What the Taliban Told Me by Ian Fritz

Author:Ian Fritz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2023-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

KANDAHAR, OR LISTENING TO AFGHANS

AUGUST AND SEPTEMBER OF 2011 had been a rough couple of months for the guys who were out there. At the beginning of August, a Chinook with the call sign Extortion 17 got shot down, and all thirty-eight of the people on it died. This was the deadliest day for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and it would make August 2011 the deadliest month of the war. No DSO was on the mission (that I’m aware of), but being out there when something like that happens is still draining. It’s not like we forget about death, but we do try and ignore it. It’s hard to ignore that much.

So when I got back to Kandahar, the guy I was replacing, Vince, asked if I didn’t mind immediately flying that night, as that would mean he didn’t have to. I technically had enough time to get my crew rest, and if I got myself on nights now, I might be able to stay on the U-boats for a while. Unfortunately, when I got out to the flight line, there was a SNAFU with my equipment, and I had to take myself off the flight. This was not a good look in the eyes of the gunship guys. It also meant that I had not, in fact, got myself set up on nights, and the next day it was decided that since I had all those Whiskey hours I ought to go ahead and hop back on them for the foreseeable future.

I was less than happy about this, as I wasn’t looking forward to doing more fucking recon, and convoy escorts, and glorified babysitting. Silly shit, like the time that an MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected, think big-ass armored truck) had been damaged and needed to be towed back to base. It was off in a ditch, and the other MRAPs and trucks that had been with it couldn’t pull it out, so they had to call in a wrecker (think big-ass tow truck). It took a while for the wrecker to get out there, so we flew in circles with our thumbs up our asses, shooting the shit. Fortunately, no more attacks happened, the Taliban not being all that interested in a busted truck. Eventually, the wrecker got there, did all its maneuvering, and started to pull the MRAP out of the ditch. I don’t know anything about towing, so I’m not sure exactly what happened, but the end result was that the wrecker was now, well, wrecked. It too had flipped into the ditch, alongside the MRAP.

Apparently, a wrecker can’t be towed by another normal wrecker, and you need some sort of super-wrecker to unfuck such a situation, all of which felt a little bit like the old “can God make a weight so big that he can’t lift it?” joke. It turned out that there aren’t very many of these super-wreckers, ’cause like, how often does someone wreck a wrecker, and the nearest one was even farther away than the first wrecker had been.

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