Category Archives: military

by | 23 April 2025 · 3:59 am

Early Origins of the Vietnam War

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 15-17:

FEW TOPICS IN CONTEMPORARY HISTORY have been studied and analyzed and debated more than the Vietnam War. The long and bloody struggle, which killed in excess of three million Vietnamese and wreaked destruction on huge portions of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, has inspired a vast outpouring of books, articles, television documentaries, and Hollywood movies, as well as scholarly conferences and college courses. Nor is there any reason to believe the torrent of words will slow anytime soon, given the war’s immense human and material toll and given its deep—and persisting—resonance in American politics and culture. Yet remarkably, we still do not have a full-fledged international account of how the whole saga began, a book that takes us from the end of World War I, when the future of the European colonial empires still seemed secure, through World War II and then the Franco–Viet Minh War and its dramatic climax, to the fateful American decision to build up and defend South Vietnam. Embers of War is an attempt at such a history. It is the story of one Western power’s demise in Indochina and the arrival of another, of a revolutionary army’s stunning victory in 1954 in the face of immense challenges, and of the failure of that victory to bring lasting peace to Vietnam. To put it a different way, it is the story of how [U.S. soldiers] Dale Buis and Chester Ovnand came to be stationed and meet their fates in a far-off land that many of their compatriots barely knew existed.

But it’s not merely as a prelude to America’s Vietnam debacle that the earlier period merits our attention. Straddling as it did the twentieth century’s midpoint, the French Indochina War sat at the intersection of the grand political forces that drove world affairs during the century. Thus Indochina’s experience between 1945 and 1954 is intimately bound up with the transformative effects of the Second World War and the outbreak and escalation of the Cold War, and in particular with the emergence of the United States as the predominant power in Asian and world affairs. And thus the struggle is also part of the story of European colonialism and its encounter with anticolonial nationalists—who drew their inspiration in part from European and American ideas and promises. In this way, the Franco–Viet Minh War was simultaneously an East-West and North-South conflict, pitting European imperialism in its autumn phase against the two main competitors that gained momentum by midcentury—Communist-inspired revolutionary nationalism and U.S.-backed liberal internationalism. If similar processes played out across much of the globe after 1945, Vietnam deserves special study because it was one of the first places where this destructive dynamic could be seen. It was also where the dynamic remained in place, decade after bloody decade.

My goal in this book is to help a new generation of readers relive this extraordinary story: a twentieth-century epic featuring life-and-death decisions made under profound pressure, a vast mobilization of men and resources, and a remarkable cast of larger-than-life characters ranging from Ho Chi Minh to Charles de Gaulle to Dean Acheson to Zhou Enlai, from Bao Dai to Anthony Eden to Edward Lansdale to Ngo Dinh Diem, as well as half a dozen U.S. presidents. Throughout, the focus is on the political and diplomatic dimensions of the struggle, but I also devote considerable space to the military campaigns that, I maintain, were crucial to the outcome. Laos and Cambodia enter the narrative at various points, but I give pride of place to developments in Vietnam, far more populous and politically important than her Indochinese neighbors.

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Filed under Cambodia, France, Laos, migration, military, nationalism, U.S., Vietnam, war

by | 19 April 2025 · 9:27 am

Overseas Chinese and Qing Reforms

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 298-301:

After the Opium Wars, the Qing had struggled to figure out how to relate to the West, how to develop domestic industry, how to enact administrative reforms. But even as foreign businesses and culture were implanted in China, especially in the treaty ports and in industrializing areas, modernizing efforts were slowed by internal divisions within the Qing and by the weight of vested bureaucratic interests, not to mention the inertia of China’s long dynastic tradition. By the late nineteenth century, the Qing teetered on the brink of fiscal insolvency, the result of the high cost of the military suppression of the Taiping and other domestic rebellions, which had ravaged southern and central China (1850–64), and of its foreign indemnities.

