What the Taliban Told Me

LISTEN

TO BE ON A GUNSHIP is to be a god. This is not to say that flying in these magnificent monstrosities provided me with some sort of spiritual moment or religious exaltation. This is to say that to be on a gunship, to carry out its mission, is to feel as powerful as any deity from the pantheons of old. But these gods, like all gods, are not interested in creation. To use the 105, a gun that is loaded with forty-five-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. To fire a Griffin missile from an altitude so great that the men on the ground could only know of it in the same moment that it kills them is to be Mars flinging his spear.

And while the old gods may have died, they were profligate with their genes, leaving their sons and daughters, we Nephilim, to carry on their legacy. Some of us use our eyes to find those who have sinned, scanning the earth below for evidence of their crimes, a hot spot of soil here, a silhouette of a gun there. We are called sensor operators. Some of us aim the guns at the targets the sensor operators have found, carefully correcting for height and angle, terrain, and nearby friendlies. We are called fire control officers. And some of us load these guns, the last people to touch the bullets that will go on to end existences. We are called gunners. These are the greater gods, the ones who are known and worshipped by many.

But there is a lesser god, known to few, understood by fewer, even these other divinities. You cannot see what this god does, as he sits there (overwhelmingly he), cocooned in his headset, eyes closed, manipulating energy, listening to invisible messages. They are called direct support operators, or DSOs. You could listen to what they are hearing, but you wouldn’t understand it, as it is not the language of mortals. Or of the living. For they hear the dead.

This is the story the United States Air Force, and many a DSO, want to tell. Call it the DSO as deity. This is not a true story. It isn’t even a good one; that shit sounds like a rough draft of a freshman creative writing prompt. But this is the story I was told, and it is the story I believed for a time. The truth, or at least a truth, is a little more grounded. Because man wasn’t meant to be deified. Our minds aren’t ready for it. So very few of us can be trusted with power of the mortal variety, so what are we supposed to do when we’re given the mythical version?

A DSO (pronounced dizzo) is just an airborne cryptologic linguist by another name. Historically, there weren’t very many DSOs, mostly because the Air Force didn’t want or need that many, and partly because DSOs like feeling special, so they artificially limited the number of spots available to other non-DSO linguists. And because there were so few DSOs, it was that much easier to craft an image as badass operators, the best of the best, the only people who could do what they do. This was plausible; there are those elite groups within the military who have been selected for their talent, grit, and exceptionalism. And, like those elite groups, if you pushed the DSOs on it, they would be able to credibly say that because their job was highly classified (true) they couldn’t tell you specifically what they did (untrue).

A DSO does what all airborne linguists do. They translate intelligence communications or data received or intercepted while in the air, aka listen to what the bad guys (usually) are saying in another language and turn it into English (that quote is from the USAF’s Quincy, Massachusetts, recruiter’s Facebook page). Most airborne linguists do this aboard a jumbo jet, the RC-135 Rivet Joint, or RJ, flying thirty thousand or so feet above the ground at four or five hundred miles an hour, in an orbit that encompasses a few hundred miles. This is strategic work; the communications they receive or interpret rarely have an immediate impact on something actively happening on the ground. But it is important, at least according to the military, as a lot of the things we do might end up on the desk of the president (ibid., and a little misleading, though technically not a lie if you note the usage of might).

The primary difference between these linguists and DSOs is one of location. DSOs don’t fly on RC-135s, or any similar massive aircraft. DSOs fly exclusively on the planes that are utilized by Air Force Special Operations Command, or AFSOC. For the most part, these are C-130s that have been modified for various purposes. Some of these, like the AC-130s, or gunships, have been changed so much from their original cargo-carrying mission as to be unrecognizable; the only cargo a gunship carries is bullets. Others, like the MC-130s, still can and do carry cargo, but they’ve been made to be better at doing it. AFSOC has other aircraft that DSOs are trained to fly on, but in my time in Afghanistan, we almost exclusively flew on C-130s.

