What the Taliban Told Me, page 15
“DSO?”
“I… Yes, sir. I’ll do it.”
Begrudgingly, I started working the way the JTAC wanted me to. Some of my reticence had been due to my dislike of being told what to do or how to do it, but a not small part was a fear of my inability to do what this guy was asking of me. At this point, I had hundreds of hours of translation under my belt, but it was DSO translation, not real linguist translation. Normally, I would hear what an Afghan said in Pashto, write down a near approximation of it in English, and then tell someone else, either the guy on the ground or another crewmember on the plane, my interpretation of it (said crewmember could then relay it to the appropriate interested party). This was its own skill, this ability to compress large amounts of information and turn it into small, easily understood sentences, in near real time. (I can’t do actual simultaneous translation, like you see or hear at the UN; that shit blows my mind.) But this skill meant I could leave out extraneous details, like names, which could be annoying to tease out and keep track of in any formal way (I kept track of them in my head, but by no means in any way that could readily be told to someone else). Mr. Super JTAC here didn’t just want names, he wanted word-for-word translation.
I gave it to him. Like the child I was, I figured I’d just tell him fucking everything and he’d eventually get bored, or overwhelmed, or both, and would back off. And, like the child I was, I figured wrong. He was stoked.
“Recoil, this is great stuff. I know that guy, he’s the local organizer.”
“Recoil, Gul Khan hit us last month. Keep track of him.”
“Recoil, say again, he’s going where? Okay, look over there, see if anyone else joins.”
The more I told him, the happier he got, and the more I understood why he wanted all these details. Because he had been there so long, this guy had built up a vast knowledge of all the local actors. I don’t remember him not knowing a single name I passed down. He knew where these guys lived, who they saw and talked to on a regular basis, what they did for work. He knew their friends, their family members, their daily habits.
This was a whole new world of intelligence to me. I knew, in a sort of technical way, that this was the kind of work that a lot of other linguists did, either in the air on an RJ, or on the ground at some base in Afghanistan, or back in America. They used all this seemingly useless detail to build up these complicated networks of information. I knew that the goal of this was to prevent bad guys from doing bad things. And I knew that sometimes it even worked. But I hadn’t ever been a part of this work, hadn’t seen how detailed it could get, how much information we had on people who, to me, were little more than random shitheads.
The mission went on for what felt like ten hours. It was maybe half that long in reality. We couldn’t fly for ten hours, even if we (or the JTAC) wanted to, but by the end of four or five hours I was exhausted. If this is what it felt like to be on an RJ, thank Zeus I wasn’t doing that shit. And like, what the fuck was the point? We didn’t shoot anyone; there was no way we were going to accurately get a missile into such a dense area, and even if we could, the collateral damage would be way too high (by this point; if we’d been a year or two earlier it might not have mattered). When we told the JTAC that we had to return to base, he was bummed, but he understood.
“Thanks, Recoil. That was great intel.”
In my overly persecuted mind, he was making fun of us, and mostly me, because I couldn’t see the point of what we had done. Great, you have some better knowledge of the plans of a bunch of fuckstick wannabe Talibs. La-di-fuckin’-da. You gonna schwack any of ’em? This gonna stop them from shooting at you? Is anything going to change? Great intel, my fuckin’ ass.
When I got back to base, back to our office, excited to piss and moan about my terrible fate as this guy’s personal Pashto primate, the guy I was complaining to quickly explained to me why I was wrong. He told me how I wasn’t thinking strategically, just tactically.
“How many TICs have you been to?”
“I dunno. A lot. Thirty? Forty?”
“That’s not that many. But okay, and how many of those were just out-of-nowhere attacks?”
“No idea. We just showed up to most of them.”
“All right, well, I’ll give you a hint, it’s not that many. If you’d been overhead before the shit went down, you probably would have heard something that could’ve been used to warn them. And even if you hadn’t, just knowing who’s in the area plotting shit is useful. That JTAC knew those guys, man. He has to.”
