Trained to Kill, Born to Save
Damien Mander is a former special ops sniper who served 12 tours in Iraq. Now he’s using his military skills in a new war. The fight to save some of the world’s most endangered species.
Please note that this interview contains explicit content and reader discretion is advised.
Interview By: Justin Harlow | Editor
Justin Harlow: Today, I’m here with Damien Mander. In 1999, at the age of 19, Damien joined the Australian Royal Navy as a Naval Clearance Diver, the Australian equivalent of the Navy Seals. In 2003, he was selected as a special ops sniper for the Tactical Assault Group East, an elite direct-action and hostage-recovery unit within the 2nd Commando Regiment. After leaving the military, he worked with several private military organizations in Iraq where his work included training the local police force in Baghdad. After 12 tours of duty, Damien left Iraq in 2008. Struggling to figure out what to do next, he ended up in South America, but his life was starting to spiral out of control. He had to get out….and decided to leave for Southern Africa with a one-way ticket and a single carry-on.
Trying to quench his thirst for adventure, he volunteered to work with park rangers. What he saw changed his life. The commitment of the rangers and the suffering of innocent animals at the hands of poachers was something he had to change. He had found his purpose. He could see they were fighting an uphill battle, but he knew his military skills could have a real impact. Frustrated by the lack of resources to combat poaching, he decided to start the International Anti-Poaching Foundation, selling all his assets to fund its initial operations. Today, the IAPF is operating in 4 countries and is supporting rangers that are covering approximately 6 million hectares. They are also pioneers in their field having recently started their Akashinga program, training their first all-women ranger brigade. Damien, it’s great to have you with us today.
Damien Mander: Justin, how are you mate?
Justin Harlow: I’m good. I’m glad we finally got this done, you’ve been a busy man. I’ve been looking forward to this for a while.
Damien Mander: I know mate. Apologies, too. I’ve been bouncing around all over the place. I’m actually on one of my brief annual trips back to Australia. I’m back here to see the family and to bring a year’s worth of dirty laundry back to mum to wash before I head back over mate and get into it.
Justin Harlow: It shows how ignorant I am because we started this off with a video and I was looking for lions in the background. I thought you were in Africa.
Damien Mander: No mate. One thing I do enjoy about walking around where I am here is that I know there’s a fair chance that I won’t be stepped on by something or eaten by something. I know people watch a lot of bad documentaries about Australia and snakes and spiders and all that, but it’s not as bad as it sounds.
Justin Harlow: That’s funny. So you’re kind of an imposing guy with some scary tattoos, but I’m assuming you weren’t always like that. Tell us a little bit about your childhood.
Damien Mander: Mate, I grew up on the beach, in the water. I literally have salt-water running through my veins. As a kid, I would get up early before school on the South Eastern corner of Australia, so it’s next stop Antarctica, you’ve got some cold waters here, but I used to get up every morning before school and go free-diving and collect all the squid-fishing lures that had been lost overnight. I would come back up and sell those to fishermen, collect my money and go to school, then come back and do the same after school. I built up a little business empire there as a 13 or 14-year old kid. I used that money to put myself through all the scuba diving courses. This is where I fell in love with adventure and diving, that eventually led to me joining the military as a naval clearance diver. I can trace all that back to my time as a kid and going diving before school.
Justin Harlow: So, in 1999 you join the Navy and you just explained a little about the rationale, but what did you actually get up to when you were in the Navy?
Damien Mander: Mate, it was like every boy’s dream. Jumping out of helicopters, shooting stuff, diving and blowing stuff up. We were doing things in real-life that most kids can’t do on a playstation. To combine that adventurous lifestyle with a paycheck going in the bank every fortnight was an amazing experience. Before I joined the Navy, I was doing a bunch of odd-end jobs. I was actually a garbologist. I was running around on the back of a garbage truck, that was my last job before I joined the Navy while I was figuring out what I wanted to be. It was a bit of a change going in and getting through all the selection processes and going online as a clearance diver.
Justin Harlow: You were in the Navy, but you were also a special ops sniper, what was that like?
Damien Mander: Yeah, mate. We were a very small unit. It was the first time in the history of Australia’s defense force that they formed the Tactical Assault Group, so direct entry into the special forces was open to the entire Australian general public and the entire Australian defense force. So, thousands of people were trying out to get into this unit. At the end of it all, there were about 50 men left and those men formed the Tactical Assault Group. I came across as a diver having had that background and one of the only roles in the military you can’t ask to do, you’re told to do, is being a sniper, so I went on to do my training to be a sniper.
