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.

Skuta (center) and fellow "foreign fighters." 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.

Then they heard voices. Skuta popped his head up and squinted into the distance and could make out a structure nearby but couldn't discern the details. Is that an ISIS outpost? The language was unmistakably Arabic. Several male voices. Yes, an outpost.

That he and his boys were half a football field away from the enemy didn't concern him. He liked fighting more than he liked most things. But he had one hundred peshmerga flanking his left, fifty Shia militia flanking his right, and an untold number of ISIS in front of him. All with weapons pointing at him and his men. Sure, he could initiate contact—hit the outpost with an RPG and follow up with his AK—but then he'd be in the middle of one of the biggest firefights the dirt-patch village of Bashir had ever seen.

For just a moment, Skuta lay still, unsure what to do.

PITTSBURGH, MAY 2016

Who is Ryan Skuta? And what's he doing fighting as a mercenary?

Well, he is both a specific man, a combat veteran who you might say has been in combat his whole life. Thirty years old, a working-class kid who has brawled his way through childhood and has never quite been at home in civil society—which in his case is the small towns of western Pennsylvania, around Pittsburgh. And Skuta is also a random sample of a vast and quietly suffering population returning from the wars of this century but not quite making it all the way home.

Look at Ryan Skuta, talk to him, and this is what you'll find: First and foremost, the one thing he is sure of is that war is the best thing that ever happened to him. Oh, Skuta was screwed up before he joined the Marines—aimless, aggressive, antisocial. As a rifleman, he blazed his way through tours in Iraq in '07 and Afghanistan in '09 and came out on the other side being told by the military wizards—that's what the Marines call their psychiatrists—that he has PTSD. But what the wizards don't understand and never did is that he only feels anxious when he's home. All the pills in the world can't change that—and besides, the pills led to the heroin.

But fighting is his natural state, and he feels best when he's fighting.

Brian Finke

Which is why he keeps returning. To Iraq. To battle. To the place of his highest purpose. To transcendence; to where he feels he belongs. Fuck stacking up pieces of paper in a bank so I can go to some tourist beach on the East Coast once a year and worry about work the whole week anyways. If I have a decent set of cammies, an AK-47, some food, and a place to stay for the day, I'm cool. I'm a wolf, not a sheep. And a lot of places in this world need wolves.

Skuta thought the Kurds needed a wolf, so he went to join what's known as the Peshmerga International Detachment (IDET), Westerners—mostly ex-military—volunteering to fight in support of the peshmerga's campaign against ISIS. That's the story he tells, anyway, an uncomplicated accounting of his best self. The details don't matter, ISIS does. In them he sees an enemy that needs killing, but he also sees personal redemption—the chance for his own heroic narrative to become true. Maybe he'll make his little boy proud. And his mom and dad. He hasn't been easy to be around since he separated from the Marines in 2010, listless and lonely and strung out. But maybe now they'll understand. He's returning to the fight as soon as he can because he believes the peshmerga still need his help. Whether that's true, or what kind of difference he could ever hope to make, is beside the point.

The news coming out of the Middle East piqued Skuta's interest—battles waged in dusty streets, good guys hunting down the bad. War looked important. War looked fun.

For now he's at his parents' house, sleeping in his old room. He flew home from Iraq to Pittsburgh at the end of April. He's here for a brief visit, and he has nothing to do. He does some work at his father Richard's signage company when there's work to be done, but otherwise he sits around the house, smoking Newports and drinking whiskey. He occasionally heads to the firing range. That's about it.

War might be the best thing that happened to Skuta, but it's also made him incapable of maintaining relationships. His last girlfriend was around for four years, but she wanted a family, a house, something stable. So that was that.

His mother, Donna, urges him to go see his six-year-old, Logan, but the time never seems to be right. Logan lives with his mother in North Carolina, born from a one-night stand Skuta had between tours. It's been months since he's seen the little guy. I do pay child support. "I will," he tells his mother. "I will." He's grateful that Donna brings his boy up north a few times a year—it's a commitment he just can't make.

Brian Finke

So he drinks. A few weeks ago, he was hanging out at a friend's place, then thinks he took off for Skis & Nick's, his favorite watering hole—he can't recall. But he didn't make it. Along a desolate stretch of highway between New Kensington and Jeannette, his truck crossed the center line and plowed head-on into another vehicle, totaling both. Ryan stumbled to the side of the road, where he lost consciousness. According to the police report, no field sobriety test was administered. The other driver suffered a leg injury. Ryan woke up an hour later in a nearby hospital, a shiner on his left eye and thirteen stitches crisscrossing his temple. Against doctors' orders, he washed up and left after an hour. His buddy picked him up, and they headed straight to the bar.