I didn’t know what to do with this advice. Maybe there was some sound reasoning behind the old requirement to have a DSO do the normal linguist gig before they found themselves in the middle of actual battles. I knew from Taylor that the gunship folk were more familiar with this sort of intel, as they flew a lot more snatch-and-grab missions (going into a place in the middle of the night and abducting/capturing/obtaining suspected bad guys), which relied on networks of contacts and information. But snatch-and-grabs are very rarely done during the day, and so I had pretty minimal experience with them.
And even though, in theory, I could have contributed to these processes with what I heard during the day, in practice it wasn’t that straightforward. Our technologic capabilities as DSOs were too limited for me to provide the complex information that a plane like a Rivet Joint could, and, this JTAC notwithstanding, no one ever asked for it. But it seemed that our missions were changing. More and more, daytime DSOing was becoming some strange, liminal state.
* * *
Halfway through my second deployment, the Whiskeys had also, finally, gotten an actual gun. A small one, all of 30mm, but it was an honest-to-god gun, none of this wannabe Predator missile bullshit. Allegedly, it was an improvement over both the 25 and the 40 on the gunships, as it was electronically mounted, instead of hydraulically, which was supposed to mean that it was so accurate that instead of putting a bullet through a basketball hoop from ten thousand feet, it could hammer a nail into the ground from eighteen thousand.
The presence of this gun had a profound effect on the crews of the Whiskeys. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t yet fire it during a mission. We could use it on the practice range outside of Kandahar, which meant we were that much closer to using it on some bad guys. Just imagine, a gunship shooting an actual gun during the day. I’m pretty sure every time the new guys flew, they had half-chubs at the thought of it.
The Whiskeys were becoming the new hotness. On my first deployment, we were usually just tasked to whichever flight didn’t conflict with our crew rest. Now, as more commanders became aware of the Whiskeys, and the presence of DSOs on the Whiskeys, we started being requested for specific missions. But there was no way we could fly on every mission that wanted us; there simply weren’t enough DSOs to go around.
As far as we could tell, the people requesting us had no idea that Pashto varies massively depending on where you are in Afghanistan. This was strange, or, really, plain ignorant, as anyone with a cursory knowledge of the language should know that at baseline it has two main dialects that pronounce entire letters differently. Hell, some of the people who speak it don’t even call it Pashto. They call it Pakhto. The second letter in the word پښتو, that little collection of three nubs with the one dot above it and one below it, ښ, can be pronounced as either a sh sound (though you have to curl your tongue to the top of your mouth to get the sh just right) or a kh sound (same tongue movement). There’s another letter that on one side of the country is pronounced as a g and on the other side as a zh. The “o” in Pashto isn’t always an o, sometimes it’s a u, as in Pashtu/Pakhtu.
And those are just the two major divisions, Western and Eastern Pashto/Pakhto/Pashtu/Pakhtu. Realistically there are dozens of dialects, some of which aren’t understood all that well even by native Pashto speakers. So, to expect us to be able to fly over bumfuck Khost and have any clue as to what the bad guys were saying was to have no idea of how the language worked. Which, I guess, we shouldn’t have been surprised by. Unrealistic expectations being the norm in Afghanistan.
Flying in places where we couldn’t understand anything that was being said was both a serious waste of us as a resource and, more importantly, at least to us, boring as fuck. Like anything that you do every day, even flying eventually loses its excitement. After enough missions, all you’re doing is sitting in a tiny chair for six or seven hours waiting for something to happen. The fact that you’re fifteen or twenty thousand feet in the air traveling at two hundred plus miles an hour falls by the wayside. Those hours are short if you’re busy listening to guys planning attacks or actually fighting. They’re a little longer if all you’re doing is listening to them bullshit. But those six or seven hours feel like an eternity if what you’re supposed to be listening to is utterly incomprehensible. What’s a DSO to do?