Justin Harlow: Why do you think you were selected for that?
Damien Mander: I think it’s because I’m lazy mate. I don’t like running around too much, so they thought I’d be suited to sitting in a hole for weeks at a time. Not too sure, mate. I don’t know how the psychs add up their equations, but somehow I get sent off to do this course. I severely struggled to get through all the selections and go online. I got through it all and went online. It was just an amazing group of people. It was obviously a time when Australia had quite deep pockets for counter-terrorism initiatives, so we were getting all the toys we wanted to go out and do the job we had to do.
Justin Harlow: Even after you left the military, you stayed in Iraq as a private contractor. How was that role different and what were you doing then?
Damien Mander: Look, I went to Iraq to make money. I didn’t join the military to serve my country, I did it for adventure and I didn’t go to Iraq to try and help the situation there. I did it to make money and then later I didn’t really go to Africa looking for a cause, I went looking for a fight, so there’s a bit of a theme emerging there. It wasn’t until Africa that I realized that there’s a little more to life than running around looking for the next adventure.
Even though I was in Iraq chasing money and I did very well as a contractor there and fed that into a pre-existing real-estate portfolio, I was still selective of the jobs that I did. It was a shit situation over there and I didn’t want to contribute to that, but wanted to try and do something constructive, but the main thrust there was making money.
Justin Harlow: In 2008, after 12 tours of duty in Iraq, you decide to leave. How would you describe yourself and your state of mind at that time?
Damien Mander: I left Iraq, I started getting complacent, mate. I was just running mission after mission and not really paying the attention that I had to be paying to look after myself and team, so I knew it was time to tap-out. You almost become deaf and blind to what’s going on around you when you’re surrounded by it all the time. I headed off to South America, mate. You’re going from units where you know the guy next to you is looking after your life more than you care about it yourself, it’s such a tight-knit brotherhood in some of these units with some of the most highly-trained people in the world and then all of a sudden you’re on your own. I came out of Iraq reasonably OK, but for a lot of guys, the real world doesn’t start until the bullets stop and you’re trying to figure out where your place is back in the real world. I always say there’s no job in the local paper for a sniper when you get home.
I always say there’s no job in the local paper for a sniper when you get home.
I went and partied, mate. I’d worked my arse off for 9 years. If you can call it work. Three years in Iraq, a dozen tours, I just blew off steam mate. I went to South America, it was too much alcohol, too much drugs, it’s a common problem for a lot of guys that are just trying to find an outlet or switch off. When you’re in those units, when you’re in Iraq, you’re always on. I had eleven months of doing that and just bottomed out I suppose. I was just trying to piece it all together. I got myself together enough to get on a plane and head to Africa for the next adventure. I was in a pretty fragile state by then and not really knowing what would be next.
Justin Harlow: So, why did you choose to go to Africa and what did you get up to when you first arrived?
Damien Mander: Mate, I’d heard about anti-poaching maybe a decade early, just bar-room chat, and it sounded like a cool thing to do, particularly now with the skills I had and the funding I had behind me. I didn’t have to work again for the foreseeable future. What else do you do? Keep drinking or go and get fit again and get back out there. There was nothing about my trip to Africa that was supposed to be philanthropic. I was basically going for 6 months to get the next group of photos to show everyone how cool what I was doing was and then head off to wherever the next adventure was going to be.
As you said in your introduction, there was just a couple of things that got me, mate. Here’s me, who’s just been making up to four hundred thousand dollars a year as a private contractor in Iraq fighting for something where we probably shouldn’t have been there in the first place, and then you’ve got these rangers who had given up everything in their life and getting paid a hundred bucks a month protecting the hearts and lungs of the planet. You start to reflect a little bit on yourself and what things are all about when you see people that are that dedicated and not financially-driven.
The second part was animals, mate. Coming from a person who grew up as a hunter, a person who had very little respect for animals or the environment, I don’t know what it was mate, after Iraq you see the world through a different lense. If you’d taken me to Africa before I joined the military and before I went to Iraq and tried to convince me that looking after wildlife was something important to do, maybe I wouldn’t have been ready to accept that then, but that’s what life’s about, evolution. It’s the path that we take that opens us up to new ideas and new concepts.
Justin Harlow: You mentioned a couple of minutes back about how the skills that you’d developed could be useful. What skills did you bring to this new fight and which skills did you have to leave behind?
