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The BookBrowse Review
The BookBrowse Review
Published January 24, 2024
ISSN: 1930-0018
The BookBrowse Review
Published January 24, 2024
ISSN: 1930-0018
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A powerful, timely memoir of a young Air Force linguist coming-of-age in a war that is lost.
When Ian Fritz joined the Air Force at eighteen, he did so out of necessity. He hadn't been accepted into college thanks to an indifferent high school career. He'd too often slept through his classes as he worked long hours at a Chinese restaurant to help pay the bills for his trailer-dwelling family in Lake City, Florida.
But the Air Force recognizes his potential and sends him to the elite Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, to learn Dari and Pashto, the main languages of Afghanistan. By 2011, Fritz was an airborne cryptologic linguist and one of only a tiny number of people in the world trained to do this job on low-flying gunships. He monitors communications on the ground and determines in real time which Afghans are Taliban and which are innocent civilians. This eavesdropping is critical to supporting Special Forces units on the ground, but there is no training to counter the emotional complexity that develops as you listen to people's most intimate conversations. Over the course of two tours, Fritz listens to the Taliban for hundreds of hours, all over the country night and day, in moments of peace and in the middle of battle. What he hears teaches him about the people of Afghanistan—Taliban and otherwise—the war, and himself. Fritz's fluency is his greatest asset to the military, yet it becomes the greatest liability to his own commitment to the cause.
Both proud of his service and in despair that he is instrumental in destroying the voices that he hears, What the Taliban Told Me is a brilliant, intimate coming-of-age memoir and a reckoning with our twenty years of war in Afghanistan.
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 ...
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.
At eighteen, writer Ian Fritz escaped his aimless life in a trailer park in Lake City, Florida, by enlisting in the Air Force to become an airborne cryptologic linguist. In his memoir What the Taliban Told Me, Fritz reflects on his evolution from a brash linguistics upstart to a broken young man realizing the human consequences of his knowledge and training.
Beginning with his high school years, when he spent his days working at a Chinese restaurant to pay his mother's neglected bills, Fritz pinpoints the one constant in this chaotic period: his love of languages and his plans to study philology in college. But his admittedly lazy and indifferent nature in high school resulted in lackluster grades and college application rejections. Recalling an Air Force recruiter in his tenth-grade class mentioning that as an airborne linguist "you got a fat signing bonus, the Air Force taught you a language of your choice, and ... you used that language to spy on people from a jumbo jet ...," Fritz reached out to a local recruiter after graduation, did reasonably well on the difficult Defense Language Aptitude Battery (DLAB) test, and was winging his way to basic training in 2008.
After graduation, Fritz was sent to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and his chatty narrative of learning Dari and Pashto (the main languages of Afghanistan) is both entertaining and enlightening. Most interestingly, he documents the cerebral shift from learning the structure of the Dari language to truly absorbing it: "It wasn't until I began engaging with the language, trying to understand how it worked, why words meant the things they did, that Dari began to change the way I thought about the world."
But it would be his knowledge of Pashto that would forever alter the course of his life because "I was told, not everyone who speaks Pashto is a Talib, but every Talib does speak Pashto, so if you hear it, expect bad shit..." His deployment to Afghanistan as one of the most elite of airborne cryptologic linguists—a direct support operator—put Fritz onboard low-flying gunships thousands of feet in the air above Afghanistan, listening to the Taliban's communications on the ground. Thus begins a rare inside look at what airborne linguists do, and Fritz excels at describing difficult and highly technical processes in a way most can understand. He is also bitingly funny while doing it.
But underneath the pages of sarcastic, stream-of-consciousness riffing that Fritz relies on too heavily—run-on sentences are not a reader's friend—there is a palpable sense of a man grappling with his role in raining death on the heads of human beings below him. The reader sees the progression from the gung-ho airman who believes in the Taliban as "evil" (and the Americans as the "good guys") to a man who listens to their boring, banal (but sometimes funny) conversations day after day and begins to see them as something else: human. He argues that "the malevolent can be filled with the mundane" and "the Taliban weren't bad all of the time." He begins to question the "war" that he claims was no war at all and does not celebrate Osama bin Laden's death, nearly getting into a fight with a fellow airman over it.
His self-admitted contrarian nature during his deployment to Afghanistan increased Fritz's sense of isolation and alienation. As he bluntly puts it: " ... the gunship didn't feel like home anymore. I no longer wanted to live among the memitim (biblical destroying angels), to aspire to Azrael. I was tired of killing people. You can't be a gunship guy and be tired of killing people. You most definitely cannot be on a gunship and talk about being tired of killing people."