Timing is the other thing that makes a DSO’s work different from that of other linguists. AFSOC doesn’t do strategic work all that often, and so neither do DSOs. In Afghanistan, our job was to provide real-time threat warning to the planes we were on and to the people on the ground that these planes were supporting. How we did this work is unimportant, and honestly quite boring.

I don’t know if they still think of themselves as badasses, but when I was a DSO, that was the ethos of the community. We (not all, but most of us) felt that we were the best of the best: better than other linguists, cooler than other linguists, more important than other linguists. Once upon a time, some of this may have been true. Long before I did it, in order to be a DSO you had to be very good at the language(s) you spoke, and you had to be handpicked by other DSOs, interviewed, and tested; it was a whole process. And there were those DSOs who flew scary, complex missions in dangerous places. But by 2010 the Air Force just randomly assigned new linguists to become DSOs, and the thing most likely to take down the aircraft a DSO was in was a drone (seriously, they have a bad habit of losing connection and orbiting at preselected altitudes that are, let’s say, inconvenient for other, human-containing aircraft).

But the DSO told himself that he was a badass. An elite, specialized, and superior human who had earned the right to do what he did purely on merit, and to shit on others who hadn’t earned the same opportunity. You may recognize this story, as it’s the same story most small men tell themselves. The DSO, for obvious reasons, did not realize this.

If I sound petulant, obstreperous, dismissive, arrogant, or, you know, just like a fucking dick, that’s fair. I have a strong dislike of those who consider themselves Better Than, and that dislike turns into utter contempt when this shameless self-promotion is founded on false pretenses that rely on the diminishment of others. This is somewhat a reaction formation, given that I spent my childhood, adolescence, and a decent amount of my young adulthood committing this very sin, and I continue to feel great shame about it. That doesn’t mean that I’m not right. I am. Being a DSO does not make you particularly special. It doesn’t make you better than anyone else, especially other linguists. And ultimately, like most things, it isn’t all that important.

But it really is spectacularly, mind-blowingly, worldview-changingly awesome. I mean like, biblically awesome. A DSO is no god (the new gods are as dead as the old), but he is sometimes powerful beyond comprehension. Providing real-time threat warning is a very bland way of saying that I listened to the Taliban as they were talking (essentially with no delay), translated it from Pashto to English, and relayed that information to my crew, to other planes, or to forces on the ground, often within seconds. If I was on a gunship, what I heard would be used to decide whether we killed those Talibs. If I was on a different type of C-130, what I heard could force us to take evasive maneuvers, to try and keep us from getting shot by those Talibs. Either way, I would temporarily be responsible for a hundred-million-dollar war plane.

Being a DSO in Afghanistan meant making life and death decisions (and not or). We could decide who lived, and who died. When we had flown a mission, and done our job right, it was no lie or even an exaggeration to say we had done something that very few other people were capable of doing. When I did it, I was one of only two DSOs who spoke both Dari and Pashto; there was only one other person on Earth who had received the training I had, who could do the work I did.

Because I experienced all of the things I did in the Air Force at a young age, it might have been impossible for them to be anything but formative. Because very little else that followed was imbued with the same amount of life and death, other things will always pale in comparison. Or maybe it really was the most important thing I’ve ever done, or will ever do. And so, though everything in this book is true, and most of it is about me, it is not a memoir, as I don’t know how to tell you who I am. Nor is it a war book, as I don’t know how to make you understand war. All this book can do—all I can do—is show you what I was.

I was a DSO.

And this is what I heard.

FLYING, OR THE VALLEY OF DEATH

I LEARNED HOW TO BE a crewmember of an AC-130 over the course of two months in early 2011. I’d spent some time before that in a classroom learning the basics of DSOing, a little general radio theory here, some specific stuff about walkie-talkies there. I’d walked around a gunship parked out on the flight line a few times, had studied the layout of the plane, and knew where all the exits and fire extinguishers were. But I hadn’t actually flown a training mission. And somehow, in eight weeks, less than fifty hours of time in the air, I learned how to fly.