Chinese emigrants living abroad in the Anglo-American world were not marginal actors in the history of the late Qing. Those who went to the gold rushes were among the first Chinese to experience the West first hand. Their participation in the gold rushes in North America and Australasia in the late nineteenth century and in the revival of the gold industry in South Africa in the early twentieth were integral to a new era of long-distance migrations and global trade that transformed international finance and political relations. Chinese gold miners contributed to the global financial hegemony of Great Britain, and then the United States, based on the power of the gold. Their contribution was doubly ironic. At one level, the gold rushes both materially and symbolically consolidated the shift to gold-based trade and investment in the global economy, which disadvantaged China. At another level, the presence of Chinese on the goldfields and in other industries gave rise to racial conflict and discrimination, violence, and finally, legal policies of exclusion from immigration and citizenship, which policies also disadvantaged China. Chinese exclusion did not directly cause either the West’s rise or China’s decline. But it was part of a constellation of policies that privileged Anglo-American settler nationalism, and that contributed to China’s oppression in myriad ways. The exclusion laws, moreover, loom large in nineteenth-century Chinese history because they were, along with the unequal treaties, the most potent symbols of China’s humiliation on the global stage.

But if Chinese emigrants were despised and marginalized by Euro-American societies, they were also conduits of knowledge and resources to their hometowns and regions. They built dense networks—migration, commercial, and political networks—across the Pacific that contributed to an emergent Chinese nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century. The anti-American boycott exemplified this national consciousness, which connected diasporic communities with the urban middle classes in China and linked the injustice of the exclusion laws to China’s weakness as a nation.

The Qing, while fiscally enfeebled and burdened by a sclerotic bureaucracy, did try to assert its independence in the face of foreign encroachment and aggression. China refused to adopt the gold-exchange standard; it mattered that China was not a colony, like India or the Philippines, where imperialism arbitrarily imposed monetary policies that inscribed dependency. Qing diplomats intervened to protect Chinese merchants and laborers living and working abroad from discrimination and abuse, although not always successfully. European and American encroachments were bad enough; the Japanese were, in turn, arguably even more rapacious, seizing Taiwan, going to war to take Korea, long a Chinese tributary state, and building up its forces in Manchuria. The stakes became even greater with the Boxer Rebellion of 1900–1, a peasant uprising in North China against foreign missionaries that split the Qing court, led the Western powers and Japan to send troops into Beijing, and resulted in another raft of indemnities.

In 1905 the Empress Dowager Cixi initiated a series of reforms, including abolishing the examination system, building up the military, and streamlining the bureaucracy. But they were slow to be implemented (in part because the Qing could not pay for them), and popular opposition to the Qing only grew. By decade’s end, the idea of reforming the monarchy had given way to popular demands to overthrow it. Armed uprisings throughout China in the summer and fall of 1911, many associated with Sun Yatsen’s revolutionary party, finally toppled the Qing and with it, four thousand years of dynastic rule. The new Republic of China faced myriad challenges, from how to form a modern government on the ash heap of the Qing to how to end fighting among warlords and corruption at high levels. The Republican era saw the establishment of a constitution, a modern university system, investments in domestic industry, the end of foot binding, and a cultural renaissance. But the needs of the peasantry, the vast majority of the population, remained largely unaddressed. Instability, both political and economic, was endemic, especially with the burden of foreign indemnity payments continuing well into the 1920s. Just as the Qing had run out of time, so did the republic, when Japan seized Manchuria in 1931 and then invaded China proper in 1937.

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by | 15 March 2025 · 8:17 am

Inspecting Ust Kara Mines, 1885

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 166-169:

Greek mining engineers advised Peter the Great in the late seventeenth century that mineral wealth lay underground in the regions east of Lake Baikal. Hard labor convicts were soon digging down to the silver veins in the vicinity of Nerchinsk. Gold mining began later near the Kara River, a name derived from a Tatar word meaning “black.” The Nerchinsk Mining Region, as it became known, eventually stretched over thousands of square miles from the eastern shore of Lake Baikal to the Chinese border.

