OLD SAYBROOK — Jerry Gill, former EMT, Army vet and Old Saybrook firefighter — also part of a special National Guard unit for domestic terrorism — thought he had seen it all as a first responder.
That was before two stints in Ukraine, where he’d ride near the front lines in an unmarked rescue vehicle to help a stranded elderly civilian whose neighborhood was bombarded by shelling. Or, he’d travel close to the fighting to deliver medical equipment to noncombatants.
“I’ve been shot at, I’ve been shelled, I’ve been chased … luckily I’ve made it back, it’s a miracle,” Gill said last week from his Old Saybrook home.
To pay for medical equipment, food, clothing and his own expenses, Gill raised around $16,000 through a GoFundMe page for his first trip. He threw in some $30,000 of his own money, he said.
Gill works with his crew, who call the retired army sergeant first class, “Sarge,” doing medical evacuations and distributing supplies, medicines and food in remote areas or hot spots in Ukraine. The group of trained volunteers came together organically, meeting each other in the region by chance.
The team takes unmarked vehicles and ambulances to towns near the front lines and routes would change daily as the fighting moved.
“The situation changes rapidly every single day,” Gill said.
Team members worry about being shelled or shot and avoid roads that are impassable — those that are mined or where bridges are washed out. Getting stuck or having a blowout in muddy or rutted roads can turn disastrous. Changing a flat tire can go sideways fast.
Last week, Gill was back home from the war-ravaged country “to refit my guys with medical supplies over in Ukraine,” he said.
He was collecting some 250 pounds of medical supplies such as Quikclot combat gauze, SWAT tourniquets, insulin and other medicines.
“I basically go over carrying an adult man,” he joked about the weight.
Gill made it his mission to go to Ukraine to save civilian lives, a calling which he says he has had since he was 16. “I’ve been rescuing people since I was a kid,” he said. “I’ve lived my whole life volunteering.”
His first trip last spring was spurred by news reports of the large scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February. “So I have a team that’s been operating self-sufficiently with me supporting them behind the scenes,” he said.
While Gill was here in Connecticut, his team were one of the first noncombatant groups — called the Quick Reaction Force Humanitarian Alliance, to give out desperately needed supplies to civilians in the liberated city of Kherson, last week.
One of his buddies sent him a rough video of them handing out supplies from an ambulance in real time, which Gill shared with pride. He described their unique role in Ukraine.
“I have a team of guys, who are everyday, rescuing people and saving lives and bringing food and medicine to the people in remote parts of the country where no one else can go.” So far they have completed some 100 missions. “We’re literally the only people in the country that are able to do what we’re doing. We’re basically the National Guard.”
He noted that Ukraine’s equivalent of the National Guard is engaged in fighting on the front lines and isn’t available to help citizens in need. “We’re literally saving people out of the war zone, elderly, disabled,” he said.
“The ones that are left behind are the people that aren’t the best ones to fend for themselves,” he said. “All the war-age or battle-age men are fighting and they haven’t stopped. There is no rest cycle.” This is Gill’s third trip, and while back home, he started another fund drive on GoFundMe.
When Gill first got there last spring, arriving at a volunteer-run refugee center in Poland, he was struck by the need: “I was watching thousands and thousands of women and children come over the border.”
Now Gill not only has help with a team, but also stateside from Old Saybrook businessman Chad Kimerer, who is helping organize a new 501c group to support ongoing and future fundraising efforts. “We’re kind of boots on the ground, grassroots,” Kimerer said about QRF Humanitarian Alliance.
Kimerer said Gill’s efforts inspired him to lend his business expertise, “You don’t meet a lot of people like Jerry who literally are willing to go out and just do something. He went to Ukraine. He was just literally like, ‘Let me grab some medical supplies, let me go there and see if I can help.’ He just did it. He didn’t go there necessarily with a plan,” Kimerer observed.
“I got involved because I saw this person who has this passion and desire — coupled with all his experience and I said, you know what, I’ve got some good business experience, I can help you organize this,” Kimerer said. So far, they have raised close to $50,000, with the goal of hitting $100,000.
Kimerer hopes to turn the “dollar donations, into $1,000 donations” and is looking to make “a better fundraising push, a better supply push.” Their goal is to put together an financial “infrastructure” to help shelter and feed the volunteers, in addition to pay for medical supplies, gas and other necessary expenses. He hopes to tap corporations, local businesses and such for funds.
