Ian Fritz was an Airborne Cryptologic Linguist who served with the U.S. Air Force in Afghanistan for five years. Trained in both Dari and Pashto, he became one of only two people that could understand what was being said by all of the people on the ground before and during battle. Following his service, he became a physician and writer. This is his memoir.

My thanks go to Simon and Schuster Publishing and NetGalley for the invitation to read and review. This book is for sale now.

Fritz was in many ways the perfect recruit; his family didn’t have any money, and he was brilliant, which meant that if he was going to have any opportunities, they would most likely come from the U.S. armed forces. He blew through his public school years, as gifted students that aren’t challenged often do.

This is where I long to stand on a big box and yell through a bullhorn: gifted students are at risk children! We must provide them with challenging, interesting curriculum, or they will stop bothering with school. I’ve been saying so for decades, and I’m saying it again right now. So many times educators and school districts assume these kids will automatically be fine. If the student is bored, they use them as unpaid tutors for their peers, which distorts relationships among the students and does nothing to provide the highly capable student with new, interesting material. These kids need different educations from those in the mainstream. Ian’s story is a powerful example of why this is so.

Ian was sent to an elite language training program, and then he was deployed. Initially, the successful flights in which targets were found, identified, and killed—often partly or solely because of his contribution—were exhilarating, but as time went on, he began to feel conflicted. On the one hand, the Taliban were responsible for the horrific, cowardly attacks on American civilians on 9/11, and were therefore a legitimate target. On the other hand, being able to understand what enemy soldiers were saying to one another made him aware that these were normal people, attempting to live their lives and repel the U.S. invaders. It’s hard to hate someone, or to be indifferent to them, when you overhear them discussing their plans for after the day’s fighting is done, or declaring that it’s just plain “too hot for Jihad today.” Sometimes a threat on the ground would be identified, and the Americans wouldn’t realize that this was an error until after the person they’d targeted was dead. And he knew the names of the dead, sometimes hear the survivors below desperately trying to get their comrade to a medic, but then…oh. Too late.

Then there was this culture among others he served with, those not trained in the language and who were therefore able to demonize the targets, howling with laughter at the way a body on the ground could be made to bounce if you shot it at just the right angle. He realized that “no one else had heard, and no one else ever would hear, the simultaneous screams of the JTAC [U.S. officer on the ground] and the Talibs. Or the sudden quiet when the Talibs died.”

Ultimately, he learned that Afghanistan was actually a lot safer without U.S. forces than with them.

As Fritz began to internalize his despair, he grew suicidal, and he knew he had to get out. It’s at this point that he was charged with malingering and cowardice; he would later learn that it was a trend among the linguists serving in this theater.

Fritz is one hell of a fine writer, and the narrative flows smoothly. I was surprised to find that this was a quick read, despite the intensity of the material. Surely there must be other military memoirs relating to Afghanistan, but as he points out, nobody else is writing about this experience, because almost nobody else has done what he has.

For those with the interest and the courage, this memoir is recommended.

It's well-written, I'll give it that. You can take what he writes with a pinch of salt. The life of a translator in the middle of war is dull, brutal and everything in-between. This book will be of interest to those who don't know anything about a translator on a war-plane (and Fritz's former superiors).

Interesting Passages:

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THREATS, OR IT’S TOO COLD TO JIHAD
On a winter night in the northern part of Afghanistan, where the average elevation is somewhere above seven thousand feet and the average temperature somewhere below freezing, the following discussion took place:
“Go place the IED down there, at the bend; they won’t see it.”
“It can wait till morning.”
“No, it can’t. They could come early, and we need it down there to kill as many as we can.”
“I think I’ll wait.”
“No, you won’t! Go place it.”
“Do I have to?”
“Yes! Go do it!”
“I don’t want to.”
“Brother, why not? We must jihad!”
“Brother . . . It’s too cold to jihad.”
He wasn’t wrong. Even in our planes, with our fleeces and hand warmers, it really was too damn cold for war.
Sadly, I didn’t hear this particular conversation live. It was a recording that was heard by every Pashto DSO and told to anyone who would listen to the English version of it. I did hear other jokes, though, because it turned out that the Taliban are fucking funny.
“Najibullah . . . Najibuuullllaaah . . . Najibullah, are you there, brother? Najibullah! Najibullah! Najibullah!”
“Yes! What is it, brother?”
“Are the things ready?”
“Yes, brother, the things are ready.”
“Is the big thing ready? I hear monsters above.”
“The big thing is waiting for Baryalai to come back.”
“Baryalai is bringing the large vegetables with him? Hahahahahahahaha your vegetable is too small to fight the monsters, Najibullah. You always have to wait for Baryalai’s big vegetable. Hahahahahahahaha.”
“Stay prepared, brother. God willing many demons will die today.”
“Najibullah! Najibullah! Najibullah! I am just joking. We will be prepared.”
Najibullah didn’t laugh, which seemed a bit unfair, as it was a pretty good dick joke, demons or no.
DSOs all traded with each other the stories of what we heard, in part because they were so funny, in part because we could pass off the stories as our own to other crews. Often, the stories were much the same—chatter is chatter no matter what plane you’re on—but because they only flew at night, the gunships could offer up prime shenanigans.
Taylor had deployed after me, and he’d gotten qualified on different planes and been sent up to Bagram. But even Afghanistan couldn’t keep us apart, because not long after he got there, a plane he was flying on had a bad enough mechanical failure that they had to make an emergency landing down in Kandahar. While the rest of his crew was enjoying all the amenities of the south, it was decided that the best use of his time would be to fly with Ed to go ahead and get qualified on the Whiskey. No rest for the wicked and all.
But he did have a little free time, and when we hung out, we traded stories from our missions so far. Maybe because it was from him, or maybe because it’s simply one of the best physical comedy stories I’ve ever heard, one of Taylor’s stories quickly became DSO legend.
There he was, overhead an op on an H-model, doing his job, listening for anyone talking about doing some bad shit to the Americans on the ground or up above. (It’s worth mentioning here that one of the hardest parts of being a DSO is listening to multiple conversations in different languages. Sometimes, when shit was going real sideways, we would only listen to the Taliban, and then relay what we’d heard to someone else, but we also had to be able to listen to all their static-filled radios while simultaneously paying attention to what the other members of our crew, the ground team, and potentially other aircraft were all saying.) Taylor’s not hearing much of interest from the Taliban, but he realizes the crew is getting pretty excited, because the sensor operator is tracking a guy moving between buildings.
Sensor Operator: “Hey FCO, I got a guy moving around the compound.”
FCO: “Is he carrying anything?”
SO: “No, but he’s sticking to the roofs. He just got on top of the southmost building.”
FCO: “You think he’s a spotter?”
SO: “I’m not sure.”
Nav: “Halo 16, be advised, we have suspicious movement in the compound.”
Halo 16 (Navy SEAL on the ground): “Hammer [H model callsign], how much movement?”
Nav: “Halo, one MAM [military-aged male], he’s now on the roof of the south building.”
SO: “Hey, he’s doing something, he’s squatting down.”
FCO: “What the fuck is he doing? Is he putting an IED on a roof?”
SO: “I don’t fucking know. It’s fucking weird, though.”
Nav: “DSO, are you hearing anything?”
Taylor: “No, nothing other than check-ins, the usual bullshit.”
SO: “Oh shit, he’s done, he’s leav—”
FCO: “Did he . . . did he just take a shit?”
SO: “Yeah, I think so. A big one too. Fucking steamy.”
Nav: “Halo 16, be advised, MAM took a shit on the roof.”
Halo 16: “Well, all right.”
People who weren’t even in the country at the time wound up telling this story as if they were there. Which like, I don’t begrudge them, ’cause who wouldn’t want to be a part of the mission where a gunship watched a guy shit on his neighbor’s roof?
This, of course, necessitates the story of the best Whiskey mission. It was supposed to have been a pretty generic flight, just doing escort support of some group of mixed Afghan military and coalition forces. But then some Talib on the radio kept asking if any of his comrades were at “the school.” This was concerning, as it could have been him checking in on the preparations for an ambush, so “the school” had to be found. While one of the CSOs kept his camera on the convoy, the other scanned the area near the route, and lo and behold, he came across a village with (1) a relatively new building that looked like a lot of the other schools around the country and (2) a shitload of Talibs around said building.
Well-armed Talibs. All around them were Hi-Luxes (Toyota pickup trucks that are seemingly indestructible and therefore the preferred mode of transportation of insurgents worldwide), machine guns, RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades)—you name it, these guys had it.
They also had something no one had ever seen the Taliban with before.
A volleyball net.
There they were, a bunch of Talibs in their man-jammies, surrounded by a metric fuck-ton of serious weapons.
Playing volleyball.
But even with all those weapons, all these obvious Talibs, the Whiskey couldn’t shoot, because alongside all the bad guys were a bunch of women and children. Some thought, and some even said, that this was an obvious “fuck you” to us from the Taliban, who were not shy about using human shields. And this may have been the case, but there was the other option, the less villainous one, wherein even a bunch of Talibs have wives and kids. The war wasn’t going anywhere, so why shouldn’t they sometimes hang out with them, maybe play some games? How many other chances were they gonna have for a nice game of volleyball with the kids?
It wasn’t all roof shits and volleyball, though. The Taliban were an industrious group.
“Amir! Amir. Amir. Amir. Are you there, brother?”
[static]
“Amir, are you there? Amir. Amir. Amir. Amir.”
“Yes, I am here, brother. We are doing the work.”
“Where are you, Amir? There are monsters nearby.”
“We are on the road, brother. Near the house with the trees. We are doing the work.”
“Stay safe, brother, monsters are near.”