In late October 1885 Kennan and Frost rode their horses through the valley of the Kara River to the prison complex at Ust Kara, or Kara mouth, the first of the prisons, convict settlements, and open placer gold mines stretching twenty miles up the valley. In addition to Ust Kara, there were the Lower Prison, the Political Prison, the Lower Diggings, Middle Kara and Upper Kara convict settlements, and the Upper Prison. Their total exile population was around twenty-five hundred, of whom two-thirds were hard-labor convicts and the rest women and children who had accompanied their husbands and fathers to the mines. Many of the political convicts in Eastern Siberia were held at Kara.

…

Kennan and Frost went directly to the prison commandant’s residence where they were greeted by Maj. Potuloff, who was in charge of Kara’s common-law convict prisons. Potuloff, a tall, cordial man in his fifties with a bushy beard and soldierly bearing, explained that he had been alerted by telegram to expect Kennan and Frost, but he never thought that the two would make it through from Stretinsk at this time of the year. He laughed when Kennan inquired where they could find a place to stay for the night. Other than the accommodations for criminals, he explained, the only place to stay was in his home, which they were welcome to do. Kennan and Frost had no alternative than to accept his offer “and in minutes [we] were comfortably quartered in a large, well-furnished house, where our eyes were gladdened by the sight of such unfamiliar luxuries as long mirrors, big soft rugs, easy-chairs, and a piano.”

They found themselves effectively under twenty-four-hour surveillance in Maj. Potuloff’s home. He never left them alone, in fact, he seemed to have relinquished his official duties during Kennan and Frost’s stay in order to keep an eye on them. Once, when Kennan moved in the direction of his overcoat, Maj. Potuloff asked, “Where are you going?”

“Out for exercise.”

“Wait a minute and I will go with you.” Kennan’s bedroom, which was on the ground floor across the front hall from the sitting room, had no door but only a thin curtain. The sentries posted night and day outside the house could even look in his bedroom through its curtainless windows.

Under Maj. Potuloff’s watchful eye, Kennan inspected prisons that were the now-familiar “perfect hell[s] of misery,” from the impossible overcrowding to the filth and vermin to the lack of any bedding for the inmates. “Civilized human beings put straw even into the kennels of their dogs.” But no matter how many Siberian prisons Kennan inspected, he always marveled at the unendurable smell. His descriptions of prison odors steadily grew more vivid and literary the farther east he went. Of the air in the Ust Kara prison, which Maj. Potuloff readily acknowledged was repulsive, Kennan later wrote, “I can ask you to imagine cellar air, every atom of which has been half a dozen times through human lungs and is heavy with carbonic acid; to imagine that air still further vitiated by foul, pungent, slightly ammoniacal exhalations from long unwashed human bodies; to imagine that it has a suggestion of damp, decaying wood and more than a suggestion of human excrement—and still you will have no adequate idea of it.”

During Kennan’s prison inspections, convicts complained to Maj. Potuloff and even approached Kennan on the assumption that “I must be an inspector sent to Kara to investigate the prison management.” Several convicts pleaded with Maj. Potuloff that they had been imprisoned for months but still did not know what they were charged with. Another insisted that he had already finished his sentence. One man explained that he had gotten drunk on the exile march and exchanged names with another convict and ended up at Kara serving a hard labor sentence when, had he kept his name, he only would have been sent to a settlement as a forced colonist.

Bartering names for food, drink, or clothing was a common practice among the exiled convicts and not easily detected since the convoy and prison guards could hardly familiarize themselves with the faces of hundreds of convicts. The exchange, which the artels ruthlessly enforced, invariably improved one barterer’s position to the distinct disadvantage of some hapless exile who had spent his money or gambled away his clothing, and thereby gotten himself, as Kennan explained, “into such a condition that for five or ten rubles and a bottle of vodka he will sell his very soul.” Maj. Potuloff ignored the convicts and their complaints.