There’s the tried-and-true option of doing your own bullshitting with the crew. But sometimes they’re busy, or you aren’t feeling social. In which case you can bring a book, either paper or electronic. But then it might look like you aren’t taking your work seriously, and that’s no good. Fortunately, some enterprising individual had devised a way for us to play old-school Nintendo games. Tecmo Bowl, Super Mario Bros., Mega Man, all the classics. I’m not sure how they managed this, and I never cared to know, as it wasn’t exactly kosher, but most every DSO knew about it, and it was tacitly approved, or at least accepted. This was probably the safest way to fill the time, as it allowed you to look like you were working, and if you suddenly really did need to work, it was easy to switch back.
Or we could just fly on actually interesting missions.
During my second deployment, I was given the dubious position of NCOIC, or noncommissioned officer in charge, despite the fact that I was in fact not an NCO, or really IC of anything. I was, however, the only DSO in Kandahar that month who already had one deployment under his belt, making me de facto the only one who knew how anything worked. This position meant very, very little, but it did give me the opportunity to bring up the issue of language variation to the Whiskeys’ mission commander, Major Stokes. I told him that (1) we didn’t want to look like so much dead weight to the crews, and (2) it was super-fucking-boring to go on these missions where we couldn’t understand much beyond yes and no. He agreed to let me and the other DSOs see the mission requests each day and, based on geography and known dialects, choose which ones made the most sense for us to go on.
A side effect of this that I hadn’t counted on was that now he felt that I should be sent on any mission that went up north, as I had explained to him that only one other guy could speak Dari and Pashto like I did, and he happened to be busy up in Bagram. I had also explained that the bad guys don’t speak Dari, so it was a bit of a moot point, but he felt that it was better safe than sorry, and that from then on out, assuming I had the hours, I’d go on the Santa Clause-y missions to the fucking North Pole like the good little worker elf I was.
Somehow I had gone from trying to get on the more interesting, shorter missions to basically being singled out for the long-ass boring babysitting shit (it’s a lengthy flight from Kandahar to anywhere in the north; Afghanistan isn’t that big, but C-130s only fly at around half the speed of commercial jets). The other DSOs thanked me profusely for pointing this out to Major Stokes, by which I mean they pointed and laughed every time I got assigned to yet another mission in the hinterlands.
I got lucky with a few short trips. There was one glorious three-hour “mission” that wound up being 2.5 hours of transit time and only thirty minutes on station, as it didn’t matter what elevation we were at, there was too much cloud cover to see the ground. When the CSO asked me if I could hear anything of interest, after thirty minutes of having heard nothing but static peppered with the occasional check-in, I could honestly report no, and back to base we went.
The Whiskey crews didn’t mind the long missions. They’d been brought up as transporters, and for years most of them had just moved stuff from Point A to Point B. A seven- or eight-hour flight was nothing to them. Initially, I had a love-hate relationship with these drawn-out flights. On the one hand, they were interminable, and exhausting, and so fucking boring. On the other hand, they got me closer to my hours limit, which meant I would get to sit for a few days. The more long flights I went on, the closer I would get to 125, and maybe 330. The higher my hours climbed, the more I got to sit, aka take a day off.
I had failed to consider that I wasn’t going to be deployed for three months, though. On my first deployment, the 330 limit was a real fear, and I regularly had to sit for a day or two. This deployment was only scheduled for two months. At best, I had to worry about 125. Oops. So up I went, in plane and country.
A lot of these missions were in support of the large-scale operation to “win hearts and minds.” After ten years and who knows how many dead, it had been determined by those higher up that simply bombing the Taliban into submission wasn’t working; not enough bombs, too many Talibs, and the only thing they would submit to was God. This was a good determination.