“We are ready, brother. God willing, many of our enemies will die.”
The only problem was that their industry, their work, was trying to kill us. In this case, they were setting up an IED at an intersection they knew was heavily traveled. But did that necessarily make them evil?
For most service members in Afghanistan, and certainly for the crews I was flying with, this conceptualization held true, as any interaction they had with the Taliban was wrapped up in fighting. Not only were said Taliban bad most, if not all, of the time, they were depraved and degenerate in their badness; they would do anything to kill us in inventive and terrible ways (remember the fucking donkeys carrying IEDs). I had my share of this, but the nature of DSOing meant that my relationship with the Taliban was becoming less and less violent; even if a given mission resulted in actual combat (all my flights in Afghanistan were technically combat missions, but this was only because the entirety of Afghanistan was perpetually combative in our eyes), there were usually multiple hours surrounding the fighting that were peaceful.
And what I had been told by the DSOs that came before me about the complexity of what I would hear held true; the majority of any elaborate speech was centered around active battles. The rest of the time, which was most of the time, what I kept hearing was the lunch plans, neighborhood gossip, shitty road conditions, and how the weather wasn’t conforming to someone’s exact desires. The name-calling, complaining, and infighting. Yes, it was bullshit, but not all of it was centered around killing us. Turns out you can’t spend all of your time talking about fighting, even in a war zone. Maybe especially in a war zone.
How much of my time in Afghanistan was spent talking about fighting versus literally any other topic? Probably a quarter of the hours of every other mission were spent debating whether one (female) celebrity was hotter than another or fantasizing about what we would do with the latest hundred-million-dollar Powerball or whining about annual training requirements. If the Taliban could have listened to us, they wouldn’t have heard much complexity either.
So as my flight hours kept adding up, they began to beg the question of whether the Taliban were, in fact, evil, or even plain old bad, most (it was certainly no longer all) of the time. Beyond the bullshit, the Talibs also daydreamed about the future, made plans for when (not if) the Americans finally left, and reveled in the idea of retaking their country. These conversations are somewhat paradoxical in that they were ubiquitous and coalesced into a gestalt, such that trying to write out any individual conversation now would be more or less an act of, if not necessarily fabrication, then a sort of creation on my part. There were specifics, though: Guesstimates, or maybe the better description is informed hopes of when the Americans or Brits or whoever would leave this village or that town. Discussion of how glorious or wonderful or great life would be once those devils were gone. The feeling of how great it would be to be back in control (both literally and figuratively). This too was supposed to be evil, their desire to remove us and once again be in charge. And it sounded pretty bad, seeing as how it was entirely predicated on their ability to eradicate the world of infidels (aka us) and return the country to the state it had been in back in the 1990s. The only problem was, it was becoming sort of reasonable.
I began to liken it to the notion of a hypothetically very rich, very not white country, let’s call it Audi Sarabia, invading a hypothetically very proud, relatively dysfunctional, very white country, let’s call it Texasstan. You would have then a country that felt they were morally upright, who, on the premise of rooting out terrorists and extremist ideologues, invaded a formerly independent state with a long and storied history of rejecting invaders and upholding their millennia-old way of life. This formerly independent state would have a working constitution, a (semi-) functioning government, and while maybe not everyone who lived under that government agreed with its policies, well, you can’t please everyone.
Now, on invasion, the Audis would say that the government was corrupt (what government isn’t), draconian (a little hypocritical, that, but okay), and guilty of harboring and supporting international threats (people, they mean people). The rest of the world would say, “Well, okay, yeah, those are all true statements, so I guess you have a point,” and would stand idly by while the Audis went in and subverted an established, legitimate government, in order to stand up a puppet state that would blindly support them in their mission. The Audis would set up shop in the major cities and begin the process of looking for their enemies.
But then, who, exactly, are their enemies? Supporters of the old government, that one’s easy. Rebels against the new government, also easy (the Audis prefer rebel to insurgent in this analogy—has to do with that whole submission to Islam thing). Oh, and anyone that members of the new government say is bad, regardless of any proof supporting these claims, and regardless of the fact that it seems strangely convenient that most of the people being named happen to be political opponents, or guys that the members of the new government feel have wronged them (some of them fellow members).
Over the next five to ten years, the Audis continue to build up their presence, continue to raid homes at night, kidnap people, drop bombs indiscriminately, all the while maintaining that these actions are justifiable and for the greater good. Meanwhile, the Texans, who have had their own culture longer than the Audis have had a nation, replete with their own laws and customs, are told that they should be ashamed of this culture, that it’s barbaric and outdated, and that while they don’t necessarily need to convert to the Audis’ religion (this isn’t the Crusades; proselytization is actually illegal under the rules governing the Audis’ military members), they should probably think about joining the rest of the world in modernity.
At some point during all this, a number of Texans find themselves wondering whether the old government—which, admittedly, had its problems—wasn’t preferable. They were violent, yes, but at least they were predictable in their violence. And they didn’t have giant flying bogeymen that went around blowing up weddings or bombing funerals or just generally making violence an everyday part of life. If, then, a number of these Texans begin to feel that they have no choice but to try and fight against the Audis, would that be so unreasonable? And if, once they do start fighting back, their culture and long-standing way of life mean that they fight hard, even fight dirty, wouldn’t this too make some sense?
I spent too many hours and too many words developing this brilliant analogy of mine. It was ham-fisted, overly reductive, and failed to extend the grace that was so readily at hand for the Taliban to the American side of things. If I had tried this shit on a U-boat, I probably would have gotten punched, or at the very least told in no uncertain terms to shut the fuck up.