Does Skuta regret the accident? Sure. Chalk it up to experience, I guess. Two days later, he pulled the stitches out himself, threw the crusted red thread in the trash, and bought a one-way ticket back to Baghdad—private security work during the week, fighting ISIS when he has the time. If he sticks around here much longer, he'll end up dead or in jail. He must return to the place where he feels at his best. It's better this way.

RAMADI, IRAQ, 2007

Skuta's regiment showed up too late to the party. Ramadi, the declared capital of the incipient Islamic State of Iraq ever since the U. S. had smoked them out of Fallujah two years earlier, had been infested with insurgents, and the battle had boiled for five months. Plenty of terrorists were there for the killing.

But by the time the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines—known as the 2/8— arrived, the city had been secured. I didn't sign up for the Marines to babysit Iraqi police. I want to fight terrorists.

In high school, Skuta was a powder keg—too many fights, not enough discipline. Wrestling allowed him to focus that rage, but he was going to have problems adjusting to a conventional path—college or a nine-to-five. And what good was intelligence if all it was used for was homework? The news coming out of the Middle East piqued his interest—battles waged in dusty streets, good guys hunting down the bad. War looked important. War looked fun. Now, that looks like something I could do. So in 2006, when he met a Marine recruiter at a suburban Pittsburgh mall, no recruiting was necessary; Skuta signed up on the spot. He was twenty.

When they'd first arrived, the 2/8 collectively thought, All right, we're in Iraq—shit's gonna go DOWN. And at first their missions were promising. Ryan was an 0311 rifleman, a frontline grunt, and carried out raids of locals' homes in the middle of the night and occasional snatch-and-grabs. But he rarely took contact—one of the few times was friendly fire from some Ugandans—and there just wasn't much to do.

And even if there was, the rules of engagement they were expected to abide by— Shout, Show, Shove, Shoot—were, to Skuta, soft. Say a vehicle driven by a potential enemy was flying at him at seventy miles per hour. He was expected to first wave a flag, then show his weapon, then fire into the grille. If none of that worked, only then was he allowed to fire through the windshield. At any second I could get shot in the face, but I have to pretend like everything's okay.

They'd been in Ramadi for almost seven months, during which Skuta had been so bored he learned Arabic from two Iraqi police and taught them English in return. The 2/8's relief battalion, the 1/9, had already arrived, which meant that Skuta and his fellow Marines—brothers with whom he was now extraordinarily close—were heading home. As a show of goodwill—the U. S.'s new hearts-and-minds push to show they were not a conquering force but were there to help—Skuta's battalion commander decided to remove some of the concrete-and-concertina-wire barriers leading a serpentine path to the coalition forces' observation posts.

Skuta says that everyone knew it was a bad idea to remove protections days before they left—it felt complacent. But they were almost done, so why complain?

Skuta on the front line between ISIS and the Kurds. Courtesy of Ryan Skuta

Lance Corporal Jordan Haerter and Corporal Jonathan Yale were manning the gate at Joint Security Station Nasser. Yale was Skuta's friend from their days training at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina—they would drive down to Tampa on the weekends. Yale was kind, soft-spoken, underestimated by his fellow Marines. Skuta was posted a kilometer away at JSS Malaab.

It was morning, Skuta remembers, and the sun was blazing. People were finishing their morning routines before the temperature got uncomfortable when all of a sudden the calm was broken: A Mercedes dump truck sped toward JSS Nasser's entry control point. Yale's and Haerter's actions were caught on six seconds of grainy security video that was later recovered: They saw the truck and began firing, puffs of gun smoke spilling from the window of their post. They managed to kill the driver but not before the bomb went off: two thousand pounds of explosives that leveled a city block and was heard for miles. Yale and Haerter were killed, but they saved a lot of Marines. It was the first loss the 2/8 had suffered.

Oh, fuck. They'd all made it through and were so close to leaving, then the barriers came down and this happened.

The second you get complacent is when someone gets shot.

HELMAND RIVER VALLEY, AFGHANISTAN, 2009

Skuta hated the Taliban, but he respected them. They proved to be damn good fighters.

