OF MY THREE AIR MEDALS, two of them deal with flights from my first deployment. The one that chronologically covers the first half of the deployment says that my “superb airmanship and courage were instrumental to the successful execution of twenty combat missions totaling 191.5 flight hours supporting Operation ENDURING FREEDOM. Constantly operating under the threat of man portable air defense systems and anti-aircraft artillery, Airman Fritz provided real time imminent threat warning, situational awareness and non-traditional intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to coalition Special Operations Forces executing critical close air support, armed reconnaissance, infiltration and exfiltration missions. Additionally, Airman Fritz passed twelve imminent threat warnings during missions that included short notice launches in support of troops in contact. Additionally, Airman Fritz was able to warn ground forces of possible mine and ambush locations, ensuring the safe return of ground Special Operations Forces. Airman Fritz and his crew’s efforts also contributed to the elimination of twenty insurgents and detention of twelve enemy fighters including two high value targets.”
The other medal, which chronologically covers the second half of that deployment, says much of the same boilerplate shit about threat warning and types of missions. But it also says that over the course of “131 flight hours” I “passed eight imminent threat warnings” and that I “was able to provide warning to ground forces of a machine gun ambush and insurgents tracking coalition force movements.” Apparently, I further “contributed to the detention of seven enemy fighters including two high value targets.”
Together, these air medals state that I flew 322.5 hours on that deployment. The actual number was a little lower, because of the way the dates are set (one of the medals includes a flight or two from my second deployment); I really only flew 316.8 hours in the three months that I was in Kandahar. The first month was the busiest, and I narrowly avoided hitting the 125-hour limit. None of the missions in that month came close to matching the extreme intensity of my first. I don’t know for sure why the Taliban had gone through the trouble of such a massive attack in Barawala Kalay, other than this was just what they did in that area. In the rest of the country, they weren’t usually too keen on walking into villages full of our waiting bullets. We were at our highest occupation level, desperately trying to prove our power. This meant fewer serious engagements; the Taliban were up against 130,000 members of the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force), 100,000 of whom were the heavily invested, and even more heavily armed, Americans. While the Taliban had proved in Marjah that they weren’t just going to sit back and take our shit, that didn’t mean they had to be dumb about their fighting.
More often than not, the firefights that happened were small, and they were sudden. The Taliban relied on surprise attacks and attacks of opportunity. The air medals weren’t exaggerating; I really did fly multiple missions on short notice launches for troops in contact, or TICs. We were regularly pulled off the mission we had been assigned that day to hightail it over to where some other guys were getting shot at. (Memorably, in response to being told that we would no longer be supporting an Australian team on their admittedly boring mission, one of our CSOs, meaning to make a joke that only his fellow CSO could see, sent the message “Fuck you, Kangaroos, we’re out” over the wrong chat channel, such that some colonel flying an A-10 saw this message during a gun run, which he was less than happy about. Said CSO just so happened to answer the phone when this very angry colonel called their unit, resulting in a minutes-long chewing out that I guess did what it was supposed to, insofar as said CSO always double-checked where his messages were going after that.)
My Mission happened somewhere in the latter half of that deployment. Of those 316.8 hours, maybe a hundred or so came after it. By the end of those hours, my anger had receded, my excitement about going home taking precedent over any preoccupation with the Taliban. There was even hope that we would get back in time for the Fourth of July, and what better way to celebrate my joyous return. What’s more, the Fourth was on a Monday, so if we got back in time, we’d get a free four days of leave tacked on to the two weeks of vacation we automatically got post-deployment.
Getting to and coming back from Afghanistan is often more stressful than being in Afghanistan. You take a military plane from Afghanistan over to “an unspecified base in southwest Asia,” aka Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, and then you wait for a commercial aircraft to take you back home, with a stop somewhere in Europe along the way. Al Udeid, also known as The Deid, is a massive base with thousands of people and over one hundred different aircraft stationed at it. It counts as a deployed location, but the most dangerous thing in The Deid is probably the access to booze and Ambien. In Afghanistan, there might be mortars, but you can’t drink, at least not if you’re in the American military. Like all rules, there are ways around this for some people, but as far as I know, none of us ever had access to alcohol while deployed. This was a problem, given how much all of us liked having access to alcohol.