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by | 14 March 2025 · 4:46 am

Early Siberian Exile System

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 121-124:

The Siberian exile system was not planned to be loathsome and vile. For much of its existence, little planning went into it. The system was the product of imperial ambitions, bureaucratic incompetence, corruption, and inadequate funding; Siberia’s vast size and harsh terrain and climate; and the extraordinary Russian capacity to inflict and endure suffering. Centuries of grotesque penal evolution had spawned disease-ridden prisons, exile parties driven like cattle, virtual enslavement, and lunacies like the punishment of the Bell of Uglich [by Boris Godunov]. Other countries have exiled their criminals, but none on the scale of the Russian exile system. Between the 1780s and 1860s, the British transported about one hundred and sixty thousand convicts to Australia. In the last half of the nineteenth century, the French overseas penal population was between five and six thousand. Russia stands out because between 1801 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, the tsarist regime exiled more than a million of its subjects to far-flung destinations within its own vast borders, creating what has been called “an enormous prison without a roof.”

As Siberia’s vast natural resources became apparent, the regime began employing the penal code as a tool for supplying Siberia with a labor force because too few Russians would go voluntarily. The offenses punishable by Siberian exile grew to include not just common-law crimes but political offenses, religious dissent, army desertion, and vagrancy. In 1753, the death penalty was formally abolished, and instead of being hanged, capital offenders underwent a public mutilation followed by “eternal penal labour” in Siberia. The death penalty would reclaim a place in the Russian judicial system in the nineteenth century, most notably in cases involving assassination plots against tsars.

…

For centuries convicts began marching to Siberia from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other cities in European Russia, often starting their march on the Vladimirka road. At the first post station, which was called Gorenki, from the word gore, meaning grief, family members who were not accompanying a convict to Siberia could get a last glimpse of their loved one. In his iconic Vladimirka, the Russian artist Isaac Levitan painted the view ahead of a marching exile: a dirt road stretching to the horizon under a vast sky. By the time of Kennan’s investigation, trains and then barges transported convicts into Siberia but many of them still had to march more than halfway across a continent to their final destinations in parties of three hundred or more guarded by Russian soldiers on foot and by mounted Cossacks.

The sight of an exile party stunned travelers in Siberia. In January 1828, a young woman making her way through Siberia in subzero temperatures to join her exiled fiancé heard a strange noise from her carriage. “It was the noise of the fetters … an entire party of people was in chains—some were even chained to a metal pole. These unfortunates were a terrible sight. To protect their faces from the cold they had covered them with some dirty rags into which they had cut holes for their eyes.” On an overcast morning in 1856, an English traveler observed, beneath a double row of birch trees on the Great Siberian Post Road, “a long line of drab-clad figures marching in the same direction as ourselves. We instinctively know what it is but can still hardly believe that a story so sad, so strange, so distant, is being realised before our eyes.” Kennan never carried out his plan to march with an exile party, possibly because he was denied permission but equally likely because he had observed the experience of the exile parties to be so dreadful.

No one seemed to question or care whether, after a forced march of thousands of miles, cold-blooded killers and an assortment of thieves, incorrigibles, misfits, malcontents, and regime enemies could become productive workers in the Siberian mines and factories. In fact many of the convicts who reached Eastern Siberia, according to one report from local authorities, “arrived exhausted, prematurely enfeebled, having contracted incurable diseases, having forgotten their trades, and having grown quite unaccustomed to labour.” Local Siberian officials regularly commandeered the healthiest convicts from the marching parties to meet their own needs, which further aggravated the shortage of able workers.

