A former US Navy SEAL who went AWOL in 2019 was killed in Ukraine this week, US officials said Friday. He said he was not fighting in an official capacity.
Petty Officer 1st Class Daniel W. Swift was wounded in the Dnipro and died of her injuries, said an official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss personnel issues.
No other details were available, including whether Swift’s body was taken out of Ukraine.
He left his post in San Diego, California in March 2019, the Navy said. “We cannot speculate as to why the former sailor was in Ukraine,” the Navy said.
At least five other Americans are known to have died fighting in Ukraine, according to State Department statements and reports from individual families.
Swift joined the Navy in 2005 and was assigned to the SEAL unit in 2007. He left the service voluntarily in January 2014, but rejoined in 2015 and was assigned to the SEAL unit a year later. After he left, the Naval Special Warfare Command stripped him of his SEAL eligibility — essentially revoking the trident of SEALs.
Rolling Stone reports:
A US intelligence official said first rolling stone Regarding Swift’s death, they said she suffered a massive traumatic brain injury and died Thursday morning. The official asked not to be named as he was not authorized to speak publicly.
Thiemann wrote on Facebook that Ukrainian forces were doing everything they could to keep Swift alive, but their resources were stretched thin trying to accommodate the wounded.
Thiemann, who was not on the operation at the time but was informed by his platoon mates, found Swift in critical condition with severe head trauma. Two other soldiers are stable and recovering.
Ryder Thompson’s book The Fall of a Man shares some of Swift’s life, “At fifteen Daniel Swift found the woman he loved. He began Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL (BUDS) training at the age of eighteen. He became a father at the age of twenty. By the time he was thirty, he had deployed five times as a Navy SEAL, including Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen. He was the father of four and happily married to the same woman he had loved at fifteen, or so he thought. He served his country and returned home to have everything he was torn from. It is the story of a soldier, father and husband.
It is unclear how the AWOL Swift might have traveled to the war zone.