There’s a saying in the flying community: “There are two types of aircrew. Those who have puked, and those who will.” The more missions you fly, the more likely you’ll encounter shitty weather and the constant jostling and bumping and swaying that will result in your vestibular system admitting its weakness and crying uncle as whatever you most recently ate leaves your body in spectacular, half-digested fashion. It is thus recommended that one only eat things that taste the same coming up as they did going down on their first few flights. Bananas, candied ginger, plain bread, these foods are your friend.
I’m not positive that this is as good a truism as those valorous vomiting victims want it to be, as I never puked on any aircraft, even when we were doing evasive maneuvers for an hour, and I know plenty of people with hundreds and thousands of hours of flight time who also never spewed. I have long since decided that this saying was simply a replacement for the less publicly friendly and therefore more honest truism of flying: “There are two types of aircrew. Those who drink too much, and those who drink even more.” Because with the exception of people who were prohibited by religion, and so didn’t drink at all, every flyer I knew drank too much.
It’s built into the community. When you fly your final training flight, you’re expected to bring beer for everyone to drink in celebration of your (hopeful) qualification. Sometime after that, in front of the whole squadron, you have to drink a grog, which is a concoction of various (mostly) liquids that are meant to be revolting and difficult to drink: mustard, vinegar, fruit juices, milk, pickle juice, sauerkraut juice, mayonnaise—the list is ever expansive and well nigh all-inclusive, the only limit being formed solids, so that the person chugging the grog doesn’t choke. It was said that qualifying either underage or as a Mormon (the two main categories of non-drinkers) made getting grogged much worse, because then you didn’t get the “benefit” of the five or six shots of liquor that allegedly covered up some of the more terrible flavor combinations you experienced during the thirty seconds it took to chug a pint of this revolting concoction (the shots did not, in fact, make the grog taste better). The only responsible part of all of this was that it was agreed on ahead of time that the grogee not be allowed to drive home.
The gunship squadron at Hurby has a full, working bar. It leads directly to the flight line. The MC-130s do too. And the CV-22s. And the U-28s. Every flying squadron I know of has a bar. These bars are ostensibly only for after flights, as there are rules about drinking and flying, the so-called bottle-to-throttle rule, wherein all of the aircrew, but most definitely pilots, as they’re in charge of the throttle, must stop drinking twelve hours before they fly. But alcohol undergoes zero order elimination by the liver, which means that there is no way to speed up its metabolism; it can only process one drink per hour. You may say to yourself, Okay, that means they’d have to have more than twelve drinks in the time prior to whenever they stopped consuming alcohol in order for this to matter. That isn’t as hard as you might think. On my twenty-first birthday, I had twenty-one drinks in three hours, or so I’m told, as I don’t remember much past number ten (there are a few blurry moments of saying incredibly dumb things around number fourteen or fifteen). I know for a fact that my friend Mike had his twenty-one shots in 2.5 hours, as I’m the one who took him home and cleaned the vomit out of his chest hair. If you’re committed, it isn’t all that hard to beat the math.
I’m not saying that I ever flew with a drunk pilot, or an actively drunk anyone. But I am saying that I was told many, many times that 100 percent O2, the stuff we had access to on the plane in the event of a decompression or flying at altitude, was the best cure for a hangover known to man.
When you got to The Deid, after however many months of not having any alcohol in Afghanistan, the first place you’d go is the BRA (Base Recreational Area; I guess they couldn’t call it the Base Area for Recreation [BAR], ’cause then it would be formally admitted that recreation is in fact synonymous with drinking). The powers that be had set up a system that was supposed to prevent real drunkenness, wherein any one individual was limited to three drinks per day. Every time you bought a drink it got logged on your ID, so if you tried to buy a fourth, the bartender would politely remind you that you had reached your limit. And while it was technically illegal to share your drinks, people developed agreements to forgo a day of drinking and give away their legally purchased three beverages so that their friend could get a proper load on, with the knowledge that said friend would return the favor on a different day.
Alternatively, if you didn’t have someone who was willing to help you out, or you didn’t feel like having to repay the favor, you could just take an Ambien, stay up a couple of hours till you get a little loopy, then go chug your three Leffes (Leffe Blond has a 6.6 percent ABV, making it much more effective than, say, a Bud Light) and get decently fucked up. Hypothetically.