----------------
I may have been closer to the action than (most of) you, but I was also very much asleep in my freight container when bin Laden got got. I found out when I woke up a few hours after and checked Facebook. Flying life was rarely physically hard. Sure, I was in Afghanistan, but I had just slept eight (mostly) uninterrupted hours and had pretty decent Wi-Fi. Scrolling through my friends’ statuses, I remember thinking, Huh. It was interesting, the idea that almost ten years after 9/11 we had finally killed our country’s biggest bogeyman, and it was very interesting that we had invaded Pakistan to do it. But I wasn’t, like, happy about it.................................We had our own office space in it, separated from the rest of the various crews on our camp due to our usage of Top Secret networks for which most everyone else didn’t have clearance. Passcode-protected door, windowless room that had a feeling of nerdy despair—just a good old-fashioned secure compartmentalized information facility. Ed was already there, which shouldn’t have been surprising. I don’t think he slept all that much on his good days, and those were plenty rare, so by the time I walked in he had already been up for a few hours, reveling in this now Greatest of Days.
“Man! Did you see! We got that fucker!”
Ed was smiling. Ed has a nice smile. Big, toothy grin—he’s got nice teeth, very into his dental hygiene, pretty sure he told me once he’d never had a cavity in all his thirty plus years—that really lights up his face. If you didn’t know any better, when Ed smiles, you’d think he was pretty happy. This might be why he’s, to some degree, usually smiling. But this morning, his smile was brilliant. It was genuine. He really was happy.
“Yeah, I saw it on Facebook.”
The smile faltered, just for a second. Maybe at my lack of exclamation points, maybe at me learning about it on Facebook. I’ll admit this is a strange way to learn about something that happened a few hundred miles away from your war zone, but it’s not as if I control how information spreads in the world.
“What a day! I’ve been trying to find pictures but who knows if we’ll have access.”
“Uh-huh.”
The smile definitely slipped, though this didn’t register in my brain at the time. An unsmiling Ed was a potentially scary Ed. This is the problem with people whose rage is constantly simmering. If they aren’t happy, they’re usually not far from something destructive.
“Dude, we should be celebrating!”
I would like to say that at this point I exercised some self-restraint, some critical thought. But I went with the option of the twenty-two-year-old who feels like they’re having deep-and-novel-thoughts-that-others-in-their-small-mindedness-haven’t-yet-considered. Ten years later, I don’t necessarily disagree with twenty-two-year-old Ian’s thoughts, but I do disagree with sharing them with someone like Ed.
“Why? What will that get you? He was an incredible human. He changed the world.”
No more smile. Some redness though.
“Fritz, shut the fuck up.”
“No, but real—”
“Get out of this room.”
“Wha—”
“Leave!”