Damien Mander: It’s very much skills, but it’s also lessons. Urban warfare, urban operations, all the bush-craft, all the tactical stuff and principles that we used and in particular the counter-insurgency operations that we were running in Iraq became very relevant to what was required on the ground in Africa to preserve wildlife. I suppose the lessons are the valuable parts. You can learn a lot of the stuff that has to be taught in textbooks and classrooms, but actually implementing it in a real-world situation is different.
They either deserted, they joined the militia and fought back against us or they got killed.
I was part of a management team in Iraq and we oversaw the training and deployment of thousands of Iraqi police and special police. Now, these were recruited from around the country in mixed units of Sunni and Shiite and redeployed back out in battalion-sized groups to try and replace the Iraqi army and police that had been disbanded overnight and had to be replaced. Congress tasked the Civilian Police Assistance Training Team under the Ministry of Interior to do that. It was about numbers. Those people went out in their groups and went into conflict with the local population because they weren’t from the area, and three things generally happened. They either deserted, they joined the militia and fought back against us or they got killed. There’s no greater to way to prove a failed theory than to send a bunch of guys off to get killed.
That was a very strong lesson for us. One, you can’t just recruit and train people and stick them back out in the line in 6 weeks’ time, it needs to be a long development process and second, you can’t just go and send in an occupying force to each of these areas and expect stability to be the outcome. You need to work with the local population and build stability from within that population.
Justin Harlow: So, you’re in Africa and obviously very impressed with the rangers and what they were doing. You developed this love of animals. Not, many people would take the leap to start an organization like the International Anti-Poaching Foundation, why you and why did you start your own organization?
Damien Mander: To summarize it as simply as possible, I had skills and I had money and I saw a problem and I wanted to do something about it. I suppose we all get to a point in life when we try to figure out our purpose and I think purpose is probably the most elusive thing on this planet for most people. We go through life, we have different roles, we have different functions, different desires, but at the end of the day, I think we’re all here to find purpose. I saw purpose in supporting these rangers to protect these animals, the rich ecosystems that they inhabit and all the other millions of animals that fall under the sexy ones. We talk about the elephants and the rhinos, but when you protect those animals you’re looking after so much more. You’re preserving the future of the planet. And, to play a small role in supporting the men and women who do that was something that I felt strongly enough about to sell up everything that I had and acknowledge the important things in life are not things, they’re actions. We haven’t looked back since.
Justin Harlow: Tell us a little bit about the projects you’ve been involved with at the IAPF and the impact your work is having?
Damien Mander: We’re working on some very exciting projects at the moment, which I’ll come back to, one up in Kenya and one in Zimbabwe amongst other projects that we either run or support. We recently handed a project back to the local stakeholders that we spent 3 or 4 years on along the Kruger National Park (KNP) and Mozambique border. KNP being home to around 35% of the world’s remaining rhinos, an epicenter of rhino-poaching on the planet. We were 7 years into a losing war and there were around 400 organizations benefiting Rhino conservation on the South African side of the border despite the fact that the majority of poachers were coming from Mozambique.
There were no positive efforts happening along the KNP border on the Mozambique side. We went in there and scoped an agreement with the government and set up a ground-level offensive what was essentially like getting dropped into a counter-insurgency operation in one of the hottest parts on the continent for poaching. A lot of rangers and a lot of poachers in conflict with each other there. KNP shares a 355-kilometer border with another country, has around 35% of the world’s remaining rhino and a rhino wandering across the border into Mozambique had a life expectancy of 12 to 24 hours. We were going into the hardest country on the planet for a rhino to survive, a country where rhino had been declared extinct a few years earlier.
We set up there and within 6 months of our operations starting, we more or less secured our part of the border with very few incursions coming through into KNP. Between 2010 and 2014, there was an average increase of rhino deaths in KNP of 55% per year, so it was just going up and up and up. In 2015, we came in June, so we had 6 months to establish our presence and stop that access into Kruger and in that year there was a 0.1% increase in rhino poaching in KNP. The following year we had the full 12 months to go at it and that year there was a 23% reduction in Rhino poaching in KNP. So, collectively with the different teams and units that helped drive that downturn, we helped drive the first global downturn in rhino poaching in over a decade.
Our job was to go in there and build the project up, build the local stakeholder’s capacity up, put the major infrastructure in and train everyone to a point where we could hand it back over and we handed it back over late last year. A great success. Almost a decade into this rhino war that has been raging out of control.