So many exiled convicts died on Siberian roads that the peasants, who had to dispose of the bodies, protested to the government in St. Petersburg, which only sent back orders to the local authorities to pay for the burials. Some convicts took years to reach their destinations but their time on the journey did not count as part of their sentence. One convict was on the road for eight years, but his eight-year sentence did not start until he finally entered a prison factory in Irkutsk. The authorities did not want the convicts to run out their sentences by feigning illness or otherwise finding ways to delay their arrivals at the prisons, factories, and mines.

Notwithstanding the human wastage, enough productive convicts reached their destinations to justify the exile system to the St. Petersburg and Siberian bureaucracies. As Kennan wrote, “One is surprised not that so many die but that so many get through alive.” Factories, salt works, distilleries, farms, and mines in Siberia continued to demand more workers and the regime continued to send them by, for example, allowing landowners and monasteries to turn over their troublesome serfs to the state for exile. Siberia became the jewel in the Romanov crown and played a role in the rise of the Russian Empire comparable to that of India in the ascension of the British Empire.

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by | 9 March 2025 · 4:51 am

U.S. Military Telegraph Corps, 1860s

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 35-37:

Kennan never attended college because the Rebellion, as it was called in Norwalk [Ohio], broke out in 1861 and “turned all my thoughts, hopes and ambitions into a new channel.”

He was elated by the martial electricity in the air. “Patriotic by inheritance and training, and naturally adventurous, I was completely carried away by a desire to take part in the momentous struggle.” But he was too young to enlist without his father’s permission, which John Kennan was unwilling to give. He could only watch as friends joined the 55th Ohio Regiment, which mustered out in Norwalk in the early days of the war. In a festive atmosphere the ladies of Norwalk offered coffee, pies, and sweet cakes to the young soldiers of the 55th in their light blue trousers, dark blue jackets, and forage caps. Trains left Norwalk taking boys, who not long ago had been playing two-old-cat, to be cut down on battlefields from Second Bull Run to the Carolinas campaign.

Still anxious to prove his courage, George Kennan sought the equally dangerous position as a field operator in the newly formed United States Military Telegraph Corps. Despite the word “Military,” the Corps was a civilian unit whose superintendent reported to the secretary of war. By the end of the war, the Corps had built fifteen thousand miles of telegraph lines and transmitted over six million telegraph messages, which gave the Union a significant communications advantage over the Confederacy with its more limited telegraphic resources. President Lincoln was among the first to grasp the capacity of the telegraph to give him command and control from Washington over his forces in the field, a power no political leader had previously possessed without being on the battlefield.

Throughout the war Lincoln haunted the War Department’s telegraph office. He personally sent nearly one thousand telegrams to his commanders, some asking about troop dispositions in ongoing battles. “What became of our forces which held the bridge till twenty minutes ago, as you say?” Lincoln telegraphed during one battle. The incoming telegrams filled the telegraph office with blood and gore. “The wounded & killed is immense,” a field operator telegraphed to the War Department, where Lincoln paced anxiously during the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862. “The battle rages furiously. Can hardly hear my instrument.”

From the War Department a vast network of telegraph wires stretched to every theatre of the war and onto battlefields. Before a battle, field operators weighed down with telegraphs, relays, and sounders; mules loaded with rolls of telegraph wire; and covered wagons crammed with nitric acid batteries, moved into position. They set up their instruments on hard-tack boxes beneath tent flys, and in just hours men had strung five or six miles of wire along poles, fence posts and tree branches, and sometimes over rivers to connect brigades or divisions with the commanding generals. A field operator once held the ends of a severed wire together in his bare hands and read a transmission from his tongue, which felt the shocks of the incoming dots and dashes.

Field operators were shot, blown up by artillery shells, and, when captured by Confederates, at risk of being executed as spies since they wore no military uniforms. Kennan could not entirely convince himself that he had the courage to be a field operator, but his doubts only made him more anxious to put his nerve to a supreme test. “Had I not camped out many a night—or at least many a morning—in the Big Woods?” he asked himself. “And was I not quite as familiar with firearms as most of the volunteers who were then going to the front?” He wrote Anson Stager, the superintendent of the Military Telegraph Corps, whom Kennan had met before the war when Stager was a senior Western Union official, asking to join as a field operator. Stager was too busy to respond and instead Kennan received a letter from another official advising him to defer joining the Corps and “wait and see what would happen.”

