Nick Laidlaw enlisted in the Marine Corps to go to war. The war never came for him. So he spent the years after collecting other men's: over 1,100 first-hand accounts from more than 20 armies, both sides of nearly every war since 1939, including a Taliban fighter who later apologized to him.
Then he stopped collecting from a distance and went himself. In 2022 he was talking into encircled Mariupol over Starlink, interviewing a 22-year-old Azov soldier named Anton "Pazman" Krill almost every day until Anton was killed. Nick holds his last words: "When we are relieved from here I will immediately marry my girlfriend and everything will be Ukraine." Two and a half years later, a man Nick was certain had died in Russian captivity messaged him. They met in a tea shop: "Thank you for giving me Anton back."
In 2025 he rode into Pokrovsk at one in the morning in a soft-skin pickup, after a brigade deputy commander told him it was 50-50 he'd be hit going in or coming out. He went. Seven hours: the wound that started it, and the work that came out of it.
▶ Watch on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=JNZvkcO3fsE
CHAPTERS
0:00:00 Cold open
0:04:04 Eight months in the making
0:09:51 Adopted at birth, and the half of his life he knew nothing about
0:19:21 He found his biological family in six days
0:37:13 Growing up on the GWOT, and why the Marine Corps
0:47:10 Boot camp, SOI, and FAST company
0:58:07 He enlisted to have his metal tested. The war never came.
1:03:43 Getting out, and the transition nobody prepares you for
1:08:29 A Glock in the car door, and the song that stopped him
1:16:02 Battles and Beers begins
1:28:06 Kabul falls, and the people he tried to get out
1:39:14 "You are the target audience" - how propaganda really works
1:46:32 He interviewed a member of the Taliban
2:03:43 Maidan, Crimea and the Donbas: how this war started
2:27:14 What Azov actually is
2:33:02 Russia's justification, and what he says is the truth
2:53:22 Into encircled Mariupol on Starlink
2:59:01 Anton "Pazman" Krill, 22 years old
3:15:52 Standing at Anton's memorial wall with his brother
3:26:36 "What right do you have to take these stories?"
3:30:37 Bucha, from a man who lived through it
3:40:26 The Coke can in the Walmart parking lot
3:56:27 Artillery down the road. The waiter offered a refill.
4:08:51 Why he calls himself a coward
4:13:02 Ukraine's prison-release soldiers
4:41:13 The third trip: full access with the 25th Airborne
5:01:56 How an FPV strike actually happens
5:03:29 Mercy kills, and the wounded nobody comes for
5:15:14 Pokrovsk: 110,000 Russians
5:17:33 Hearing became survival
5:30:47 A mine went off next door
5:40:17 He strained drinking water through his underwear
5:58:01 The truck he was supposed to be in
6:00:29 From atheist to something else
6:27:23 American aid to Ukraine
6:52:20 What years of this has done to him
6:59:01 Close
Follow Nick: Battles and Beers battlesandbeers.org · IG @nicklaidthelaw · @battles_and_beers · @zero.line.dispatch
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