https://www.spreaker.com/user/arroe/ian-fritz-releases-the-book-what-the-tal
When Ian Fritz joined the Air Force at eighteen, he did so out of necessity. He was not accepted into college due to poor academic performance. He had slept through classes too often while working long hours at a Chinese restaurant to help pay the bills for his family living in a trailer in Lake City, Florida. But the Air Force recognized his potential and sent him to the elite Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, to learn Dari and Pashto, the main languages of Afghanistan. In 2011, Fritz was an airborne cryptologist linguist and one of the few people in the world trained to do this work on low-flying combat helicopters. It monitors communications on the ground and determines in real time which Afghans are Taliban and which are innocent civilians. This listening is essential to supporting Special Forces units on the ground, but there is no training to counter the emotional complexity that develops when you listen to people's most intimate conversations. Over the course of two tours, Fritz listened to the Taliban for hundreds of hours, night and day throughout the country, in times of peace and in the midst of fighting. What he hears teaches him things about the Afghan people – the Taliban and others – the war and himself. Fritz's mastery is his greatest asset to the army, yet it becomes the greatest liability to his own commitment to the cause. Both proud of his service and desperate to help destroy the voices he hears, What the Taliban Told Me is a brilliant and intimate coming-of-age memoir and review of our twenty years of war in Afghanistan .
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