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by | 4 March 2025 · 4:58 am

PTSD vs. Moral Injury

From What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Kindle pp. 222-224:

ACCORDING TO MY OFFICIAL Air Force records, I do not have, and in fact have never had, PTSD. Formally receiving this diagnosis would have required an official admission that what I did and saw and heard was in fact traumatic and that it wasn’t normal, which would only have served to justify my reasons for not wanting to go back. You can see why the powers that be wouldn’t want to admit this. And while this diagnosis wasn’t true when the Air Force made it, it might be now. Time doesn’t heal all wounds—some simply can’t be treated—but eventually your mind can bring the edges together, and while the scar is ugly and imprecise, the gaping hole has, finally, closed. These days I can listen to Pashto without breaking out in a cold sweat, get on a plane without thinking about the guns that ought to be attached to it, and talk about war without wanting to curl up in a ball and die. This, then, is understood as meaning that my PTSD has been cured (never mind that curing something that was never supposed to have existed creates some mild metaphysical stickiness).

In the time since I wasn’t diagnosed, the military has embraced a different terminology to attempt to describe the turmoil that I and so many others experienced: moral injury. The idea of moral injury has been around since at least the 1980s, though the explicit term was coined by Jonathan Shay in the nineties, when his work with Vietnam veterans led to his writing Achilles in Vietnam. Today, Syracuse University’s Moral Injury Project not only defines moral injury but attempts to explain why and when it happens:

Moral injury is the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one’s own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct.

This is a good definition; it is thorough while simultaneously casting a wide enough net to embrace the myriad reasons any warfighter could suffer such an injury. Being a DSO allowed for perpetration, witnessing, and failure. Certainly, my moral code was violated. But I don’t think moral injury fully encompasses just what happened. It’s not that I, along with almost every other Pashto DSO, wasn’t morally injured. We were. But it’s not entirely accurate to say that there was “damage done to [my] conscience or moral compass.” It’s more like, along with the many men I killed, my consciousness was blown the fuck up.

With the exception of spies mythical and real, most warfighters throughout history have not been tasked with killing people they know. Even in our modern wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the majority of killing is done by complete strangers. There is, I assume, a feeling of knowing associated with killing someone in close combat, even though you may have no knowledge of anything that defines that person as a unique human. But this is different from understanding what makes that person a person, from killing someone you know. With modernity came the ability to have this knowledge.

The most famous of these warriors are drone operators. These men and women face issues that I can’t begin to understand, as the cognitive dissonance that they experience is so strange as to be something out of science fiction. If anything, it seems that their injury is arguably worsened by the moral contradiction of being so far away from the “threat.”

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by | 3 March 2025 · 4:51 am

Problems of Knowing Thine Enemy

From What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Kindle pp. 230-234:

No single individual is held responsible for the people that our planes kill. It’s a crew effort. There is no ammunition without a loadmaster to balance the plane; a FCO [Fire Control Officer] can’t fire that ammunition without gunners loading the weapons; the gunners won’t ready the weapons till the sensor operators find a bad guy; the sensor operators couldn’t find that bad guy without pilots flying the plane; the pilots couldn’t have flown the plane to the location where the sensors found that bad guy without a navigator guiding them across the country; the navigator couldn’t have safely gotten across that country without an EWO [Electronic Warfare Officer] making sure no one hit the plane with a rocket; the EWO couldn’t have used his equipment without a flight engineer making sure everything was in working order.