The Deid isn’t all booze and pseudo-barbiturates though. There’s a movie theater, a swimming pool, the fabled Dairy Queen—myriad ways to remind yourself of ’Murica in all of its glory. There are giant transient tents, filled with a hundred people on bunkbeds trying to sleep through the 110-degree days, so that they can sweat through only one pair of clothing moving about during the 90-degree nights. The Deid is nice, in its way, but it’s also a little purgatoryesque, maybe even Kafkaesque, in that there are large amounts of bureaucracy that somehow attempt to make the “deployment” there seem more dangerous, or of greater importance. When moving about at night, you must, for instance, wear your standard issue neon-yellow reflective belt on top of your camouflage uniform, in case of, well, something. Traffic, I think. So when you get woken up by a full bladder for the third time in a day because you drank fifteen bottles of water last night to try and stay hydrated in spite of the booze and the humidity, and must make your way to the nearest latrine, which is at least a hundred yards away, you must either wear your full flight suit and boots, which like, no way, too fucking hot, or your Air Force–issued physical training gear. Never mind that if you were deployed to Afghanistan you wouldn’t have packed PT gear, given that the gyms in Afghanistan allow you to wear normal civilian clothes, so you’re required to go to The Deid’s Base Exchange (think military TJ Maxx) and hope that they have a size somewhere south of XXXL. And when they don’t, you buy it anyway and walk around swimming in too big clothing for however long you’re stuck in this silly, silly place.
At some point, you get told that your flight is coming in and that you’ll be leaving soon, so you pack up all your shit and congregate at some benches for a few hours, bullshitting with all the different crews from Kandahar, only to then be told that, in fact, said flight is not coming and that you can return to the transient tents. This will happen again the following day. And the day after that. You lose track of how many times this happens, whether it did in fact happen twice in one day, or did time just get all fuzzy courtesy of the beers you downed in anticipation of the flight? But then, finally, the flight really does come, and you make it over to Leipzig, Germany, and someone buys a bottle of absinthe in the duty-free, and as you drink your fourth Dixie cup of it, you note that said Dixie cup is sort of dissolving the longer the absinthe sits in it, and this is an interesting phenomenon given that there is not a small amount of this absinthe inside of you, but eh, the stomach is stronger than a chemically treated Dixie cup, surely, and besides, if you don’t drink, the gunners will make fun of you, and isn’t this a good time to tell that story about that one chick who said that if you put a dick in front of her mouth she just had to suck it, except I guess you shouldn’t have said her name ’cause now this gunship major is pretty mad and is cutting you off from the absinthe, and even through this anise-flavored addlement it’s pretty clear that she’s pissed, but like, I’m just repeating what Laura said herself, so what’s the problem, does she think I’m being sexist, ’cause I’m not; I’d tell this story if a dude had said it too—hell, it might be even funnier then—but oh, okay, she’s really serious, fuck, I should go sit over there and be quiet, and I guess I can try and apologize later, and hopefully it will come off as genuine, I mean it is genuine, but there’s no way for her to know that; she doesn’t know me, and I could just be trying to make sure she doesn’t tell anyone in my unit, but really I didn’t mean to, like, speak ill of anyone or anything like that, I’m a big fan of anyone who’s willing to put a dick in their mouth; it seems pretty unpleasant, so if anything I was celebrating Laura, but maybe trying to explain that won’t work as well as I think it will, but like, I can’t go find the major on the plane ’cause then everyone would see and that would be awkward for both of us; I know she has to worry about being seen as some sort of shrill ballbuster ruining our fun, but I don’t think that, ’cause like, obviously I’m not sexist, but I guess what are the odds I ever fly with her, probably not that high, and worst case, if I do I’ll just have to be on my best behavior, which should be a lot easier given that I will hopefully not have just had a lot of absinthe and be trying to impress the guys around me, but then I won’t be able to give out DSO candy on that flight, ’cause then she’d for sure know I’m sexist, but maybe I can find pictures of some hot dudes for her, show her that I’m an equal opportunity objectifier, it really isn’t a gendered thing, it just so happens that most of the crews are straight men; that isn’t on me, I’m just trying to bring some joy into the world, and gods why did I drink all that absinthe, I don’t even like the taste of licorice—or is it licquorice?—whatever, it’s fucking gross and I’d much rather have had some scotch, why didn’t that gunner buy something better—oh, right, he said something about it being “real” absinthe, some shit about hallucinating, but like, would they really just be able to sell that in a normal shop, seems kind of dicey, and how much do you even have to drink before you start tripping, am I gonna be seeing shit on the flight, fuck I hope not, maybe I’ll just be able to pass out instead.