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Kalima, or at least the guy who wanted to talk to him, was emblematic of so much of what I was hearing on mission after mission. These men, these Taliban, these guys sitting in the mountains, were bored and tired, but mostly bored. This is difficult to explain in that, while it’s easy for me to tell you this, it’s difficult for us humans to admit that the malevolent can be filled with the mundane. We want our evil to stay evil, the prosaic to be not just separated from the depraved, but diametrically
opposed.

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For so many Afghans, a bad day consists of their house getting blown up along with the fifteenth family member they’ve had killed because of this war. It’s not hard to understand why they might want to get back at us for that shit. Or maybe their bad day is when, after having been promised a well, a few foolhardy fuckwits decide to shoot at the Americans in broad daylight, and the Americans decide that everyone in that village can get fucked, the well is off. That’s if we don’t decide to just bomb them, citing “increased Taliban presence.”
And then I realized that no, this was the wrong thing to be mad at. Not only was it useless, as my anger could do nothing to stop the U.S. military from carrying out its God-given mission, but it was also just the wrong way of looking at things.
The Taliban had forced our hand. They were responsible for harboring the people who had planned and carried out 9/11. They routinely infringed on human rights, and while maybe we did too, at least we accomplished something when we did it. What were they building? What were they giving the world? Fucking nothing. Killing them, ridding them and their ilk from the face of the Earth was the only way to ensure that no more JTACs got shot, no more girls got acid thrown on their faces, and this war could finally end. The only logical conclusion was that I should, in fact, be mad at the Taliban. Maybe they weren’t completely and utterly evil, but that sure as shit didn’t mean they didn’t need to die.

