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.
General
Imprint: |
Simon & Schuster
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
November 2023 |
Authors: |
Ian Fritz
|
Dimensions: |
213 x 140 x 21mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Hardcover - Sewn / Cloth over boards
|
Pages: |
304 |
ISBN-13: |
978-1-66801-069-3 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
1-66801-069-0 |
Barcode: |
9781668010693 |
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