Excerpt from What the Taliban Told Me by Ian Fritz, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

LISTEN

TO BE ON A GUNSHIP is to be a god. This is not to say that flying in these magnificent monstrosities provided me with some sort of spiritual moment or religious exaltation. This is to say that to be on a gunship, to carry out its mission, is to feel as powerful as any deity from the pantheons of old. But these gods, like all gods, are not interested in creation. To use the 105, a gun that is loaded with forty-five-pound bullets, a gun that, when fired, causes the 155,000-pound plane it's mounted on to buck so far to the right that the pilot must actively correct the flight path, is to be Zeus hurling Hephaestus's bolts. To fire a Griffin missile from an altitude so great that the men on the ground could only know of it in the same moment that it kills them is to be Mars flinging his spear.

And while the old gods may have died, they were profligate with their genes, leaving their sons and daughters, we Nephilim, to carry on their legacy. Some of us use our eyes to find those who have sinned, scanning the earth below for evidence of their crimes, a hot spot of soil here, a silhouette of a gun there. We are called sensor operators. Some of us aim the guns at the targets the sensor operators have found, carefully correcting for height and angle, terrain, and nearby friendlies. We are called fire control officers. And some of us load these guns, the last people to touch the bullets that will go on to end existences. We are called gunners. These are the greater gods, the ones who are known and worshipped by many.

But there is a lesser god, known to few, understood by fewer, even these other divinities. You cannot see what this god does, as he sits there (overwhelmingly he), cocooned in his headset, eyes closed, manipulating energy, listening to invisible messages. They are called direct support operators, or DSOs. You could listen to what they are hearing, but you wouldn't understand it, as it is not the language of mortals. Or of the living. For they hear the dead. This is the story the United States Air Force, and many a DSO, want to tell. Call it the DSO as deity. This is not a true story. It isn't even a good one; that shit sounds like a rough draft of a freshman creative writing prompt. But this is the story I was told, and it is the story I believed for a time. The truth, or at least a truth, is a little more grounded. Because man wasn't meant to be deified. Our minds aren't ready for it. So very few of us can be trusted with power of the mortal variety, so what are we supposed to do when we're given the mythical version?



A DSO (pronounced "dizzo") is just an airborne cryptologic lin- guist by another name. Historically, there weren't very many DSOs, mostly because the Air Force didn't want or need that many, and partly because DSOs like feeling special, so they artificially lim- ited the number of spots available to other non-DSO linguists. And because there were so few DSOs, it was that much easier to craft an image as badass "operators," the best of the best, the only people who could do what they do. This was plausible; there are those elite groups within the military who have been selected for their talent, grit, and exceptionalism. And, like those elite groups, if you pushed the DSOs on it, they would be able to credibly say that because their job was highly classified (true) they couldn't tell you specifically what they did (untrue).

A DSO does what all airborne linguists do. They "translate intelligence communications or data received or intercepted while in the air," aka listen to what the bad guys (usually) are saying in another language and turn it into English (that quote is from the USAF's Quincy, Massachusetts, recruiter's Facebook page). Most airborne linguists do this aboard a jumbo jet, the RC-135 Rivet Joint, or RJ, flying thirty thousand or so feet above the ground at four or five hundred miles an hour, in an orbit that encompasses a few hundred miles. This is strategic work; the communications they receive or interpret rarely have an immediate impact on some- thing actively happening on the ground. But it is important, at least according to the military, as "a lot of the things we do might end up on the desk of the president" (ibid., and a little misleading, though technically not a lie if you note the usage of "might").

Excerpted from What the Taliban Told Me by Ian Fritz. Copyright © 2023 by Ian Fritz. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.