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 ...