Eavesdropping on the Taliban with the Angels of Death

An Air Force linguist’s moody memoir of listening in on the enemy—and crew mates—from the sky

Ian Fritz, fighting linguist, is wildly smart, smart enough to unearth complications the way hogs unearth truffles, smart enough to see any reality as an idea (his ringing ears, for instance) but most importantly, smart enough to test his way out of trailer-park nowhere in Lake City, Florida and into the Air Force as a student at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA.  

In one year he learned to speak both Dari and Pashto.  He then spent a couple of tours in Afghanistan, flying around in gunships eavesdropping on the radio traffic of the Taliban. He was credited with helping to kill 123 of them.

He ended up so depressed he found comfort in meditating with a pistol in his mouth—he comes from a family where mental health problems are “rife,” he says. With very few missions left in his tour, he refused to fly around in gunships anymore. He was accused of malingering.

Ian Fritz eavesdropped on the Taliban from an AC-130 Angel of Death (Defense Department photo)

After his discharge he got degrees from Columbia University, then medical school. He bailed out before residency but still thinks of himself as a physician, a saver rather than a taker of lives.

He moved to Maine and became a writer who can flash his smart at you with a single sentence that runs two pages for no other reason than he could write it that way. He notes that in Florida, his best friend’s mother once told him he was “the most insecure narcissist I’ve ever met.”

The title of his book, “What the Taliban Told Me,” is misleading. There’s no indication in the book that he ever met a Talib, but by listening to them on his headphones he came to know them as real live human beings, then real dead ones. The transition between these states persuaded Fritz that “to be on a gunship is to be a god.”

As in: “To use the 105, a gun that is loaded with 45-pound bullets, a gun that when fired causes the 155,000-pound plane it’s mounted on to buck so far to the right that the pilot must actively correct the flight path, is to be Zeus hurling Hephaestus’s bolts.”

Fritz’s part in this Zeus game was not as dramatic. It involved sitting in a huge airplane, wearing headphones and listening to the Taliban chatting in an esoteric language.