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Resistance See other Resistance Articles Title: The Marine Who Loved Battle The Marine Who Loved Battle By Matt Stroud Jul 21, 2016 NORTHERN IRAQ, MARCH 2016 The drone lay stranded in the minefield. Night had fallen, the stillness of cease-fire settling in once the sun dipped below the steppe to the west, and neither side—not the peshmerga, the Kurdish forces in control of the drone, nor ISIS, who had shot it down—was willing to send men into the gentle hills of the IED-studded no-man's-land to retrieve it. So Ryan Skuta and two other Americans were sent in. Skuta was always picked when a serious problem needed fixing: He spoke Arabic and ran signals intelligence, monitoring the ISIS radio communications his fellow "foreign fighters" could not. Plus, he was an ace with a rifle. The three Americans stood in the dark on the Shia-militia front line—a berm, little more than a dirt mound—just outside Bashir, two hundred kilometers due north of Baghdad. ISIS fighters were stationed a thousand meters ahead on a front line established when they had taken over the town nearly two years before. The peshmerga and the Shia didn't have a healthy working relationship. In fact, they despised each other. But as long as they had ISIS as a common enemy, they weren't killing one another. Skuta understood the tensions but found them aggravating nonetheless. Isn't that why we're all here? he thought. To smoke these fuckers? The Shia commander said that this area belonged to him and his men—fifty strong—and that the peshmerga weren't welcome to move about as they pleased, drone or no drone. Courtesy of Ryan Skuta Skuta listened in but said nothing. He revealed that he understood what was being said only on a need-to-know basis. No one in this country ever suspected him—why would a white guy from Pittsburgh know Arabic? Only a few of the peshmerga knew that nine years ago, the young American had done some of his best work not far from here, as a member of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines. This time, though, he was not here at the behest of the president of the United States. He was here under his own steam, one of an unknown number of American fighters come to kill ISIS himself. The peshmerga commander addressed Skuta and the other Americans in English: "The Shia commander isn't letting us get the drone, and they're getting upset. So be prepared to fight to the death in five minutes." This is gonna go south real fucking quick. Skuta is one of an unknown number of American "foreign fighters" heading to the war against ISIS, in which the U. S. is not officially fighting. They decided to call the Shia commander's bluff—there was no way he was going to intentionally target three Americans. Skuta walked off the mound and back to their truck, grabbed his RPG, loaded the booster, and slid the rocket down the tube, the satisfying click indicating it was in place. He swung the RPG over his shoulder, grabbed his AK, and readied himself along with his buddies at a wall near the ridge. For the past two days, their position had taken some very effective fire from an ISIS sniper. The shooter was more than a kilometer away but had still managed to hit the lens of a spotting telescope just three inches across. He'd shot a peshmerga fighter between the eyes. If it had been daytime and they were doing this mission, they'd all be dead in less than a minute. If a sniper sees you, you're fucked. He'll put you in his sights and blow your fucking brains out. Skuta's masked selfie. Courtesy of Ryan Skuta It was time to go. The men pushed out and started sprinting toward where they thought the drone had come down. After a few hundred yards, they got down low and started bounding from one small bit of cover—a bush, a slope—to the next, always scanning for signs of the enemy. When they were two hundred meters from the ISIS position, they began crawling on their stomachs, inching along the ground, trying to remain silent. Just then they startled a flock of birds, which took off, wings beating, erupting in calls of alarm. Skuta might as well have sent up a flare. Poster Comment: OOORAH! Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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