And then you pass out, and wake up in Bangor, Maine, for a bit, and then, finally, you’re on the last leg and you make your way back to Florida, and now the true celebrating can begin. Between the Fourth and CTO (commander’s time off, akin to the Army’s more well-known rest and recuperation, or R&R), I don’t remember very much of the first half of July 2011. There was a lunch at the Dancin’ Iguana, which I got to wear my new white linen pants to. There were a lot of congratulations, people from my squadron excited that I had finally deployed, or even more excited that I had done some shooting on my deployment. But mostly, there was drinking. We did a lot of this drinking at a bar in Destin called the Red Door Saloon. The Red Door was a beloved institution, as they had good bartenders, a decent selection of beer, and no walls, just open access to the water, which meant you could smoke and drink to your heart’s delight (or, I guess, dismay, but who asked the heart anyway?). It was crowded, especially in the summer, and more often than not you wound up stuck against one of the side railings separating the bar from the docks, but this was okay, because it was only a couple steps or one drunken lunge back up to the bar to secure yourself another beverage. One of the nights around the Fourth, I think, or maybe the next weekend, not that it matters, really, all of that time being even more interchangeable than the blurred together days back in Kandahar, but one of those nights, I was pressed up against a railing with James and his fiancée, shooting the shit, generally engaged in revelry and merrymaking, relishing my newfound belongingness. An awkward pause came up at the end of some story, when we were all still laughing, but in that half-hearted way one laughs when one isn’t sure of where to go from there, or what to say next. Instead of playing along, though, James just stopped laughing and looked at me for what felt like an uncomfortably long time.
I wasn’t sure what to do with this moment. James was not a person who engaged in ridiculous macho shit like stare-downs, and beyond normal joke-making I’d never known him to really fuck with anyone. But then his face softened, and he stopped looking at me, and more looked to me, before he said, “You look different.”
“I lost some weight. Y’know, no booze, lots of gym time.”
“No, that’s not it.”
“I probably need a haircut, sort of put it off for a while.”
“No, you look different. You look like more of a man.”
He turned to his fiancée and said, “Doesn’t he?” To which she replied with a smile, a nod, and a soft, kind “Yeah, he does.”
This was a moment I had been craving for years. I was twenty-two, fully grown, but so often treated like a child. Women would be interested in talking to me, until they asked my age, and then would almost universally let the conversation trail off, no longer interested. Other aircrew would talk about me like I knew nothing of use beyond Pashto, like I had no life experience. My buddy Dex had once texted me some random praise while I was at DLI for Pashto, and given that it was a Friday I was fairly drunk and nearly texted him back the opening lyrics to The National song “Baby We’ll Be Fine”:
All night I lay on my pillow and pray
For my boss to stop me in the hallway
Lay my head on his shoulder and say
“Son, I’ve been hearing good things”
For James, who was almost ten years older than me—a true elder statesman to my mind—who had deployed who knows how many times, who had lived in Europe, who was overwhelmingly cool—for him to say that I looked like a man was exactly the validation I so desperately craved. It was early in the night, though, and because I hadn’t yet had enough beer to build up any vulnerability and genuineness, I responded with “It’s the dead look behind the eyes, right?”
This was, mostly, a joke. I didn’t know whether I did in fact have a dead look to my eyes, and I didn’t yet feel like I should have such a look. It just seemed like a good joke to make. But I have this hypothesis that all jokes have some foundation in fact, or at least honesty, even when the joke-teller doesn’t know or isn’t willing to admit it. Particularly for men, these jokes are a repercussion-free way of expressing at least some of their emotions, but with the safety net of comedy underneath them. In those moments when you feel seen, or heard, or otherwise stripped bare of whatever defenses you thought were protecting you, when it’s too painful or embarrassing to confess, but you still want to acknowledge, however dismissively, this recognition of your self, a joke is the only thing that will do.
But James fucked up my attempt to (un)acknowledge my pain by saying, “Yeah. You’ve got the thousand-yard stare now.”