I didn’t mention the role of DSOs because DSOs, while nice to have around, are not remotely necessary for a C-130 to carry out its mission. And so, if I heard something that proved to be the key piece of information that resulted in us shooting, a piece of information, that, if lacking, would have prevented us from shooting, then didn’t I kill someone on my own? Conversely, if I didn’t hear anything that was related to why we shot, then did I kill anyone at all?

The problem with this argument is that according to my official records I have in fact killed 123 people. The actual wording is “123 insurgents EKIA” (EKIA = enemy killed in action, so not quite people, but definitely killed). These records don’t say that I was part of a crew that killed these people, or that I supported other people who did the killing, just that I killed those 123 humans. I can’t know, and will never know, if all of these kills belong to me. I do know, and will always know, that I belong to all of them.

…

These are the things I wish I hadn’t heard.

If I hadn’t heard those things, infinity would have remained, well, infinite. I would have been able to tell myself that the Taliban were not men, were not even human, that they were in fact Enemies, whose only purpose was to be Killed in Action. If I hadn’t heard those things, I wouldn’t have loved the men I was listening to. If I hadn’t loved them, killing them would have been easy. If killing them had been easy, my consciousness would have remained intact.

To say that I loved the Taliban is surely anathema to most anyone who reads this. It doesn’t feel good, or right, for me to say it. But I checked, and of the many definitions that exist for the word love, one of them is the following: “strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties.” I most certainly had personal ties to the men I was listening to; they told me shit they wouldn’t tell their best (non-Talib) friends, their wives, their fathers. And at some point, not because they were Talibs, in fact in spite of that, because they were human, I came to have the strong affection for them that I firmly believe it is impossible not to develop for virtually any other person if you can get past your own bullshit and just accept that they’re people too.

Let me be clear about something here: I in no way support the Taliban, their stated goals, their practices, or really anything about them. Nor do I support the individual men who comprise the greater Taliban. Their movement and many of their beliefs are an affront to modernity in all of its complicated, messy, but ultimately better than the shit that actively and gleefully removes myriad human rights from everyone who isn’t a God-fearing man, splendor. They are not the good guys.

None of these things detract from the fact that they’re still human. They’re still people. I have no desire for you to identify with them or wish for their lives to be spared. What I do ask is that you understand that I did identify with them. I had to. My job required it. All that talking with my teachers in language school, so I could figure out how they think? That’s what made me a good linguist. The translation we did isn’t something that can be done by a computer or a robot, it isn’t the simple transformation of the sounds of one language into another. You have to understand the intent, the tone, the playfulness, the fear, the anger, the confusion, all of the nuances that attach themselves to spoken words and drastically change their meanings.

It was impossible for me to do this without internalizing the speakers’ logic (it’s possible for others, but I don’t understand that process). It was also impossible, despite all this knowing and feeling, for me to wish for their lives to have been spared. To have spared their lives would have been to guarantee that many others would have been taken.

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by | 2 March 2025 · 5:36 am

Pashto Regionalects

From What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Kindle pp. 161-162:

The Whiskeys [MC-130W] 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 [Direct Support Officers] 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?

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by | 1 March 2025 · 10:11 am

USAF DSO Job Description

From What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Kindle pp. 2-4:

A DSO [Direct Support Operator] (pronounced “dizzo”) is just an airborne cryptologic linguist by another name. Historically, there weren’t very many DSOs, mostly because the Air Force didn’t want or need that many, and partly because DSOs like feeling special, so they artificially limited the number of spots available to other non-DSO linguists. And because there were so few DSOs, it was that much easier to craft an image as badass “operators,” the best of the best, the only people who could do what they do. This was plausible; there are those elite groups within the military who have been selected for their talent, grit, and exceptionalism. And, like those elite groups, if you pushed the DSOs on it, they would be able to credibly say that because their job was highly classified (true) they couldn’t tell you specifically what they did (untrue).