It was also determined that in lieu of all the bombing, we should send teams of Marines to go live in villages among the natives, er, Afghans. My understanding of the logic behind this was that by having some of “us” live with “them,” and assuming that we were on good behavior, the natives, er, Afghans, would see that what they had been told about us by the Taliban and other disgruntled Afghans wasn’t true. It would also allow us to engage in more sustained improvement projects in a given area. Instead of just dropping in, building a school, and leaving, we could build said school, put in a well, repave a road, etc. At the same time, we would be able to educate them about the true nature of the Taliban. The hope was that by doing this in enough villages over a long enough period of time we would create a grassroots rebellion against the Taliban, or at least an acceptance of America.
This was not a good determination.
There’s a fine line, so fine as to be occasionally invisible, between living in a village and occupying it. When the Marines (or whoever, but it was generally Marines) went into a place, they often simply informed the villagers that they would be taking over a certain compound within the village. Yes, they paid the people who lived there, and paid them handsomely, but they were still forcibly evicting them. And once they were there, even if the Marines were on their best behavior, their very presence meant that there would be increased fighting, as now they were a constant, stationary target for the Taliban, who could dart in, do some damage, and leave, without having to engage in a major battle with a superior force.
This is exactly what happened to some team up in the northwest corner of the country, and that team had then requested that we come in and do reconnaissance for them. When we got overhead, they explained to us how the day before, a number of presumed Taliban had taken a bunch of potshots at them before disappearing into the countryside. The JTAC was convinced that whoever these cowardly fuckers were, official Taliban or no, they lived and worked in the village and its surrounding areas. Our job was to look for anyone engaged in anything that could be construed as “nefarious activity.” I don’t know how this came to be the go-to term for bad guys doing shifty and shady shit. I suspect someone wanted to sound smart, so they went and found a thesaurus and voilà, nefarious.
The word reconnaissance has this strange sexiness associated with it. Maybe it’s because of the Marines and their Force Recon unit, or maybe it’s because of movies and TV where so much of reconnaissance is associated with spies. Maybe it’s because it’s French. Regardless, the idea of collecting information on the enemies’ plans and then using that illicitly obtained information to thwart said plans is exciting. In real life, recon, at least the recon I did, is just the collection bit. Someone else usually got to do the actually interesting part of acting on the collected information. This was still somewhat more interesting than many of our other missions, given the recency of the attack, so we got to work, excited at the prospect of helping this ground team.
I know that the JTAC understood the difference between us and a U-boat, or at least I think he did. It could have been his first deployment, and he could have never been on an operation at night. But with the amount of training he’d been through, and the number of stories he must have heard, he had to have known that there’s a difference between the meaning of actions during the day and the meaning of those same actions at night. But for now, for him, anyone could be the bastards who had shot at him and his team.
So we watched everyone. Men, women, kids. There was a hilarious two minutes where a couple of kids were playing, throwing rocks at each other pretty lackadaisically, until one of them just beaned the other, and started laughing when the second kid fell down. The second kid got up, dusted himself off, and walked over to the first kid. He was clearly mad, and we figured there would be a good ole fistfight, right until the second kid kicked the first kid straight in the nuts and shoved him to the ground before walking off like the total badass he was. The comedy was a good omen; this was turning out to be a good mission.
After the kids, though, we mostly watched the guys in the village as they walked from compound to compound. We looked to see if they were carrying guns under their clothes (it isn’t illegal to own a gun in Afghanistan, but it’s frowned upon by the people who are afraid that those guns are going to be used on them, and it’s often an extrajudicial death sentence to be seen with one in their vicinity). We looked for any patterns of movement, whether it seemed like a number of people were slowly headed in one direction, or toward the team’s side of town. And I listened. The best I could hope for was hearing someone brag about getting some shots off at the Americans the day before. In lieu of that, I would take discussion of weapons, or plans for further attacks, or plans for meetings. These might not be enough for us to shoot, but it would help confirm the JTAC’s suspicion, and if I heard enough call signs, maybe he would be able to figure out who those guys were (assuming they were locals and assuming he had good intel).
