The man who willingly takes his family to war

Updated

David Eubank has spent 20 years on the frontline of some of the world’s bloodiest wars. That's not unusual for a former US special forces soldier like him, but David brings his wife and children wherever his humanitarian mission takes him.

The trucks were laden with food and medical supplies, ready to help desperate civilians trapped in Mosul, under siege by Islamic State. The only problem was, no one really knew where they needed to go.

Go to this neighbourhood, the NGO told ex-US special forces soldier-turned-maverick humanitarian David Eubank. Find the Iraqi army.

"I said, 'what's the name of the commander?' They don't know," David says.

"'Do you have permits to go through checkpoints?' 'No.' So we just prayed, and we went."

There's no way to tell David's story without mentioning his faith. He's a passionate Christian, and every decision he makes, from which nation's resistance fighters to help next to whether to turn left or right at a literal fork in the road, involves prayer.

That fork in the road came not long after, as David and his team trundled closer and closer to the Mosul neighbourhoods occupied by Islamic State in November last year.

"We had to choose to go left or go right. We prayed, and we looked around with our binoculars and we saw an Iraqi flag and we went right.

"As we went towards the Iraqis, ISIS starts shooting at us from where we would have gone left, with mortars and machine guns.

"They would have killed all of us."

Not only did David and his team cheat death that day, but they managed to find the army. They were met with gratitude, but also incredulity.

Who are you? The Iraqi general said. How did you find us? Where did you come from? How did you get past Islamic State?

"And we just said, 'God sent us'," he said.

"I'm sorry for the wrong things my country has done to your country but we're here to serve you."

Meet the Eubanks

David, with his wife Karen, is director of the Free Burma Rangers (FBR), an organisation originally founded to help ethnic groups oppressed by the Burmese government (the people they work with prefer to use the name Burma over Myanmar), but that has grown into a humanitarian service specialising in providing aid in conflict areas around the world.

There's another thing you need to know about David. Anywhere he goes, his whole family goes too. That includes his kids, Sahale, 16, Suuzanne, 14 and Peter, 11.

The kids help Karen run pastoral care and child healthcare education programs in the places they visit. Sahale shoots videos of the FBR's work, and drove the armoured ambulance transporting injured civilians from the Mosul front line to their field hospital.

They led the dozen or so people in the Free Burma Rangers team, made up of ethnic Burmese and other international volunteers, into Iraq to help local forces and NGOs.

While they work with aid groups, they operate outside of official channels.

"We're there completely as volunteers, and completely by the good graces of the Kurds or the Iraqis or Syrians," David said.

"We have good relationships with our Government, the US Government, but we're not supported by them, nor do we do secret work for them."

Whose life is more valuable?

Perhaps the Iraqis didn't know what to make of the Free Burma Rangers when they first turned up, but seeing the Eubanks put their own lives and the lives of their kids on the line to help them quickly earned their trust.

The children's programs Karen and the kids run are usually held out of harm's way, but that definition is a little loose in conflict areas where the situation changes daily.

One day outside Mosul, the family was working with local children in a school, when they came under attack. Bullets raked the outside of the building while the family and local children huddled inside.

After the attack, the Eubanks were shaken. But they didn't leave.

"When the Iraqis saw that they thought, wow. You think that we're as valuable as you are."

From that time on, the Free Burma Rangers became part of the Iraqi army unit. They travelled with them, used the protection of their tanks, helped them in their missions and treated their soldiers when they were wounded.

An extraordinary childhood

Sorry, this video has expired Video: With family (ABC News)

But who willingly takes their family into a war zone?

"It's dangerous," David acknowledges.

"I don't want to lose my kids. I'd rather die. But there's kids there, and they count too."

But then, the Eubank children aren't exactly ordinary kids. They've been sneaking through the jungle back and forth across the Burmese border since they were babes in arms. They've learnt to hunt and fish, make fire, handle knives. They've shot caribou when they were shorter than the rifles they were shooting. Peter Eubank ran a 5-kilometre fun run in the US when he was just three.

And, as 16-year-old Sahale puts it, who's to say what a normal childhood looks like?

"For me, this is normal. And then also there's people in Burma who live in a war zone all the time and for them, that is normal."

Bloodshed on every block

Wresting control of Mosul back from Islamic State was a violent mission.

"It was just bloodshed, suffering, families being killed, villages being blown up, suicide vehicles coming out of nowhere, Iraqi soldiers being shot. And ISIS fought for every block," David says.

Much of the FBR's role was distributing food to recently liberated families in newly safe areas but, again, nowhere was really safe.

Seven out of the first 10 food distributions they did were attacked.

"They'd come from two blocks over, climb through the buildings, fire RPGs and mortars, fire machine guns and try to close in and kill the Iraqi army, ourselves, and the people," he says.

Sorry, this video has expired Video: Plight (ABC News)

While the Eubanks and their volunteers were handing out packets of biscuits and bags of rice, the Iraqi army would be fighting the militants back.

At one distribution, a bullet hit a man in the leg as he was waiting for food.

"And his wife put him on a cart so he wouldn't lose his place in the line, because they were out of food. So a medic went and fixed his leg as he was sitting on a two-wheeled cart as his wife kept him in line, pushing. They were desperate for food," David says.

As they pushed further into the city, Islamic State lashed out more and more violently.