After a short stint back at Camp Lejeune—during which Ryan met a woman named Kayla, who would later give birth to Logan—the 2/8 shipped off for America's other war. As part of Obama's troop surge, they were about to begin Operation Khanjar, the fiercest Marine offensive since the Battle of Fallujah—forty-eight days of hell in the scorching summer heat, during which four thousand Marines took three towns on a seventy-five-mile stretch of the Helmand River Valley.

The operation was to begin on July 2, but the 2/8 arrived early to serve as an advance party with the Brits, who'd occupied the ancient Jugroom Fort, just south of Gamsir. The Brits aren't doing shit—no offensives, no missions, no plan. They even had an agreed-upon cease-fire each day from noon to three because of the heat. Are you serious? A cease-fire during prime daylight hours? This afforded the Taliban time to entrench themselves and arm up.

Courtesy of Ryan Skuta

While the 2/8 was settling in and readying for what they knew would be an intense few months, word came over the radio that some Marines from Golf Company had accompanied British troops on a mission two kilometers south and had accidentally ended up outside their area of operation. They were ambushed, completely surrounded by Taliban fighters, and needed immediate backup. As part of the Quick Reaction Force, Skuta loaded up, got in a tank, and headed south.

By the time the QRF arrived, one of the Marines had managed to retreat in a vehicle but had plowed through some buildings of a nearby village—people's homes—and was stuck. Taliban fighters were hitting him hard.

The QRF jumped out of the tank and headed toward the action on foot. They popped around one corner and immediately started taking rounds. A couple men hit the ground and returned fire while the commanding officer called out targets. Give me a fucking target! "Black turban!" his commander shouted. "Roger that!" Skuta said. He trained his gun on the turban, twenty meters away, and fired.

By then, the platoon sergeant had rolled up and immediately screamed, "You're fucking killing civilians!" We're getting shot at! Shut the fuck up! Skuta looked back at the man he'd shot—a second man ran out with a wheelbarrow to collect the body. Skuta's impulse was to kill him, too, but the man was unarmed, so he didn't.

The Marines found themselves in an L-shaped ambush near a little canal, Skuta's men on one side and men from 3rd Squad on the other, everyone taking very effective fire. But then the helicopters began arriving, and finally a Harrier jet came along, destroyed the Taliban positions, and everything quieted down.

Before they'd left that morning, each Marine had reviewed the BOLO list—be on the lookout—and one item said that the Taliban were transporting explosives inside spare tires. In the blurriness of the engagement, two Afghans had started rolling tires toward 3rd Squad, who opened fire.

After the battle, another unit came across the two bodies and judged that the men had been killed execution-style. That's the description that went out over the radio, and that term—"execution-style"—changed everything.

Every man from 3rd Squad was immediately taken to Camp Leatherneck, the main base in Helmand Province, and quarantined, awaiting charges. Investigators took Skuta and the others there that day back to the site of the ambush and asked them to explain what happened. If you think you're gonna get us to incriminate our own guys, you're fucking stupid.It looked like an execution because the shots were so precise. Give them a medal, not murder charges!

Third Squad would be acquitted, but Skuta was done with the Marines.

Operation Khanjar started soon after. The 2/8 lost fourteen men. Skuta watched two of his closest friends die. He almost died, too, when a Taliban fighter triggered a bomb beneath his feet as his unit walked back to base after a firefight. The bomb's concussion didn't kill him, but it did send him flying through the air. A fellow Marine says that as soon as he hit the ground, he jumped to his feet and began firing into a tree line where he thought the Taliban fighter who detonated the bomb was hiding. "You missed me, motherfuckers!" Skuta screamed. "You can't kill me!"

Back home, he wouldn't be so lucky.

PITTSBURGH, 2013

Ryan was dopesick in the locker room of Stage AE, here for the third competitive mixed-martial-arts bout of his fledgling MMA career. His record was 2–0. But he'd recently dropped twenty pounds and hadn't eaten in days, and he was running to the bathroom every five minutes to puke. He was waiting on a buddy to drop off a bag, told him otherwise he might die. He just needed enough to get him through the next hour. The first fight had begun, he was up sixth, and his buddy hadn't shown.

Ryan first took opiates in 2010, prescribed by his doctors at Camp Lejeune, where he went after Afghanistan to finish out his time in the Marines. The blast that had sent him flying through the air made his back—a mess from bearing heavy loads for years—instantly worse. By the time he got the meds, he could barely get out of bed.

