Excerpt from What the Taliban Told Me by Ian Fritz, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

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.

Excerpted from What the Taliban Told Me by Ian Fritz. Copyright © 2023 by Ian Fritz. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.