“To be on a gunship is to be a god.” This is the first sentence in Ian Fritz’s book, “What the Taliban Told Me,” about his time in Afghanistan, and it’s a grabber. As part of a team riding an air chariot called a C-130 and hurling lightning from 2 miles high, he is indeed something of a god.
As the crew’s DSO (Direct Support Operator) he is not tasked with actual hurling, so maybe he’s more of a lesser god, a minion of the gunship’s commander rather than a true Angel of Death. Still, like many in the pantheon of older gods, he’s making life and death decisions about the groundlings scurrying beneath his wings. “What the Taliban Told Me” By Ian Fritz Simon & Schuster.
288 pages, hard cover $29.99 In the Air Force, a DSO is a flying linguist. Fritz’s job was to ride in airplanes patrolling Afghanistan’s skies and listen in on any electronic chatter he could tune in.
If he heard anything threatening, his team would warn the American forces on the ground and then try to eliminate the problem. He was listening to conversations in Pashto, one of Afghanistan’s major languages, and he was one of fewer than a dozen DSO’s who could speak Pashto well enough to do the job. Fritz, who lives in Maine, insists his book “is not a memoir.
Nor is it a war book.” Instead, it is an extended introspection, recounting what he heard in those gunships, what he did when he was on board, and how those experiences changed who he was then into who he is today. But to .