"In East Mosul, ISIS would randomly shoot families. By the time we got to West Mosul, they were singling them out and purposely shooting them, consistently," David says.

"We had many women and children die, some in our arms, as we were trying to help them.

"My translator was killed as we were trying to help wounded civilians transfer from one Humvee to another.

"One guy who was already shot was shot again in my arms. One of my team members was shot, one of my other team members was shot eight times."

By the end of the campaign in West Mosul, there were so many dead bodies in the street it was hard to move around.

With rubble and bodies littering the streets, driving was near impossible — but getting out of the vehicle meant drawing Islamic State fire.

"So you're running over dead ISIS guys, civilians in the street, it's just sad and it smelled terrible. It was just a mess," David says.

"This was just two-way destruction with no way around it. ISIS fought to the death, block by block."

The rescue of the girl with pink pigtails

David's work in Mosul drew widespread attention earlier this year, when video of him diving through Islamic State fire to retrieve a little girl was circulated widely on social media.

Sorry, this video has expired Video: Running through ISIS fire to save a little girl (ABC News)

Throughout the previous night, people with gunshot wounds had come crawling across the highway to the field hospital.

The volunteers helped 30 people who had been shot but managed to escape.

Back at a wall that was now little more than rubble, the bodies were banked up and Islamic State fighters — desperately clinging to the last few blocks of the city they still controlled — were down the road, ready to fire.

But there were still survivors trapped among the dead: two men and a little girl with pink bobbles in her hair.

They were just a little more than 100 metres away but it took hours of logistical planning between the Iraqi army, the American forces and the Free Burma Rangers to figure out how to get close enough to rescue them.

The Americans dropped a continuous barrage of smoke for about half an hour and the Iraqis gave them a tank to run behind.

"As we went behind it, bullets were hitting the tank, rocket-propelled grenades were missing, mortars were landing. They were trying to kill us", David says.

Shielded by the tank and the smoke, David and his team members ran out and got the men and the little girl.

"But as we tried to retreat, the tank took more and more fire from ISIS. One of my guys, Ephraim, was shot and wounded, one of the guys we tried to rescue was lost — shot and killed," he says.

"We narrowly missed getting killed ourselves as we retreated behind the tank with the little girl and the one man."

The little girl's entire immediate family had been killed. She had been hiding under her dead mother's hijab.

The Iraqi army commander, General Mustafa — the same general who greeted the FBR with cautious gratitude when they first arrived in Mosul — said he would adopt the little girl if a living relative couldn't be found.

She's living with him and another Iraqi family for the time being.

"She's smiling now. And we heard there may be an aunt or a cousin that's alive that may come and adopt her," David says.

Resistance in the jungle

The work of the Free Burma Rangers has grabbed the spotlight most recently for their dramatic civilian rescues in Iraq, but as their name suggests, their focus is Burma.

Twenty years ago David was approached by members of the Wa tribe. They said the Burmese army was attacking them and they wanted his help.

"We are a warrior people," they told him.

They knew he had grown up in Thailand with his missionary parents and had worked with the Thai army when he was in the special forces, training their soldiers in special military operation techniques. Would he help them?

Three days after their beach wedding in Malibu, David and Karen flew to Thailand, "extra-legally" crossed the border into Burma and began working with the local resistance.

Now they have 70 teams there, providing medical relief, food and shelter to oppressed ethnic groups. They also run a small medical school they founded, the Jungle School of Medicine.

Human rights groups accuse security forces of abuses against the Muslim Rohingya minority in Burma's Rakhine state, including rape, killings and the burning of more than 1,000 homes.

The Free Burma Rangers say attacks also continue against the Kachin, Shan and Ta'ang ethnic groups in northern Burma and against the Arakan in western Burma.

Word of the Free Burma Rangers began to spread. They were invited to Sudan's Nuba mountains to help displaced people there in 2014.

The next year, friends who worked in Kurdistan asked them to come and assist there. They also spent time in Syria, delivering food and medical supplies to Kurds on the frontline.

Grateful to be alive

Despite years of ducking bullets in some of the world's bloodiest current wars, David insists all his injuries have been "pretty minor".

In November he got some grenade fragments in his leg. But by rights that grenade, which went off just four metres away, should have taken his legs off and killed him.

Then there was the grenade dropped by an Islamic State drone that injured his arm.

And the time he was hit in the hand with fragments from an IED.

"And then I was shot in the arm, point-blank, by ISIS, and had some more fragments in my leg," he says.

"But none of those were serious."

Sorry, this video has expired Video: In action (ABC News)

David's just grateful to still be alive, and mostly intact.

"You see guys with their legs blown off, with their faces torn off and it's like, man. I can still walk, I can still speak," he says.

Telling their story back home

A few weeks ago, they left Mosul. David's Burmese team leaders needed to return home, and the Eubank family headed to the US, partly for some R and R, but mostly to spread the word about what's happening in Iraq and raise funds for their work there.

They're travelling across the country — they're in the midst of a 15-hour drive between Missouri and Colorado when we speak — stopping at churches and meeting with congressmen to tell their story.

It's a hard balancing act, managing the need to raise awareness and support with the desire to get back in the field," David says.

"For me, I'd much rather do the hands-on.

"I'd rather do something than talk about it."

Topics: unrest-conflict-and-war, human-interest, iraq, kurdistan, myanmar, united-states, sudan

First posted