What the Taliban Told Me

March 1, 2023

An airborne cryptologic linguist in the U.S. Air Force from 2008 to 2013, Fritz sat in a low-flying gunship monitoring communications on the ground to determine who was Taliban and who was civilian. Here he communicates what he learned about the Afghan people from his work and the emotional turmoil it created that made it harder and harder to do. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from September 25, 2023
Fritz holds nothing back in this raw and engrossing debut memoir about his experiences in Afghanistan as a cryptologic linguist for the U.S. Air Force. Raised by his single mother in Lake City, Fla., Fritz had to work long hours in a Chinese restaurant to help ensure that his family’s utility bills were paid. Exhaustion resulted in subpar grades, despite his academic promise and love of literature, and Fritz was rejected from every college he applied to. In 2007, he followed up on an Army recruiter’s high school presentation about becoming a cryptic linguist, and was accepted to the Air Force’s language school in Monterey, Calif., where he learned Dari, the official language of Afghanistan. In 2011, Fritz arrived in Afghanistan, and soon began listening to suspected Taliban fighters’ communications while flying above them in massive military aircraft, tasked with determining in real time who was a threat and who was an innocent civilian. Over time, Fritz grew horrified by the deaths his work facilitated and increasingly dubious about the war’s goals, having become attuned to the humanity of “enemy” forces by spending so long listening to their mundane exchanges. His mental turmoil led to thoughts of suicide and a decision to leave the military. After Fritz graduated from Columbia University, he went to medical school and became a physician. The grim subject matter is often leavened by welcome humor, and Fritz’s slow-moving evolution from soldier to healer is profoundly moving. This is a standout wartime memoir. Agents: Claudia Cross and Frank Weimann, Folio Literary.

October 15, 2023
A linguist for the U.S. Air Force chronicles his service in Afghanistan. During his deployment, Fritz, an airborne cryptologic linguist, realized that language has the ability to humanize the so-called enemy. The author worked as a direct support operator, translating Dari and Pashto over two deployments in 2011. Hailing from a poor family in Florida, Fritz enlisted at age 20 in order to access college, and he spent a year studying Dari and Pashtun during accelerated Air Force language training in Monterey, California. As the author demonstrates, the work conducted by airborne linguists aboard military gunships is strategic and important, even though "the communications they receive or interpret rarely have an immediate impact on something actively happening on the ground." In a vernacular account full of military abbreviations and slang, Fritz frankly reveals some of the chatter he heard and had to translate quickly. Listening to Taliban combatants exulting at their kills on the one hand, and the U.S. soldiers celebrating theirs on the other, prompted decidedly uncomfortable emotions. "Because I could hear it all, both sides of this strange and eternal war," he writes, "the boundary that was supposed to separate them from us no longer existed." Fritz's first deployment was 322.5 hours and earned him two medals; the next lasted only two months. He writes poignantly about his increasing dread before the second deployment, hearing of other DSOs "losing it" and falling into binge-drinking and other destructive behavior. Ultimately, Fritz grew disenchanted with the gung-ho killing and questioned the motives of the U.S. government. Never diagnosed with PTSD, Fritz calls the damage he sustained "moral injury," defined by psychiatrists as "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." A fraught, moving account by a conflicted soldier.

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November 1, 2023
One type of Air Force Direct Support Operator is an airborne cryptologic linguist. Fritz, in his first book, shares the story of his time in this position. Fluent in Dari, Pashto, and other languages of Afghanistan, Fritz listened to Taliban fighters through their radio communications to give real-time alerts and targeting information to trigger pullers on the ground and in the specialized gunships he flew with. Over two deployments Fritz realized that the Taliban fighters are not entirely evil, but humans with familiar hopes and failings. This is an often-vulgar, sometimes philosophical story of one man's journey through war, trauma, reflection, and atonement. It is an extended monologue in which the author wrestles with questions that have plagued warriors from time immemorial. Fritz's memoir deals with the morality of killing and war from a unique angle. An illuminating look at a secretive and exclusive military occupation, this is a good resource for readers curious about what "the other guys" talk about when they think no outsiders can hear and the complex impact of listening to what they have to say.

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