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According to my official Air Force records, I do not have, and in fact have never had, PTSD. Formally receiving this diagnosis would have required an official admission that what I did and saw and heard was in fact traumatic and that it wasn’t normal, which would only have served to justify my reasons for not wanting to go back. You can see why the powers that be wouldn’t want to admit this. And while this diagnosis wasn’t true when the Air Force made it, it might be now. Time doesn’t heal all wounds—some simply can’t be treated—but eventually your mind can bring the edges together, and while the scar is ugly and imprecise, the gaping hole has, finally, closed. These days I can listen to Pashto without breaking out in a cold sweat, get on a plane without thinking about the guns that ought to be attached to it, and talk about war without wanting to curl up in a ball and die. This, then, is understood as meaning that my PTSD has been cured (never mind that curing something that was never supposed to have existed creates some mild metaphysical stickiness).
In the time since I wasn’t diagnosed, the military has embraced a different terminology to attempt to describe the turmoil that I and so many others experienced: moral injury. The idea of moral injury has been around since at least the 1980s, though the explicit term was coined by Jonathan Shay in the nineties, when his work with Vietnam veterans led to his writing Achilles in Vietnam. Today, Syracuse University’s Moral Injury Project not only defines moral injury but attempts to explain why and when it happens:
Moral injury is 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.
This is a good definition; it is thorough while simultaneously casting a wide enough net to embrace the myriad reasons any warfighter could suffer such an injury. Being a DSO allowed for perpetration, witnessing, and failure. Certainly, my moral code was violated. But I don’t think moral injury fully encompasses just what happened. It’s not that I, along with almost every other Pashto DSO, wasn’t morally injured. We were. But it’s not entirely accurate to say that there was “damage done to [my] conscience or moral compass.” It’s more like, along with the many men I killed, my consciousness was blown the fuck up.
With the exception of spies mythical and real, most warfighters throughout history have not been tasked with killing people they know. Even in our modern wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the majority of killing is done by complete strangers.............The most famous of these warriors are drone operators. These men and women face issues that I can’t begin to understand, as the cognitive dissonance that they experience is so strange as to be something out of science fiction. If anything, it seems that their injury is arguably worsened by the moral contradiction of being so far away from the “threat.” These are people who wake up every morning and drive to work like any other commuter. Except, their work is hunting people. They do this work for twelve hours (or more), and at the
end of their shift they head home. Just like any other commuter. Maybe their significant other calls them and asks them to stop and pick up some milk on the way, which they obligingly do, maybe grabbing a candy bar or a six-pack at the same time. And then they sit down to dinner with their loved ones, the memory of the missile they fired five hours earlier destroying a man still playing in their head.
Often, the man that was destroyed by that missile was a target that this drone operator had been following for days or weeks. This work is done to establish what is known as a pattern of life (POL), aka the shit someone does on a regular basis. POL is supposed to help determine whether the things someone is doing or the people someone is meeting are happenstance or more purposeful. Did that guy go talk to a known bomb-maker who also happens to be a tailor just once, like someone who was trying out different tailors might do? Or did that guy go see his “tailor” two or three times a week for a month, all while wearing the same ill-fitting clothing? In the course of this work—sometimes as a side effect, sometimes completely on purpose—one begins to develop an idea of who that target is.
In a New York Times article exploring the effects of this work, of the damage done to the men and women who perform this function, an unnamed drone operator says that his injuries resulted from “cognitive combat intimacy,” a term so apt that I wish his name were published, if only so he could get the credit he deserves for such an accurate neologism. The day in, day out watching of targets, learning about their lives, their habits, their likes and dislikes, results in a strong sense of familiarity, and sometimes, even closeness (a friend of mine who did this sort of work once told me that he and his team could always identify one particular target based on the highly specific porn searches said target made on various devices that he used, which while comical, is indeed also quite intimate). And then, after you’ve come to know so much about this person, in fact because you’ve come to know so much about this person, you kill them.
The work I did was not this in-depth, and nowhere near as detailed (I didn’t hear of any porn searches, though I did learn about a few sexual preferences), and so it could be said, in relation to others like these drone operators, that I didn’t know much about the men I was listening to, not really. The sense of closeness I had with the men I listened to was not a cognitive process, but an emotional one (whether and how these two processes are actually different is a matter of debate, but in my usage here I mean to have cognitive equate to an objective, fact-finding affair, and emotional to mean a subjective, desire-discovering activity).
------------
U.S. (and many European) fighters are so well equipped, so technologically advanced, so well armored as to be mythical. SEALs, Green Berets, and other special operators are trained to continue moving after they’ve been shot. (I’ve helped them with this training. The rules were that when we, the “bad guys,” got shot, we went down. If they, the “good guys,” got shot, they were supposed to keep advancing until they neutralized us and completed their mission. All of this was done with simulation rounds, but there’s still impact, and the guns we were using were real; they really were getting shot.) The purpose of this training is to impart a psychology of undefeatability. It is singularly terrifying to shoot multiple bullets into what is supposed to be a human and then watch that (alleged) human continue to push forward as if nothing happened to them. Yes, somewhere in the back of your mind you know that they are wearing a bulletproof vest and other pieces of body armor and that these are the things keeping them alive, but that knowledge doesn’t make the six-foot-tall, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound creature coming at you any less intimidating. To kill such a being is to kill a god. I could now see why a Talib might feel entitled to inflate his kill count.
In addition to this sort of allegorical accounting, I wondered if, in a way, they weren’t actually right about how many of us they were successfully killing. At the very least, a lot of us were dying. And I couldn’t help but think, if a warfighter dies because of a war, does it matter if they died on the battlefield? Does it matter if their death is “self-inflicted”? All those men and women who made it out of Afghanistan, only to commit suicide once they were home, are they not casualties of war? Didn’t the Taliban kill them?