Justin Harlow: I think most people in the US and elsewhere would assume that everybody would be on the side of the animals, but that’s not always the case, right? What has been the reception of what you’re doing in those local communities and what have you been doing to get them on your side?
Damien Mander: I’ll talk about the most recent program that we’ve been focusing on, the Akashinga program, Akashinga meaning “the brave ones” in local Shona culture. We wanted to look at how to change things in conservation and solve a few problems at the same time. In conservation in Africa, law enforcement is the biggest budget line item. The more antagonistic an operation, the more expensive it gets, you’re talking about helicopters and aircraft, more guns, bigger fences, more troops. We wanted to look at a way to turn that into a community program. How could we take the biggest investment in conservation and put it back into the community?
We looked at women. Now, I’ve never come across a women killing an animal in Africa in terms of poaching, they simply just don’t do it. We’ve come across women involved in organized crime, but not women who are on the ground poaching. Women are also far less susceptible to corruption from what we’ve seen. And, the women we’ve selected come from some of the most horrific backgrounds. They were victims of sexual and domestic violence, they’re AIDS orphans, abandoned wives, single mothers, the wives of poachers who are in prison, women who have had their children taken off them because they couldn’t feed their families. We presented an opportunity for those women in the local communities to come on and be rangers with us. I’d like to think they would have had another chance in life, but the odds are that this was going to be it.
We presented an opportunity for those women in the local communities to come on and be rangers with us. I’d like to think they would have had another opportunity in life, but the odds are that this was going to be it.
I’ve never seen such a strong spirit as I’ve seen with these women. I don’t know what the difference is or why it’s like that, but it just is. None of these women are going to jeopardize the opportunity for a bribe or to leak a bit of information about where animals are. If they do, I’d be shocked, but I haven’t seen any sign of it yet.
Despite the best units I’ve worked with across the continent, corruption always creeps in and to minimize the chance of that happening we used to recruit rangers from around the country and we brought them in and formed a unit to protect the nature preserve from which the local population had been forcibly relocated from. So, you’ve got the local population who have been forced out to create a park and you bring in an external force to protect that area. Sound familiar? That’s exactly what I was talking about in Iraq, exactly what failed, but that’s the way conservation functions across the continent.
By employing women, we can employ directly from the local community. By employing directly from the local community, the largest line item now becomes a community investment. We have 100% employment from the local community, we get as much of the goods and services from the local community as possible, at the moment 72 cents in every dollar is going back into the community and it’s going back in household level. It’s going back at household level in the hands of women. There’s a growing body of evidence that suggests that the greatest way to uplift these communities is through women empowerment. Are we a women’s empowerment organization? No, we’re a conservation organization. We’ve just seen in these women, a more effective and efficient way to perform wildlife conservation.
The women themselves seem very good at de-escalating situations as opposed to antagonizing them. None of them drink. Very little ego. No sense of entitlement. They don’t compete with each other, they work together. They build very good relationships with the local community. It really has changed two decades of law enforcement thinking for me, seeing the potential of these women and what they bring to conservation and I genuinely believe that women will change the face of conservation forever.
Justin Harlow: How does the training of women differ from the training of men? I guess there’s a lot of focus on soft power, but the women are involved in combat operations as well, right?
Damien Mander: They are. They’re out there on daily armed patrols and reacting inside the wilderness area and reacting outside the wilderness area with the local authorities and also in the communities. We have our Community Liaison Officers and their job is to be the eyes and ears walking around and speaking to community leaders, business owners and the general population. For an organization that has maintained a fairly direct-action approach to how we deal with law enforcement and conservation and being quite hard-lined in our tactics, for us to put our hands up and say that we’re going to implement all women, we knew we were going to be in the crosshairs of other organizations saying that we’re doing this as a PR exercise.
I don’t know what it is with the women, but they don’t seem to break as easily as the men here in Africa….
We set out to build a training team that could drive these women to breaking point and then rebuild them again. To be honest, I’ve made a career by making it through the units that most men break trying to get into. To now be at a point where I’m sitting here saying that I think women will change the face of conservation forever is a big pill to swallow, but ego always was the enemy. The training of these women has been nothing but a pleasure. I don’t know what it is with the women, but they don’t seem to break as easily as the men here in Africa when it comes to pushing them to the absolute point of breaking.