First things first, all the crew positions: pilot, copilot, FCO, Nav, EWO, flight engineer, loadmaster, sensor (TV), sensor (IR), gunners.

The pilot and copilot were pretty straightforward. The rest, though, needed some familiarizing. The FCO (pronounced foco), or fire control officer, is responsible for calibrating and aiming the massive guns attached to the plane, and for sort of overseeing and directing the sensor operators. The navigator, or Nav, not only does what the job title explains, but also talks to other aircraft and troops on the ground, coordinating airspace and movements within it in real time. The EWO, or electronic warfare officer, knows everything there is to know about enemy fighters, radars, and surface-to-air missiles, and has to be able to tell the pilots how to evade incoming attacks.

You have to be an officer to be in any of those positions, aka have a college degree. You get to wear shiny stuff on your collar, instead of stripes on your sleeves, and everyone has to call you sir or ma’am.

The rest of the crew is enlisted. The flight engineer is like a super mechanic who knows everything about the plane and tells the pilots what to do if some mechanical or electrical or hydraulic thing fails. The loadmaster does the math to figure out how to balance the multiple tons of ammunition that get loaded onto the plane. The sensor operators, TV (television) and IR (infrared), operate the cameras mounted on the side of the plane. The gunners (all four of them) maintain the bullets and the guns in the back half of the plane, when not busy giving out naked gunner hugs or just generally goofing off. (A naked gunner hug is exactly what it sounds like; a gunner strips down to little to no clothing and gives you a big ol’ bear hug.)

I also learned about mission planning and checklists and safety. I learned how to talk on a plane, how you always address someone by their crew position, and name yourself by yours, like:

EWO, DSO, I’m hearing chatter about a possible surface-to-air missile.

Or Nav, DSO, I’m picking up a couple guys coordinating movement toward the objective.

And, most importantly, I learned that together the fourteen of us would find the enemy, and we would kill them.

Ten flights later, I was qualified as a DSO, which meant I could, three years after joining the Air Force, finally do the work of an airborne cryptologic linguist. I just had to get over to Afghanistan to do it. My squadron wasted no time arranging the trip, and I was scheduled for the next flight east, a couple weeks later. My last meal stateside was with my buddy Quinn at a Longhorn Steakhouse. I ate entirely too much shitty food, confident that it would be better than what I’d be able to get in Afghanistan.

There were two main bases in Afghanistan: Bagram, in the north, and Kandahar, in the south. Bagram was the OG, but it was also a shithole. Good old-fashioned bunk beds set up in a giant tent with curtains that were supposed to provide enough privacy to rub one out (they didn’t, but that didn’t stop anyone), inadequate heat, and little to do on base. Being up north also meant that the missions were often less exciting, as the brunt of the battles were in the southern and eastern parts of the country. Kandahar, in the south, was the place to be; the place I was assigned for my first deployment.

It was a massive base, with troops from dozens of countries stationed at it. Over time, a sort of town square, affectionately known as the boardwalk, had been built. Every country contributed: the French had a nice little shop with all sorts of bonbons; the Germans had a duty-free where you could get a carton of cigarettes for twenty-five bucks (a steal); the Dutch even had a discotheque. At least I think it was the Dutch. There was definitely a discotheque, country of origin uncertain. But it was the Americans that really transformed the place. I arrived in 2011, at the height of our occupation of Afghanistan, joining over one hundred thousand other American service members in the country (in addition to all the contractors and members of other militaries). We did our best to make the base feel like home. You could get a can of Coke and some mozzarella sticks at the TGI Fridays on the boardwalk, or some fried chicken at the KFC.

The other major upside to Kandahar was that you didn’t have to share a big-ass tent with twenty other horned-up airmen. Instead, you got a nice freight container, individual AC unit included, and you only had to share it with one other guy (occasionally two). If you were lucky, you were on opposite flight schedules, and you could jerk it in peace. And even if you weren’t, ’bating with one other guy in the room was far preferable to flogging yourself in the vicinity of a dozen others.

