View from a gunship

When people ask me what I did in Afghanistan, I tell them that I hung out in planes and listened to the Taliban. My job was to provide “threat warning” to allied forces, and so I spent most of my time trying to discern the Taliban’s plans. Before I started, I was cautioned that I would hear terrible things, and I most certainly did. But when you listen to people for hundreds of hours—even people who are trying to kill your friends—you hear ordinary things as well.

On rare occasions, they could even make me laugh. One winter in northern Afghanistan, where the average elevation is somewhere above 7,000 feet and the average temperature is somewhere below freezing, the following discussion took place:

“Go place the IED down there, at the bend; they won’t see it.”

“It can wait ’til morning.”

“No, it can’t. They [the Americans] could come early, and we need it down there to kill as many as we can.”

“I think I’ll wait.”

“No, you won’t! Go place it.”

“Do I have to?”

“Yes! Go do it!”

“I don’t want to.”

“Brother, why not? We must jihad!”

“Brother … It’s too cold to jihad.”

Yes, this joke came in the middle of plans to kill the men I was supposed to protect, but it wasn’t any less absurd for it. And he wasn’t wrong. Even in our planes with our fleeces and hand warmers, it really was too damn cold for war. In 2011, about 20 people in the world were trained to do the job I did. Technically, only two people had the exact training I had. We had been formally trained in Dari and Pashto, the two main languages spoken in Afghanistan, and then assigned to receive specialized training to become linguists aboard Air Force Special Operations Command aircraft.

AFSOC had about a dozen types of aircraft, but I flew solely on gunships. These aircraft differ in their specifics, but they are all cargo planes that have been outfitted with various levels of weaponry that range in destructive capability. Some could damage a car at most; others could destroy a building. In Afghanistan, we used these weapons against people, and my job was to help decide which people. This is the non-euphemistic definition of providing threat warning.It didn’t matter that they were unarmored men, with 30-year-old guns, fighting against gunships, fighter jets, helicopters, and a far-better-equipped ground team.

It also didn’t matter that 100 of them died that day. Through all that noise, the sounds of bombs and bullets exploding behind them, their fellow fighters being killed, the Taliban kept their spirits high, kept encouraging one another, kept insisting that not only were they winning, but that they’d get us again—even better—next time. That was my first mission in Afghanistan.