I had started to laugh when he said yeah, assuming that he was going to do the polite thing, or at least the thing everyone else did whenever trauma was brought up, and respond to my joke with another, but when he got to the thousand-yard stare bit, whatever hope I had of moving past this moment of reality faded along with my smile. James was a Buddhist, and not in the way that someone who takes an Eastern philosophy class in college and learns about the Eight-Fold Path and nirvana is a Buddhist, but in the way that someone gives up meat and fifteen years later gets irate when a houseguest cooks chicken in one of his pans, that pan now being permanently sullied such that he’ll have to replace it. A true autodidact, James had found Buddhism and fully embraced its teachings. He didn’t evangelize, comment on anyone else’s beliefs, or get exasperated when someone asked him about his beliefs for the fourth time, said person having not bothered to listen to his explanations the first three.
He also did a job that involved killing a large number of people. His work was different than mine, and to my knowledge he’d never killed people the way I had, in that the planes he flew on didn’t shoot the missiles/bullets that did the killing, they just helped direct the ordnance, but to me, he’d been directly involved in or responsible for far more death than I had. But this didn’t seem to bother him. He told war stories the way most everyone did, used the same irreverent and dehumanizing language that made it so we weren’t killing people, merely enemies, and was otherwise a happy guy who had no qualms with what he did for a living.
Or did he? He didn’t say you’ve got that thousand-yard stare now. He said you’ve got the thousand-yard stare. This was not likely an accident; James had once explained to me the difference in pronunciation of merry, marry, and Mary, and was as nerdy about his language skills as I was about mine. Words weren’t accidents for him. For him to say the thousand-yard stare meant that he wasn’t telling me that he was recognizing something that he had seen in so many others. He was telling me that he had looked into the same distance.
I spent the next couple of weeks relaxing, building a bed I’d bought online and had shipped to my house while deployed, playing video games, seeing friends, and drinking. At some point my unit told me that I was due for language training in Dari, which seemed wrong, but then it really had been almost two years since I graduated, and Pashto didn’t count toward maintaining my Dari as far as the Air Force was concerned. More specifically, I had to attend a Significant Language Training Event, or SLTE. For this, I would be headed to Offutt Air Force Base, in Omaha, Nebraska. Being told I was going to Omaha in two weeks didn’t elicit quite the same feelings I’d had the year before when I was told I was going back to Monterey, but I was excited that I’d get to see a number of my friends from language school who were stationed up there.
I knew from Facebook and texting, and even running into a couple guys out in Kandahar, that my former classmates’ lives had become very different from mine. Turns out Dari was just as useless on the aircraft they’d all been assigned to, the Rivet Joint, as it was in AFSOC. The difference was that no one was going to teach them Pashto. They’d all done one deployment on the RJ out at The Deid for a few months, if only so that the Air Force could say they’d finished training them as linguists. But after that, all but one of them got tasked into doing the same job James did: TSO (tactical systems operator, pronounced “tizzo”). Once upon a time, like back when James first started doing it, TSOing was a sexy job. It’s highly classified, to the point that even describing what they do could be seen as sharing state secrets. Fortunately, the Air Force has to publish information about most of their career fields. In the official, unclassified document that describes the career of a TSO, it states that they are responsible for the following duties:
Process intelligence information in an airborne environment. Operate assigned intelligence systems and mission equipment. Use operator workstations, graphical displays, recording devices and related equipment. Field and operate sophisticated computerized radio receiver suites on various strategic and tactical ISR platforms. Conduct environmental surveys of radio frequency spectrum. Annotate electromagnetic events, measures parameters and compares results to previously catalogued signals to determine likely emitter source. Operate direction finding/precision geolocation equipment. Analyze structure and content of machine-based communications. Digitally archive key events for follow-on processing. Extract essential elements of information for reportable significance. Disseminate threat warning information to affected entities via established channels. Maintain logs to document mission results. Prepare in-flight and post-mission reports.
If your eyes glazed over reading this, I understand. I put it all there, though, because it comes from an unclassified, government-sanctioned publication, and no one can accuse me of sharing state secrets if all I’m doing is copying and pasting the words from an unclassified government document.
There’s a brilliance to the language used in this document, in that it genuinely outlines exactly what a TSO does, but these details only make sense if you’re already relatively familiar with the career, and/or you know what to look for in all that jargon. The three sentences in the middle are the important bit, and I find them easier to understand if you separate them:
So, a TSO uses a database of information about things that happen in the electromagnetic spectrum, or signals, to figure out what sort of device, or source, is responsible for sending those signals. They can pinpoint where that signal came from by operating their precision geolocation equipment. They can also analyze structure and content—which sounds a lot like a legalese way of saying “read”—of machine-based communications, which could be something like your Internet of Things refrigerator sending a message to your Alexa, or a computer receiving a message from a router, or a cell phone receiving a text message from another cell phone. Who’s to say? Machine-based communications encompasses any instance of a machine communicating with another machine, and in the modern age there’s a lot of that.
