Scott Sather was born June 21st, 1973 in Flint, Michigan. He was raised in Clio, just a few miles north of Flint and attended Clio High School where he graduated in 1991 just months after the first Persian Gulf War came to a close. He enlisted in 1992 as a Combat Controller (CCT), and throughout his years in service he had been stationed in McChord AFB, Washington with the 22nd STS; RAF-Mildenhall and RAF Alconbury, England with the 321st STS, and Lackland AFB, Texas.

His last assignment was with the 24th Special Tactics Squadron – an elite Air Force Special Operations unit assigned to the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) out of Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina. The 24th STS, like it’s Army and Navy JSOC special mission units is a Tier 1 top-priority unit for the Department of Defense whose Combat Controller and Pararescue (PJs) members number just in the double digits.

Scott and his fellow 24th members were routinely assigned to directly support JSOC counter-terrorist operations throughout Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Scott had previously served in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. His last assignment was in March of 2003 as part of the invasion of Iraq. At that time Scott was attached to a team from the 75th Ranger Regimental Reconnaissance Detachment (RRD), serving as a combat controller.

Scott and the RRD team was part of a joint and clandestine special operations force led by a squadron (possibly B Squadron) from Delta Force under command of LTC (Ret.) Pete Blaber, and supported by a small element of the 1st Ranger Battalion. The special operations task force objective was to create a ruse to make Saddam Hussein and his top generals believe that the main invasion was coming in from the west of Baghdad rather than where the real attack would come – the south of Iraq. The force of less than a hundred special operators with the help of roughly five tanks from a conventional Army unit were tasked to make the Iraqis believe that an entire armored military division was driving from the west to attack Tikrit – which led Saddam to stay put in Tikrit rather than make the run for Syria. The operation was chronicled in Pete Blaber’s book – The Mission, the Men, and Me.

It was on the drive towards Tikrit somewhere in the deserts of Western Iraq, on the night of April 8th, 2003 that Scott Sather lost his life during a combat operation after eleven years of military service – almost a decade ago today. He was 29 years-old. He was buried two weeks later in Arlington National Cemetery where fellow CCTs and PJs in red and maroon-colored berets, along with a handful of Ranger tan berets in the crowd paid their final respects to their fallen brother.