Fritz's account possesses a raw interiority as he dissects his thoughts and mental health concerns, which culminate in his decision to no longer deploy, effectively ending his Air Force career at the end of his enlistment in 2013. Never diagnosed officially with PTSD, Fritz believes another term the military has recently embraced is more apt: moral injury (see Beyond the Book). The cognitive dissonance that drone operators feel after tracking their human prey for days, weeks or months, and then killing that person is a precise example of moral injury: they are killing someone they have come to know. A similar "closeness" to the enemy—listening to their unfiltered, highly personal radio transmissions—blurs the differences between the good and bad guys for Fritz: "Because I could hear it all, both sides of this strange and eternal war, the boundary that was supposed to separate them from us no longer existed. Even if I only spent six hundred hours listening to the Taliban ... I spent thousands of hours hearing them in my head, building their camaraderie, telling me it was too cold to jihad, or breathing their friend's last breath."
While Fritz's experience is compelling and uncomfortable at turns, his writing style alternates between defensiveness and offensiveness (literally so for some readers, as he is overly fond of the f-word). The book unfortunately loses some of its poignancy towards the end as he shifts from reminiscence to soapbox, ready to argue with an undefined "you" about the validity of the war and America's role in it. Not everyone will care for his position or the crassly worded way in which he often delivers it, but Fritz has earned his time at the podium.
What the Taliban Told Me is essential reading for those with an interest in America's recent wars and the toll our military personnel have paid—and continue to—for their service.
Reviewed by Peggy Kurkowski
Elliot Ackerman, author of The Fifth Act: America's End in Afghanistan
J. Kael Weston, author of The Mirror Test: America at War in Iraq and Afghanistan
Kevin Maurer, #1 New York Times bestselling author of No Easy Day
Matt Gallagher, author of Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War and the novels Youngblood and Daybreak
Ian Fritz's memoir, What the Taliban Told Me, chronicles the author's difficulties processing his role in events that resulted in death and injury to others. Not officially diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Fritz discusses a category of non-physical harm that military experts denote as "moral injury," which he says is closer to what he suffered during his deployment in Afghanistan. But what precisely is moral injury, and in what ways does it differ from the more well-known PTSD designation?
According to Syracuse University's Moral Injury Project (cited in Fritz's book), moral injury constitutes "the damage done to one's conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one's own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct." As an airborne cryptologic linguist, Fritz identified potential ground threats to U.S. soldiers through close monitoring of Taliban communications. The gunship he flew on would then fire 105mm artillery rounds to kill the targeted Taliban talkers. Eventually, Fritz suffered severe depression and even suicidal thoughts.
The U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs notes there is a great deal of overlap between moral injury and PTSD; guilt and shame are core features of moral injury and are also symptoms of PTSD. However, "PTSD includes additional symptoms such as hyperarousal that are not central to moral injury." Moral injury is just as serious as PTSD, as the VA indicates that "exposure to morally injurious events is associated with both suicidal ideation as well as suicide attempts."
Awareness of the issue among mental health professionals and veterans' service providers is growing. For instance, in Florida, Jacksonville University's Keigwin School of Nursing has a Moral Injury Program that provides key resources and videos to address what they call a "soul wound," which is "not readily seen unless the bearer of Moral Injury is willing to share it with others." The sense of guilt and shame one feels for their actions—and their feelings about feeling that way—can hamper them from seeking help or opening up to friends, family and mental health professionals (Fritz relates his own painful experiences in this respect). As The Moral Injury Project affirms, "the effects of moral injury go beyond the individual and can destroy one's capacity to trust others, impinging on the family system and the larger community.
Research into moral injury is also increasing, and researchers are identifying pathways to recovery. Since feelings of isolation can inhibit sufferers from getting help, "listening and witnessing to moral injury outside the confines of a clinical setting can be a way to break the silence that so often surrounds moral injury," suggests The Moral Injury Project. In this sense, Fritz's memoir is his raw personal testimony of the trauma he copes with daily, and the rest of us should be willing "listeners" for those members of the armed forces who deserve to be heard.
Two US Air Force members demonstrate relaxation training, part of the military's program to address PTSD and other mental health issues, courtesy of US Air Force
Filed under Medicine, Science and Tech
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