We continue to see more and more benefits to employing women in the program. One of the research topics we’re working on at the moment suggests that dangerous animals, which are the biggest threat to rangers on patrol, seem far less aggressive to all-women patrols than mixed patrols or male patrols. Perhaps this links back to thousands of years of these animals being hunted by men. The benefits are far-reaching and we’re discovering more every day.
Justin Harlow: Staying on the Akashinga project, I believe it’s your first vegan team as well, which I guess is very logical, but tell us about how that has impacted the team?
Damien Mander: We’ve tried everything with our male rangers to get them to go vegan. We’ve explained to them that they’re conservationists and they shouldn’t be 9–5 conservationists. The meat industry is the greatest cause of animal suffering on this planet and the greatest negative environmental impact on this planet. Conservationists get involved with conservation generally because we love animals or we love the environment or a combination of the two. I think we as conservationists should be at the forefront of the vegan movement.
One of the biggest issues we face is loss of habitat and a lot of that loss is for grazing livestock or growing food to feed livestock. In that respect, the vegan aspect is a no-brainer. Now, these women coming from the backgrounds they come from, being vulnerable and being victimized, are now in a position of power and they don’t want to project that power onto anything vulnerable that doesn’t deserve it and that includes animals. They’ve taken that position, I’m very proud of them for it. They’re not only vegan at work, but they go back into their communities and talk about the vegan movement and why they do it. These are now community leaders. They are thought leaders and they’re well respected in the community because of the jobs that they do and the hardships that that’ve been through. We’ve got this grassroots, plant-based vegan movement happening in rural Africa, on a continent that will have 2 billion people on it by 2040, it’s a continent that’s very far behind in that aspect.
Justin Harlow: You mentioned earlier that the meat industry is the greatest cause of suffering for animals. I wanted to finish by talking about a movie that you’ve recently been involved in, The Game Changers. What’s the movie about and how’s it being received?
Damien Mander: It’s a fantastic movie that premiered at Sundance Film Festival. I’ve just flown in from Utah in the States after my trip there. It’s produced by James “Lightning” Wilks and Joseph Pace, directed by Oscar-Winner Louie Psihoyos, who directed The Cove and Racing Extinction and James Cameron was the Executive Producer. You’ve got quite a bit of pedigree there in the line-up. They sort of assembled this vegan special forces unit from across the world. In the movie, I was the only one who was asked to speak on behalf of the animals’ side. It was largely a sports and science-focused documentary and I think it got the message across extremely well, but there was also room there to tell the story from the animals’ perspective from an ethical standpoint.
…the thrust of the movie is to debunk the theory that you have to eat meat to be a man…
It’s getting great reviews and write-ups across the world. Sports Illustrated has just done a big write-up about it, which people can see online. It’s in the Berlin Film Festival this month, the second biggest film festival in the world. I think it’s going to be a very powerful tool in our movement. Overall, the thrust of the movie is to debunk the theory that you have to eat meat to be a man and take away that machoism of the industry. It’s an industry that has used sports stars in the same way that the cigarette industry did back in the 50s, getting high-profile people to sit there and smoke cigarettes to appeal to kids and we’re seeing it again with sports stars now, as far back as Michael Jordan eating a Big Mac. I think we’re brain-washing our children to think that eating meat, not just any meat, but junk-food meat, is how sports stars behave.
I think we’re going to look back in 10 or 20 years and see this is as one of many very powerful tools in the movement. We’re going to look back and at some stage shake our head and wonder how the hell we did what we did to animals and how we didn’t hold ourselves accountable at the time.
Justin Harlow: Well, Damien. It’s quite a story you have there. Thanks for everything you’re doing to save some of our most precious species. Myself, my kids, who like most kids love animals, and future generations to come, should be eternally grateful. Stay safe, good luck and thanks a lot for your time today, we really appreciate it.
Damien Mander: Justin, thank you very much mate, thanks to all the listeners. If anyone wants more information, they can jump on our website, www.iapf.org, that’s the International Anti-Poaching Foundation. Thank you very much, we only survive with people around the world supporting our initiatives on the front lines and anything is welcome.
Justin Harlow: Take care buddy. I also want to give a shout-out to Kathleen King, who introduced us, who’s also a former Skunks & Soap guest and who I know has been a big supporter of yours.
Damien Mander: Thanks Kath!!
Justin Harlow: Take care Damien, I appreciate it, all the best buddy.
Damien Mander: Cheers mate.