Gill’s crew is international with members from the U.S., Norway and Canada. Ambulances are on loan from a Norwegian group. The team augmented this with three unmarked vehicles to get in and out of hot spots without being flagged. All this is done under the aegis of existing nonprofit groups.
Every member of his team rotates in and out in 90 day stints in the Ukraine and then another 90 days in Poland.
The team communicates with each other using four different encrypted apps and do not use U.S. SIM cards in their phones, so the Russians can’t intercept their communications.
“We’re being smart about things,” Gill said. “We have to use Ukrainian SIM cards — we work under encrypted phone communication systems because you’re at risk.”
“You have to make sure you don’t just get bombed because they see five dudes in the car with a mix of SIM cards,” he said.
Logistics are very complicated in Ukraine with Poland being the only access point in or out, Gill noted.
“You have to resupply in Poland,” Gill said. “You literally have to drive cross country with supplies to get them where they have to go,” he said, noting that it can take eight hours or more to get to the border and one time he spent eight hours just sitting in his vehicle at a checkpoint.
And checkpoints aren’t easy. “We’re going through security checkpoints and all of a sudden you have a gun pointed at you,” Gill said.
“You’re hoping your interpreter can explain exactly what we’re doing — it’s really tense because there’s not a lot of people doing what we’re doing,” he added. No matter how you plan, the war makes daily life incredibly unpredictable.
“We had one of the ambulances — they slashed the tires on it — and that’s in Kyiv. Somebody who obviously is a Russian sympathizer. The only way to get tires for your ambulance on the far eastern warfront is to get them from Poland,” he recounted.
“Something as simple as getting some tires, you literally have to drive eight hours across the country through checkpoints” then figure out how and where to get the tires on the vehicle, he described.
“It’s insane, challenging, expensive, dangerous,” Gill said.
His group is working with the Ukraine government for a group called SOS. When civilians call in an emergency, “it gets dispatched to Ukraine SOS,” he noted.
“Ukraine SOS says, ‘Hey we have a 98-year-old grandmother who is not ambulatory. She doesn’t need medical support but they are actively fighting in her neighborhood and she needs to get out and nobody else get her. Can you do it?,’” Gill said.
“And we did it,” he said. “I actually rescued a 98-year-old grandmother who went thru World War II.”
Gill has been working on the logistics end, especially when it comes to complicated medical runs.
“I have established a whole logistics chain from the western side of the country — actually even in Poland. The channels are going from Poland all the way to the battle zone or the red zone,” he said.
Plans can change on a dime.
“It’s not like you just jump in the car and deliver something, a car full of medicine,” he said. “You have to constantly look at the threat assessments. You have to have a background — military experience and leadership — like I have, to actually accomplish these missions. Because if you don’t, you’re going to actually end up killed.”
Teammate Devin Hall, who was also back in the U.S. in North Carolina, agreed.
“The line shifts all the time. You can have a road that one day has a Ukrainian checkpoint and the next day it has a Russian checkpoint,” he said.
“When stuff goes wrong it goes catastrophically wrong,” Hall added. “Preparation is key. The closer you get to the front, the more you have to plan.”
“You’re in a war zone — the roads are all blown up,” he continued. “I can’t even tell you how many blow-outs we had and how many things we had to overcome. We ended up driving 4 miles through a mud field.” The medical situations are equally unpredictable.
Hall recalled treating a POW whose tattoos had been “cut off” by the Russians when he was working with a Norwegian group.
“It was pretty messed up,” Hall recalled. “Our goal was to make sure he didn’t have any gangrene in any of the wounds.”
Another medical run involved a 24-year-old woman who had a massive, fatal cancerous tumor on her face and was “waiting to die,” according to Hall and Gill.
A Ukraine group contacted the team and asked if they could help transport her out of the country to get life-saving medical care.
Poland would only admit her to a hospice, according to the men, so they reached out to hospitals in Germany and the U.S. Then the crew had to coordinate with other independent volunteer groups to divide the two-day run.
“It was an interesting 48 hours, a lot of Red Bulls,” Hall said. They approached the young woman with their action plan.
“Once we kind of formulated a plan and presented it to her and her mom, they said ‘yup let’s try it,’” Hall said.
“Within three hours of her saying that we had our first medical team picking them up,” he said.
The final team took her to Berlin where doctors agreed to treat her and gave her chemotherapy to shrink the tumor so they could surgically remove it . “So now she’s really in that home stretch … a bunch of reconstructive surgeries and she should be good to go,” Hall said.
“We actually know we’re saving people’s lives,” Gill added.