Equally disheartening was my newfound understanding of why the Taliban seemed to ignore, somehow discount, our kills. On the missions where I knew we had killed dozens of them, they routinely refused to acknowledge all of the deaths. Some of this was attributable to their haphazard organization; they didn’t exactly have rosters of who was fighting in a given battle, or dog tags to identify unrecognizable corpses. Our jokes about them being immortal had stopped being funny, because now I couldn’t help but wonder if they actually were. They were suffering thousands of casualties per year, which I always heard about, but not once had I been told that the Taliban was growing weaker, getting smaller. It was like we were playing whack-an-Afghan, and every time we managed to hit one, another popped up one wadi over. How many times had we rolled up the same guy, interrogated him, probably tortured him, eventually released him, only to wind up hunting him down again weeks or months or years later? They were constantly replacing themselves, either literally or figuratively, and we had fallen for the trap of thinking of them as interchangeable, thereby placing them beyond the constraints of ordinary humanity, allowing them to become the superhumans they claimed they were. So, while I knew they were dying, I no longer believed they were dead.

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OF MY THREE AIR MEDALS, two of them deal with flights from my first deployment. The one that chronologically covers the first half of the deployment says that my “superb airmanship and courage were instrumental to the successful execution of twenty combat missions totaling 191.5 flight hours supporting Operation ENDURING FREEDOM. Constantly operating under the threat of man portable air defense systems and anti-aircraft artillery, Airman Fritz provided real time imminent threat warning, situational awareness and non-traditional intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to coalition Special Operations Forces executing critical close air support, armed reconnaissance, infiltration and exfiltration missions. Additionally, Airman Fritz passed twelve imminent threat warnings during missions that included short notice launches in support of troops in contact. Additionally, Airman Fritz was able to warn ground forces of possible mine and ambush locations, ensuring the safe return of ground Special Operations Forces. Airman Fritz and his crew’s efforts also contributed to the elimination of twenty insurgents and detention of twelve enemy fighters including two high value targets.”
The other medal, which chronologically covers the second half of that deployment, says much of the same boilerplate shit about threat warning and types of missions. But it also says that over the course of “131 flight hours” I “passed eight imminent threat warnings” and that I “was able to provide warning to ground forces of a machine gun ambush and insurgents tracking coalition force movements.” Apparently, I further “contributed to the detention of seven enemy fighters including two high value targets.”

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You may have noticed, or maybe not, how slippery I have been with the verb to kill:
“I killed.”
“We killed.”
“I helped kill.”
This is no grammatical slip, an inability to keep track of who did what. These variations are there because there was, and is, an argument to be made about my role in any killing, as that’s not how gunships, or Whiskeys, or DSOs work. No single individual is held responsible for the people that our planes kill. It’s a crew effort.

(…..) According to my official records I have in fact killed 123 people. The actual wording is “123 insurgents EKIA” (EKIA = enemy killed in action, so not quite people, but definitely killed). These records don’t say that I was part of a crew that killed these people, or that I supported other people who did the killing, just that I killed those 123 humans. I can’t know, and will never know, if all of these kills belong to me. I do know, and will always know, that I belong to all of them.

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I went to the community college near my base to take some pre-reqs, transferred to a university soon thereafter, got my degree, and applied to medical school.

Being a physician was never going to unkill those 123 men. Nothing will.
There is no atonement, because I did nothing wrong; I am no sinner.
And there is no absolution, because I did nothing right; I am the worst sinner.

"What the Taliban Told Me" by Ian Fritz stands is an intricately woven narrative, sensitively navigating the intricate and mysterious landscape of Afghanistan. From the opening page, Fritz tells a tale that transcends just any account of a conflict-ridden terrain, exploring the unbreakable spirit that defines its people.

This book provides readers with an intimate understanding of the Afghan conflict. Fritz, a seasoned journalist, leaps fearlessly into the heart of the matter, painting vivid portraits of the individuals caught in the crossfire. I felt immersed in the ebb and flow of the nation's struggle for identity.

The depths of the interactions with the Taliban are authentically chilling and enlightening. Fritz manages to convey the complexities of the Afghan narrative, capturing the essence of what the Taliban represents to its people.

I found myself drawn into the intricacies of Afghan culture, history, and the resilience of its people. Fritz's language transported me to the rugged landscapes, bustling bazaars, and the quiet strength that defines Afghanistan.