With that breakdown, it makes some sense that this would be considered a cool, or sexy, or interesting job. My understanding is that when it first got started, being selected to do it was a badge of honor, the deployments were to interesting places, and the work was, or at least it felt, important. You may note that this is the same story that was once told about becoming a DSO. Funny, that.
But by the time my friends were doing it, TSOs were a dime a dozen, they most definitely went to places that were not at all interesting, and almost by virtue of how many of them were doing it, the work either wasn’t, or at least didn’t feel, important at all. For many people, some of my friends included, this was still an upgrade from being a linguist, as doing the TSO mission doesn’t require the use of language skills. If you didn’t like listening to insert-foreign-language-here in the first place, then you definitely didn’t like listening to it in the back of an RJ, so becoming a TSO was a great alternative to being stuck flying twelve- or sixteen-hour missions in the RJ (TSO missions were much shorter).
I knew what my friends did, all the classified details included, as Hurby had many, many TSOs. My friends did not know what I did, as Offutt didn’t have many former DSOs, and the few they did have (1) likely never deployed as a DSO (why would they be back at Offutt if they were actually useful?) and (2) likely had many sticks up their asses that prevented them from describing what DSOs do, under some nonsense guise of “classification.” I was stickless, so we excitedly traded stories.
I found that it was easier to talk about missions and battles and firefights when I was back in America than it was when I was in Afghanistan. Retelling war stories, which can often result in reliving them, is a lot more fun, or at least a lot less stressful, when you’re not currently in a war zone. If I tell you a war story at home, there’s no way for it to become true, as stories are only real in the place where they happened. Anywhere else, they’re just memories. This had the strange effect of helping me better understand why the Taliban might not want to spend all of their time talking about battles, because unlike me, when they went home, it would be to the next village over, where the stories were alive, not six thousand miles away, where they faded into phantoms.
My friends mostly talked about all the working out they got to do, which, like, same, but that wasn’t the key takeaway from my deployment. I couldn’t sort whether they were more detached than I was, or just less invested.
This didn’t matter, though; it was just great seeing my friends again, even if we were, perhaps, a little different now. But after my first day of class I was just as excited that I would get to spend an entire month back in a Dari classroom. For the Air Force, an SLTE is significant because it requires 150 hours of language immersion, which conveniently works out to twenty 7.5-hour days. For me, this SLTE was significant because it reminded me that Dari was my first academic love. I hadn’t realized how much I had missed my first (well, second, but first non-English) language in all of its nonviolent, organized, logical beauty. And to my pleasant surprise, I still knew it! Pashto and the Taliban hadn’t wiped it out of my head; they’d just distracted me from it.
I could still listen to and read the news, get most questions about what I’d heard or read correct, and try to charm my professor with some bullshit about the technicalities and semantics of whatever I got wrong. I still had to be told to slow down, to be patient, and to not talk over others. In a wonderful inversion of my second stint at DLI, I also now had to be told to stop using Pashto words in place of Dari ones. I’d come full circle, and it was magnificent.
And at night I could use my sweet per diem to explore Omaha, a surprisingly great food destination. I could use that money to justify going to the Dundee Dell, aka the bar possessing the world’s second largest private scotch collection outside of Scotland, to take part in their biannual mega scotch tasting, during which I would get to taste ten scotches, none of which were younger than me, culminating in a surprisingly large pour of 1964 Black Bowmore that normally went for $200 a dram, making the entire event, really, a steal. And I could go to the Max, Omaha’s premier gay bar. I could even volunteer to DD for my friends some of those nights, seeing as how I had just spent the prior month drinking, and I had to take a physical fitness test when I got back to Hurby before I deployed again. Which meant I could dance like an idiot, albeit a sober idiot, secure in the knowledge that this was not a place to get laid, it was simply a place to have fun, except when I stopped caring about being seen as attractive or coordinated it turned out I became more attractive and coordinated. Such that women approached me, demanding to know my sexuality before dragging me off to dance, or in at least one case to have sex in some darkened corner of the club, or in another case to wind up the only male allowed on a bachelorette party bus driving through downtown Omaha, hanging on to a stripper pole with one hand and drinking tequila straight from a bottle with the other, while getting grinded (ground?) on by the woman who had picked me up.