Kayla had just given birth to their boy. They agreed to name him Logan, after Ryan's favorite Marvel character, Wolverine. But Ryan didn't stick around very long. He returned to Pittsburgh, four hundred miles from his newborn son and the mother of his child.

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Ryan had a hard time reintegrating into civilian life. In his mind, he was stuck back in the war. He missed it. My squad knows more about me than my family does.

His father and brothers were the only ones he could talk to about the war. His memories weren't a weight, exactly; people just didn't understand. A whole lot of "Thank you for your service!" and "How many people did you annihilate?!" Some things couldn't be explained—all the dead bodies, seeing your fellow Marines take their last breath.

So he spent hours at home, in his room, drinking until the early hours of the morning, watching home movies he'd filmed in battle. He liked the ones from Afghanistan most. His favorite—he watched it hundreds of times—was taken in the midst of a gunfight. So many of the videos were from a GoPro attached to his gear, so he never saw himself. But in this one, he'd flipped the camera around to see what he looked like amid chaos. Ryan would stare at his computer and look at an earlier, more content version of himself, cackling and cracking jokes as bullets whirred around his head and mortar blasts went off nearby, offering up color commentary as if he were at a hockey game.

Military doctors diagnosed him with PTSD and put him on a series of antidepressants that did nothing to stop his anxiety. And when they weaned him off opiates, heroin seemed like an easy replacement. It allowed him not to think about war so much. It numbed him. He stopped watching the home movies.

Then he discovered MMA. It brought back what he yearned for from the Marines. His team was his new squad; his coach was his new squad leader. He'd train two, sometimes three times a day. They'd beat each other up, then hug and go grab drinks. He even cleaned up for a bit before falling back in.

His father and brothers were the only ones he could talk to about the war. His memories weren't a weight, exactly; people just didn't understand.

Ryan was in the locker room, getting his hands taped up, shaking. The fourth fight started; no sign of his buddy. If this dude doesn't come through, I'm fucked.

His coach came in and said, "You're up." So he breathed in and out, wiped the sweat from his face, pulled himself upright, and went out to the ring. His opponent specialized in jujitsu, the perfect foil to Ryan's wrestling and boxing. The bell went off and Ryan went in. Okay, let's fight this dude.

Ryan got in a few decent takedowns and could've knocked the guy out if he were able to hit in the face while on the ground, but Pennsylvania rules don't allow that.

By the end of the second round, he was tired—beat down, feeling terrible. His coach didn't know about the dope. Hardly anyone did.

Ryan didn't make it through the third; his opponent got him in a choke hold and he tapped out with forty-nine seconds left. Fuuuuuuuuck! This was the only fight he'd ever lost. He was beyond disappointed in himself. Why the fuck am I hooked on heroin? He talked to as few people as possible on the way out, scored dope, went home, and got so high he fell out. He woke up eight hours later covered in sweat.

PITTSBURGH, 2014-15

Ryan had a crippling addiction, few friends, and no purpose. Until he watched the news one day and heard about a group of radical jihadis born from the ashes of Al Qaeda who were snatching up territory in northern Iraq and eastern Syria, committing beheadings and other atrocities. They went by the name ISIS.

Through Instagram and Facebook, Ryan made contact with men—ex-military, mercenaries—helping Iraqi forces fight back, and they transmitted images to him from the front lines. He saw children with their heads cut off. He saw a young woman, no older than eighteen, her hands tied to a bed, her breasts cut off, a crucifix shoved down her throat. Why the fuck am I not doing anything about this? These people need to die. When he found out all he needed to go was a passport and a plane ticket, he nearly headed to the airport right then and there.

But first he had to get clean.

Brian Finke

His mother contacted the Wounded Warriors Project, which provides services for disabled veterans. They referred Ryan down to Camp Hope in Houston, and from there he went to a nearby farm where Marine vets worked as ranch hands while working through their struggles. Ryan hated talking about his feelings, but he got clean and went back to Pittsburgh to continue preparing for his return to war.

He could've gone directly into the heart of ISIS and fought in the Kurdish areas of Syria. But then, through Google searches, he found the peshmerga, the army of Kurdistan, based in northern Iraq. He'd never been to that part of the country, but one of the two men who'd taught him Arabic was proudly from there. Ryan watched the peshmerga's motivational videos and thought they had a good fighting spirit.

Through a Marine buddy, he started talking to a nineteen-year-old aspiring Kurdish rapper named Hameed. Though not himself a fighter, Hameed seemed well connected with the peshmerga fighters. He told Ryan about the IDET. Hameed said that men in the IDET were provided lodging, vehicles, and, of course, weapons.