The downside to going to Kandahar was that it meant you stood a chance of flying on the Whiskeys instead of real gunships. At the time, the Air Force had two gunships in service: AC-130Us (known as the U-boat, or their official call sign, Spooky) and AC-130Hs (H-model, or Spectre). These had been around since Vietnam, when the Frankensteined imaginations of artillery-loving madmen had determined that not only was it possible to attach a 105mm howitzer—aka the gun that tanks use against other tanks—to the side of a cargo plane, but that it was in fact also a good idea to do so. Once a fever dream like this begins to take shape, it builds on itself with ever more frightening results. The 105 wasn’t enough, as a gun that big can only fire so fast. No, there must be other guns that, though they provide less damage per bullet, can hit more targets at once with a greater rate of fire. For medium damage and medium speed, there’s a 40mm Bofors cannon. For light damage and massive speed, a 25mm Gatling gun. If you are someone who has the slightest appreciation of mechanical engineering and the building of things that simply aren’t supposed to exist, it’s difficult not to love gunships. Inversely, when it registers that these impossibly real monstrosities have no purpose but killing, it can be difficult to love gunships.

Then there are the Whiskeys. The MC-130Ws, call sign Recoil, were the prototype of what would eventually replace the aging Spooky and Spectre fleets. The Whiskeys had access to Griffin and Viper missiles, which some thought were improvements over the 105. This might be true. But it seems worth noting that a single 105 round costs $400. Each Griffin is $127,333. Raytheon, the company who makes these missiles, knew what they were doing when they pitched them to the DoD. (The Whiskeys would eventually get a smaller gun, a 30mm Bushmaster II that was purported to be far more accurate than the Gatling gun and Bofors cannon on the ACs.)

In part because they were less capable of mass destruction, but more because men will always find reasons to shit on other men, the Whiskeys were not only Other, they were also Lesser Than. The crew of a Whiskey were seen as transporters, guys who just flew shit from point A to point B. They also flew during the day, which had the double downside of not being vampirically sexy and being tasked to missions that were, so it was said, less likely to involve schwacking some Afghans. Real gunships, AC-130U/Hs, didn’t fly during the day, as they had to be much closer to the ground than a Whiskey. This was deemed too risky, especially after Spirit 03, an AC-130H, was shot down in broad daylight in Iraq in 1991.

I knew before I left that I would be flying on Whiskeys for at least some of my deployment, and maybe even the whole thing. Despite the Whiskey’s less virile image, commanders across Afghanistan were excited to have a gunship, any gunship, overhead during the day. The fact that I had never seen an MC-130W, much less flown or even trained on one, wasn’t important. DSOs are unique in that they can get qualified on another aircraft with just one or two flights, either stateside or in a combat zone. This may sound irresponsible, and it might be, but our job doesn’t really require all that much knowledge about a given plane beyond basic safety rules, escape routes, and the location of the pisser. That said, I still had to be trained on the Whiskey, which meant I had to fly with an instructor. Fortunately, there was an instructor already deployed to Kandahar: Ed.

Ed was a little high-strung, kind of twitchy. He was on his second marriage—which didn’t appear to be going much better than the first—on deployment number whatever-the-fuck doing a job that he had been poorly trained for, a combination that helped further his progression into an ebulliently stressed-out bundle of nerves. He talked too fast, expected too much, and, as near as I could tell, hated most everything, including, but very much not limited to, his marriage, Afghanistan, Afghans, deployments, and existence. Ed was a nice enough guy, and he usually meant well. He wasn’t necessarily disliked, but he wasn’t popular, partly due to his anxiety and self-seriousness, partly by virtue of being an instructor, as it’s sort of hard to like the person grading you.

Once you get to Afghanistan, you get one day or so to adjust to the new time zone. And so my first combat mission wound up being at the tail end of March 2011. Ed felt that it was going to be a good first mission, easy, just circling overhead a forward operating base (FOB). This would give me time to adjust to the new plane and let Ed teach me the few differences that mattered. I couldn’t ask for a better way to ease into finally doing the job for real.