Omaha, despite its reputation of being in Nebraska, was turning out to be a fun time. But then I went out with Ben and his wife one night, and we ate too much and drank too much. Darcy was a Farsi linguist, and she and I spent the first half of the evening talking in Persian, the most memorable part of which was a discussion of bulimia, and at some point we just kept saying استفراغ, because in English it became somewhat onomatopoeic, estafraagh sounding, at least to us, very much like the sound someone would make while vomiting. Ben was wondering why we kept saying such a specific word, suspicious of our nonsense, so we just changed the subject—how we went from that to threesomes I’ll never remember—and he let it go. (Having spent an entire year in language school with me, Ben knew how much I loved using my Dari, how happy and goofy I was when I got to play with words and sounds in another language.)
Someone had the great idea that we should head across the river to Council Bluffs, Omaha’s twin city in Iowa, where Ben had grown up and still had a number of friends, and where you could get a beer for $1.50, because Iowa. Things get a bit hazy from there, but I remember winding up at his friend’s house, sitting on the porch, smoking a clove, wondering where I was, and just feeling… not nothing, but like nothing? That night is the first I can (sort of) remember wishing I didn’t exist, if only because then I wouldn’t have to feel anything at all.
But in the morning I was fine; it didn’t matter why I’d felt that, I’d had so much to drink that anything I’d been thinking was total nonsense, and everything was fine. In another month I’d be back in Kandahar, and there was no booze there, so really, I’d be fine.
It wasn’t until I got back to Hurby, again, that something changed in my thoughts about going back to Kandahar. It was subtle, this shift, in that I didn’t not want to go, as that would have been a ridiculous thought to have, for so very many reasons. But I wasn’t excited. I figured some of this was the novelty wearing off. I wasn’t as stressed about not fucking up on the way out there, now that I’d already figured out The Deid and all its nonsense. And I (technically) had enough hours to be an instructor by now, so the flying itself would be old hat. I wasn’t so worried about the Dari course messing up my Pashto; if anything, getting coined again made me feel like I still had the whole language thing down (I had done so well in the class that I was deemed the best student in the schoolhouse that month, which wasn’t quite DLI commandant–level praise, but it felt good). And yet, something had me unsettled.
I couldn’t articulate it then, but now I wonder how much of this was a result of spending a month focused on and thinking in a language that hadn’t been pushed into a constant state of adversariness. We listened to all kinds of news programs about war and fighting and the Taliban, but it was all very objective, and somehow detached. Dari couldn’t kill anyone.
There was also, by this point, a pattern in our squadron, such that almost every DSO before me who had gone to Afghanistan had eventually gone a little, or a lot, crazy. Some of the madness seemed to come from the length of their deployments. All those guys had done five months at Bagram for their first deployment, and my understanding was that somewhere around the fifteen-week mark everything got a little weird. The combination of the lack of a sleep schedule, not knowing what day it was, and just the drudgery and physical toll of flying added up. There was also the issue of hours, in that during the last month of the deployment someone might only fly once or twice a week, because they would otherwise exceed their hours limit. At first, this can be nice, in that you’re not flying as much, but then you’re sitting in Afghanistan, being useless, doing nothing. This is not a good feeling for someone who spent multiple years of their life training to do a job. Then there was the issue of the number of deployments. After their first they only got a few months home before they had to go back out, which, of course, was a violation of the Air Force mandated 1:1 dwell time (the ratio of time between deployments and being home), but, of course, this was (illegally) ignored because of our “mission critical” status.
