WHAT THE TALIBAN TOLD ME

A former linguist in Air Force Special Operations Command, Ian Fritz shares his personal experience eavesdropping on the Taliban, highlighting the role of language and air strikes in modern warfare and presenting a candid experience of his time in the military during the war in Afghanistan. This is a powerful, timely coming-of-age story of a young man who is, by turns, arrogant and befuddled, angry and brilliant, thin-skinned and reflective.

When Ian Fritz joined the Air Force right out of high school, he did so out of necessity. A brilliant linguist but indifferent student, he hadn't been accepted into college. But the Air Force recognized his potential and sent him to the elite Defense Language Institute in California to learn Dari and Pashto, the main languages of Afghanistan. In 2011, Fritz became 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 monitored communications on the ground and determined in real time which Afghans were Taliban and which are innocent civilians. This eavesdropping was critical to supporting Special Forces units on the ground, but there was 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 listened to the Taliban for hundreds of hours, and what he taught him about the people of Afghanistan-Taliban and otherwise-the war, and himself. Fritz's fluency was his greatest asset to the military, yet it became the greatest liability to his own commitment to the cause. This is a moving and intimate story of how modern war disfigures a young man and how he recovers from the trauma. It is also a timely one as millions of servicemen struggled to come to terms with our failures in Iraq and Afghanistan and a deep sense of the futility of their service.

The book originated in a viral 2021 Atlantic article, "What I Learned While Eavesdropping on the Taliban," which gave readers a sense of the implacable enemy who defeated us the in the Graveyard of Empires.