Though Ryan couldn't be certain Hameed wasn't a member of ISIS who would cut his head off as soon as he arrived, they talked enough—nearly daily in online conversations over three months—for Ryan to feel as comfortable taking the risk as he ever would.

Skuta travels with his old Marine gear, a hunting knife, and as many contact lenses and cigarettes as he can fit in his bags.

When Hameed began to arrange for Ryan's travel in November of last year, Ryan realized it was time to break the news to his parents. They were deeply unhappy—he'd just gotten rid of his addiction and he had a son he could finally be a father to—but they didn't argue. Richard agreed with his son that ISIS had to pay for what they'd done, and Donna was afraid that if he stayed, he'd start using again. "I'm choosing between ISIS or heroin," she said.

On the afternoon of January 2, 2016, Donna and Richard drove their son to Pittsburgh International Airport. They asked if they could wait with him at the terminal, but Ryan told them he'd rather go in alone. While their car idled in the drop-off lane, they unloaded his bags. Richard hugged his boy tight. Donna gave her son a hug and made the sign of the cross on his forehead.

Then Ryan walked away, carrying with him his old Marine gear, a hunting knife, and as many contact lenses and Newports as he could fit into his bags. He boarded a plane for Vienna, then on to Erbil—a forty-hour trip, gate to gate. He didn't know if he'd ever come back.

SULAYMANIYAH, IRAQ, 2016

The three men lay stranded in the middle of the minefield. Fuck the drone. They turned around, slowly crawling back over the undulating terrain, careful to be as quiet as possible. One of the men stopped abruptly—his foot was stuck on an artillery round that could be nothing or could be linked to a pressure-plate IED. The only way to tell was to move it. They counted to three, he lifted his foot, and they took off running. No explosion. The peshmerga leader would have to do without his drone.

Skuta had been in the fight for three months, joining "foreign fighters" in the war against ISIS, including a number of Americans. (Around 4,500 Westerners have joined arms with ISIS, including 250 from the U. S. who joined or attempted to join.) The U. S. does not prohibit enlisting in another country's army or in a mercenary army. However, fighting against U. S. military interests—taking up arms with ISIS, for example—is in violation of several federal laws.

Where Skuta could run into problems was with the often-blurred lines between groups that operate in Iraq and Syria. The U. S. is okay with some of them—even supplying the peshmerga with arms and ammunition—but considers others terrorists. It's not unheard of for such groups to intermingle. If they did while Skuta was around, he might inadvertently run afoul of U. S. law by providing "material support" to a terrorist group.

The stamp in Skuta's passport for his most recent trip to Iraq. Brian Finke

The IDET included men from New Zealand, Scotland, England, Sweden, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Australia, and the U. S. Though they were there for support, they often ended up leading. But Skuta was impressed with the peshmerga. The men in the videos he watched back home were comically amateur—jeans and sneakers, shooting AKs. Now they had uniforms and walked around in columns, saluted their superiors. It was no Marine Corps, but it was definitely military.

The first few months were busy: running missions, conducting raids, getting into gunfights. Skuta's unit even caught an ISIS commander in a raid one morning in a village not far from Bashir and turned him over to the Asayish, the Kurds' security organization.

Who cared that his mortar was from 1931, his AK was from 1979, and his RPG was rickety? He could've bought his own weapon—an RPG went for as little as six hundred bucks at the weapons bazaar in Sulaymaniyah—but he chose to embrace the scrappiness. He did buy his own uniform, a Multi-Terrain Pattern similar to what the U. S. Army used.

Skuta spent downtime in between missions teaching the peshmerga how to clean and operate weapons, running IED drills. He ate most meals with them, the same thing every time: a piece of flatbread, a small plate of rice, and red soup (tomato-based, with potatoes or beans) or green soup (chickpeas and lentils). One day red, the next day green. If they were fighting on the front, they'd get a piece of chicken.

Hameed tagged along as much as possible, and Skuta liked him. But he started pissing others off—he always wanted to talk, take selfies with the IDET and their weapons and upload them to Facebook. Just thug-life shit in Kurdistan. But soon enough the commander, Akam, banned Hameed from their base.

Where Skuta could run into problems was with the often-blurred lines between groups that operate in Iraq and Syria.