"What the Taliban Told Me" is an exploration of the human spirit in the face of adversity. Fritz's balances facts with empathy that creates an informative and moving narrative. A variety of stories are within this book that challenge preconceptions and offer a nuanced perspective on a region often misunderstood.

In a world saturated with news headlines, Fritz's fearless pursuit of truth and his unique storytelling make this book an essential read for those seeking a profound understanding of Afghanistan and the human stories hidden within its borders. His insightful exploration peels back the layers of complexity, transcending the headlines and intimately connecting readers with the profound realities of Afghanistan.

To quote Fritz directly, "In the silence between gunshots, you can hear a nation's heartbeat, pulsating with resilience." Read this book. Listen, learn, and, most importantly, empathize with a nation that has faced the tumultuous winds of history head-on.

"A soul-stirring journey into the heart of Afghanistan's untold stories."

"Captivating storytelling that transcends borders and headlines."

"An odyssey of truth, unraveling the complexities of a war-torn nation."

"A poignant exploration of the human spirit amid the Afghan landscape."

"Fritz's fearless pursuit of authenticity illuminates the hidden narratives of Afghanistan."

"Beyond war, a testament to the enduring strength of the Afghan people."

"A must-read for those seeking profound insights into the soul of Afghanistan."

"Evocative prose that captures the essence of a resilient nation's untold tales."

"In 'What the Taliban Told Me,' Fritz weaves a narrative that resonates with the echoes of Afghanistan's silenced voices."

Intelligence memoirs from Afghanistan are either human focused or air with drones focused, Fritz has done very well making a from the air, “ears to the ground”account of the Afghan War while listening in on insurgent conversations from a plane in the air. I would recommend this for those looking for a different memoir.

I hated reading Catcher in the Rye in high school because Holden Caulfield didn't know how to describe anything he was feeling without vociferously using expletives. My teacher at the time asked me what his choice of vocabulary said about his character, his fears, and his development, and all of the sudden, I saw the character in a new light.

The author here describes the unique horrors of war that he experienced in Afghanistan. It's hard to "rate" someone's life experience or give it a review (or stars). Where the narrative is overly laced with expletives at times, I can see someone who is still trying to process everything that has happened. Where I began the book hoping to discover a love for Pashtun culture, or the people, or a neatly packaged narrative about lessons learned, I realized that this is not the narrative of war. War destroys everything. And the narrator lives among the wreckage and the aftermath.

If you mashed Catcher in the Rye and All Quiet on the Western Front together and set it in the last 20 years, this is what you get. Except someone actually lived this experience. That is what is heart-wrenching. I hope the author finds peace in his journey.

"What the Taliban Told Me" by Ian Fritz lays bare the futility of war, particularly the war in Afghanistan. Fritz is clearly a talented writer and many of his memories are searing and impactful. That said, I found some of it to be trite, in particular the continual use of expletives. That just seems like lazy writing. It no longer becomes powerful, it just got boring. There's value in the message of this book, to be sure, but maybe it will hold more appeal for a reader younger than me. Thanks to #netgalley and @simonschuster for the opportunity to preview this book.

Yes, I'm reading a lot of memoirs lately. I liked the idea of this one because comparisons to Eugene Sledge can't be all bad. And it was, like Stephanie Land's Class, very easy to read. It was so easy to read that I'm struggling to decipher what it was that prevented it from being a better book, and I think in the end, it wasn't visceral enough. Not in terms of blood and guts and glory, but in terms of navel-gazing dreaminess.

I appreciate any book that explores the futility of American military operations, the awfulness of war, the toll it takes on the human psyche. This book had all of that in spades. The conversational monologue was easy to read, but also strangely detached. Maybe that's how Fritz had to write it, to keep his sanity. Memories are strange, nebulous things, and we lose more swathes of time than we recall in great detail. Perhaps I should appreciate that he didn't make up conversations, that he didn't describe the dings on the inside of the u-boats, that his story provided more of a general "feeling" of his time in Afghanistan than a whole lot of specifics (most of the time, the attack in the field a memorable exception). But it also made it only one type of story. Still a good one, but not a gripping "must read, must recommend" for this librarian.

Definite teen appeal, and will keep in mind for the 8th grade memoir project. (Dick jokes probably prevent this from being added to any curriculum, but it works for a general reading assignment.)