a bit more purpose. So off I went to Iraq. It seemed like a great idea to me. Some of the other people that I ran it past thought, no, that's absolute bloody madness. You know, you don't speak Arabic.