I say every DSO who had gone to Afghanistan, not every Pashto DSO, because the 25th Intelligence Squadron, our unit, had deployed multiple linguists who had not gone to language school for Pashto, who could not pass the DLPT in Pashto, who would be the first to tell you that they did not speak Pashto. The 25th felt otherwise. They felt that by putting people through a turbo course a few hours a day with one instructor for a few months, they had adequately trained them in the language (Taylor and I got seven hours a day with many instructors for six months at DLI). As far as the 25th was concerned, these Farsis and Daris were now Pashtos. Of the ones who had actually been trained in Pashto at DLI, maybe half of them could pass the DLPT, which is to say, could meet the Air Force and Department of Defense’s definition of proficiency in the language. This is no comment on those men’s intelligence. The DLPT pass rate for Pashto at the time hovered around 30 or 40 percent; it’s a difficult language that is formally taught in very few places outside of Afghanistan (and maybe Pakistan). DLI likely has, or at least had, the largest repository of Pashto learning material for non-natives in the entire world. And it wasn’t a large repository. The instructors may have been native speakers, but that doesn’t mean they were formally trained in education, language or otherwise. Hell, one of my Pashto instructors was a twenty-four-year-old freshly arrived from Kandahar whose English was such that she couldn’t explain grammar to us without using Pashto. But her husband was related to someone in the department, and she needed out of Afghanistan, so she got the job.
It made sense that the guys who didn’t speak the language would go nuts. They were forced to try and do a thing that they were incapable of doing through no fault of their own (they were all, every single one of them, brilliant humans). When they couldn’t perform, people died. Sometimes a lot of people. A lot of Americans. It didn’t matter that if they hadn’t been there those people would likely have died anyway. That’s not how it works. They were there, and they couldn’t save them.
What was more worrisome was that the guys who were good at Pashto, really good, better than me by far, were also losing it. More slowly than the turbos, and they were still deploying, but they weren’t healthy. There was a running joke that Conor was now going through alcohol withdrawal the first few days of his deployments, except maybe it wasn’t a joke, because he drank as much as he could every night that he was home, and even with our limited dwell time, that gave him enough nights to regain his dependence. Kasady was the most unsettling. He might have been the only “real” DSO among us, having spent time in Omaha flying those long-ass RJ missions, listening to Pashto for hundreds of hours, but with the ability to stop, pause, rewind, re-listen, ask other linguists if what he thought he was hearing was correct, and overall hone his skills. It was well known that he was the second-best Pashto linguist in the airborne community (he had no qualms with this ranking, and readily admitted how incomprehensibly intelligent the first-best was). He had requested orders to Hurby, had worked hard to become a DSO. But he too was disappearing into his drinks.
None of them proselytized, tried to convince me that I too would lose it. As bitter and unhappy as they were, they weren’t so far gone that they tried to bring anyone else down with them. They were honest, unflinchingly so, about what they had seen, the things they had done, or worse, been unable to do. But they never exaggerated, or inflated, or tried to make things sound worse. They didn’t have to.
Before my deployment, when they would tell me these things, I was also told how incredible being a DSO would be, how important, how badass, by our instructors and by older DSOs. What I didn’t understand then was how little these people knew of what they were talking about. The only ones who stood any chance of ever having been on an aircraft that had killed anyone were the Arabs, and even then, Iraq wasn’t Afghanistan, at least not from the air. The rest of them—the fucking Serbs, Koreans, Chinese, Spanish, Russians—the fucking Farsis who decided not to go through the turbo course despite years of talking about how incredible it is to be a DSO, these were the people who had been preaching the gospel of the DSO as deity.
What I was coming to see was that it really was just like a religion for them, in that they relied on faith and imagination. None of them had seen God, but they knew he was real. None of them had killed anyone, but they could envision just how good it would feel every time. I didn’t blame them for this. Most people want to believe in something, or someone. Belief makes the world that much smaller, that much easier to comprehend. Belief allows for the abstraction of killing, the continued confidence in the idea of it, rather than the persistent precarity that comes with the actual event of it; it was very easy to celebrate something you had never done. And it was far, far easier to revel in killing if you had no blood on your hands, and no dead men in your dreams. Before I deployed, I didn’t have the ability to tell the difference between what the disciples felt was true and what the apostates knew was true. But if Mark Twain (or whoever) was right and reading the Bible is the best cure for Christianity, then maybe actually killing someone is the best cure for wanting to.
But none of this mattered because the next flight east would be here in a few weeks and I had to get current again: fly a training flight with an instructor because I hadn’t flown since I got back from Afghanistan, do all the paperwork and trainings to deploy, find someone who would drive my truck once or twice while I was gone. The one upside of going back out so fast was that most of the paperwork was still valid. Little victories and all. And it would be better this time, not being the new guy, being more comfortable with the planes and the equipment. Maybe I’d split my flights between the U-boats and the Whiskeys. Be nice to be back on a gunship. To be home.