We went to our mission brief, and stepped to the plane a little earlier than the rest of the crew. Along the way, Ed told me some of the differences between the gunships and the Whiskeys. How I wouldn’t have to worry about naked gunner hugs, as there were no gunners, just two loadmasters. How I wouldn’t be talking to the EWO and Nav, but instead to the CSOs (sizzos), or combat systems officers, the Whiskey’s hybrid FCO/Nav/sensor operators. How I wouldn’t have to turn around to see what the CSOs were looking at, as my seat was right in front of the monitors they used. He said that the cameras were incredible, basically HD, but given my experience with the gunships’ ancient and grainy black-and-white CRTs, I figured he just meant they were HD in comparison.

The base radio station was playing Asshole by Denis Leary, a favorite of Ed’s I had never heard, so he had me listen to the whole thing. He showed me around; taught me how to set up my equipment on a Whiskey; showed me where to piss, where to shit (the Whiskeys had this on the U-boats, an actual can). All the important stuff. The flight over to Kunar took a while, so we bullshitted about this and that and lamented the Kunari accent (in most Pashto, the word yes is either balay or balay ho or just ho. In Kunar, ho becomes something like hhhhnyeah. Dialects are weird.) Mostly, we just hoped that there wouldn’t be anything all that important waiting for us.

This was wishful thinking, as Kunar is an infamous part of an infamous country. Kunar is one of the N2KL provinces—Nuristan, Nangarhar, Kunar, and Laghman in the northeastern corner of Afghanistan—the area that has been host to most of the worst battles in modern Afghanistan’s history, at least on the U.S. side; twelve of the fourteen Medals of Honor awarded to American military in Afghanistan were for actions carried out in these four provinces. Kunar might or might not be the most dangerous of the four. It’s the most recognized, though, as it’s home to the Korengal Valley, known widely as The Valley of Death.

This name makes sense from the American point of view, given how many of our soldiers have died there. But the area is full of life. Eastern Afghanistan is mountainous in a way that’s hard to explain if you haven’t seen it. It’s not dissimilar to the Rockies, in that there are seemingly countless peaks, rugged and rough. But the valleys between the mountaintops are unlike any other place I’ve seen. They’re so deep that it’s hard not to envision an ancient god astride the planet, driving his world-sized pickaxe thousands of feet into the earth, jaggedly scraping out the land in one fell swoop, replacing what was once lifeless rock with seemingly endless life. The valleys, ten thousand feet and more above the sea, are lush and vibrant, often verdant beyond belief; the idea that so much life can flourish at such heights almost requires these divine descriptions, as it’s hard to believe that nature and time alone could result in such extravagant beauty.

The beauty of this landscape was brought to incredible life by the new cameras on the Whiskeys. As the precursors to the next-generation gunships, they’d had their sensors upgraded. These cameras are connected to high-definition, full-color monitors, making watching the world through the eyes of the Whiskey like something out of the future compared to what I was used to on U-boats. So I was not a little distracted while we were in transit, trying to process everything I was seeing, along with what I was hearing over the radios, as we started getting updates en route. A TIC—troops in contact—had been called.

Hey Ed, uh, that means there’s like, actual fighting, right?

Eh, it means there’s shooting, but by the time we get there it could be over.

This was meant to reassure me. Ed was calm and collected (I quickly learned that flying Ed was a much more controlled person than on-the-ground Ed), but I was pretty wet with flop sweat. And my dampness wasn’t being helped by the increasingly intense radio calls we were hearing directing more assets in the same direction as us. Soon, we knew we were close, and the CSOs started scanning the ground with the Whiskey’s cameras. But in those mountains, even if you’re flying at twenty-five thousand feet above sea level, you aren’t all that high above the ground, so you can’t really see down into a given valley until you’re directly overhead. When we finally cleared the last crest and got directly overhead Barawala Kalay Valley, there was plenty of life. And a lot of it was moving.

I looked at Ed, hoping to gain some reassurance that the madness below was just a product of my greenness, that because this was my first real flight I was