That pissed Skuta off. But what pissed him off more was the incompetence of Khris, the head of his IDET unit. He thought that Khris didn't know anything, and just kissed Akam's ass. But Khris had peshmerga rank and thought that meant he could boss Skuta around. Nobody bosses Skuta around. Just as in the Marines, just as in his whole life, authority didn't sit well with him. Yes, he had traveled halfway around the world, leaving behind civilian life, where they just didn't understand, and now he had to put up with this jealous, ass-kissing motherfucker, pretending like you're Mr. Pesh. This is ridiculous.

After a few months, the ISIS action started dying down. Guess we're doing our jobs. But when the action was slow, the tensions between the peshmerga and the Shia militias rose. One week, Skuta would be fighting side by side with Shia fighters, taking photos with them after battle. The next, his peshmerga commanders would say that the Shia were killing Kurds and razing their villages and needed to be dealt with.

Skuta quickly got the impression that the peshmerga were grooming the IDET to be some sort of hit squad against the Shia militias. He wasn't sure whether the Shia were allies of the U. S. for the purpose of fighting ISIS. Would fighting them be a war crime?

The final straw came when he went to Sulaymaniyah to pick up an M4 rifle that the peshmerga commander, Sheik Jaafar Mustafa, had ordered. When he got back, Khris freaked out because Skuta hadn't said he was leaving. Skuta lost it. I'm here to fight ISIS, not brownnoser shits. I'm outta here!

That was the end of Ryan Skuta's four-month stint as a "foreign fighter" in the campaign against ISIS.

PITTSBURGH, JUNE 2016

So who is Ryan Skuta? He's the valorous Marine from western PA who will soon be heading back to Iraq to work as private security for rich people moving around Baghdad, the potential for violence crackling in the air. And on the weekends, he says he's going to fight the enemies of America.

So Ryan Skuta is a fighter. He's also an addict at a time when it's never been easier to be an addict. A pox on the working class, addiction is one of many, as prospects shrink and the world closes in on working people, beset by enemies without faces or names. And so you might say that Ryan feels both powerful and powerless. And maybe that's why he needs to go six thousand miles away, back to the setting of his most meaningful fights, to find that meaning again, and to fight an enemy that he can see with his eyes.

Brian Finke

Who is Ryan Skuta?

Well, as the nexus of so many of the pathologies that make up America in the twenty-first century, you might say that he is us.

Ryan was supposed to leave on an early-morning flight on May 16. The gig didn't start until June, but a Marine buddy decided to join one of the peshmerga volunteer forces, and Ryan figured he'd tag along for a few weeks to see a bit more battle. He had bought a ticket; he had packed. But he stayed up late drinking whiskey, and he missed the countless calls his ride to the airport made to his phone.

No matter. Ryan is convinced his new Kurdish boss will buy him a ticket back whenever he returns. Besides, with the recent bombings and political tension rocking Baghdad, the kinds of diplomats and dignitaries he'll be guarding aren't likely to be in Iraq right now.

Who is Ryan Skuta? He's a combat vet who's been in combat his whole life. He's also a random sample of a quietly suffering population returning from the wars of this century but not quite making it all the way home.

Once there, he won't be working for a U. S.-based company, where he'd sit around in a secure compound playing video games. He's joining a security firm run by a Kurd who understands Ryan's need for battle. He'll let Ryan take off on the weekends—for Fallujah, for Ramadi—to fight with the Iraqi army or the peshmerga (they were so upset when he left, he says, begged him to stay, and said they'll always take him back), or anyone else. Ryan is an official resident of Iraqi Kurdistan—with his sponsorship by Sheik Mustafa, and an Iraqi ID card. Moving around is easy. If Ryan wants to go to the front line in Mosul, he'll hop in a cab on Friday and get driven a few kilometers away. A weekend warrior, back to work on Monday.

Ryan's contract is three months on, one month off, so he can return to the United States if he wants. Maybe next time he'll see Logan.

He'll be going back any day, and he'll be there, he says, until ISIS is eradicated—they're not human, they're fucking animals—or until there's nothing left to do. Maybe he'll buy a house. A couple people have approached him about it. It's cheap real estate. Besides, he likes it out there.

There is, of course, the court date for the recent car crash. Scheduled for late August, that might throw off his schedule some. So in the meantime, he's got some time to kill. On days when he isn't working for his dad, he heads to Skis to drink. Sometimes he gets obliterated. Sometimes he makes it until dawn. On those days, he thinks, I feel absolutely normal. Maybe I should do this every day.