A DSO does what all airborne linguists do. They “translate intelligence communications or data received or intercepted while in the air,” aka listen to what the bad guys (usually) are saying in another language and turn it into English (that quote is from the USAF’s Quincy, Massachusetts, recruiter’s Facebook page). Most airborne linguists do this aboard a jumbo jet, the RC-135 Rivet Joint, or RJ, flying thirty thousand or so feet above the ground at four or five hundred miles an hour, in an orbit that encompasses a few hundred miles. This is strategic work; the communications they receive or interpret rarely have an immediate impact on something actively happening on the ground. But it is important, at least according to the military, as “a lot of the things we do might end up on the desk of the president” (ibid., and a little misleading, though technically not a lie if you note the usage of “might”).

The primary difference between these linguists and DSOs is one of location. DSOs don’t fly on RC-135s, or any similar massive aircraft. DSOs fly exclusively on the planes that are utilized by Air Force Special Operations Command, or AFSOC. For the most part, these are C-130s that have been modified for various purposes. Some of these, like the AC-130s, or gunships, have been changed so much from their original cargo-carrying mission as to be unrecognizable; the only cargo a gunship carries is bullets. Others, like the MC-130s, still can and do carry cargo, but they’ve been made to be better at doing it. [Later MC-130Ws, nicknamed Whiskeys, were modified to carry weapons.] AFSOC has other aircraft that DSOs are trained to fly on, but in my time in Afghanistan, we almost exclusively flew on C-130s.

Timing is the other thing that makes a DSO’s work different from that of other linguists. AFSOC doesn’t do strategic work all that often, and so neither do DSOs. In Afghanistan, our job was to “provide real-time threat warning” to the planes we were on and to the people on the ground that these planes were supporting. How we did this work is unimportant, and honestly quite boring.

I don’t know if they still think of themselves as badasses, but when I was a DSO, that was the ethos of the community. We (not all, but most of us) felt that we were the best of the best: better than other linguists, cooler than other linguists, more important than other linguists. Once upon a time, some of this may have been true. Long before I did it, in order to be a DSO you had to be very good at the language(s) you spoke, and you had to be handpicked by other DSOs, interviewed, and tested; it was a whole process. And there were those DSOs who flew scary, complex missions in dangerous places. But by 2010 the Air Force just randomly assigned new linguists to become DSOs, and the thing most likely to take down the aircraft a DSO was in was a drone (seriously, they have a bad habit of losing connection and orbiting at preselected altitudes that are, let’s say, inconvenient for other, human-containing aircraft).

The U.S. Air Force students in the Romanian-language class ahead of me at the Defense Language Institute in 1969-1970 were assigned to an airbase in Turkey, where they listened constantly to Romanian-language radio broadcasts and recorded any that contained reference to military assets or movements, which were then translated. The two other Army students, one in the class ahead of me and one in my class, were both assigned to Military Intelligence units. The one in my class went to Germany and did some undercover work. The only other person in my 3-person Romanian class was an FBI agent from Chicago who probably didn’t get much more use out of his new language skills than I did as a company clerk in Ft. Gordon, Georgia.

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by | 27 February 2025 · 5:09 am

Learning Pashto Through Dari

From What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Kindle pp. 64-69:

S. and V. didn’t speak Dari, and it turned out neither did anyone else. The course wasn’t a turbo course, it was just abbreviated, a way to teach some army sergeants the fundamentals of Pashto before sending them back to their posts to keep learning the rest of the language. For Taylor and me, this meant that after the first two months we were leaps and bounds beyond four of our classmates. But there was a fifth who was a brilliant linguist. Ty too had thought this would be a turbo class, and even though it wasn’t, he was still expected to pass the Pashto DLPT by the end of the course. (The Defense Language Proficiency Test is the standardized exam used by the Department of Defense to assess an individual’s competency in a language. At the time, roughly 50 percent of people who took the full yearlong Pashto course failed it.) Ty took a monastic approach to language learning and after class would spend two hours reading one news article, looking up every single word. With this effort, while he wasn’t quite at our level—we had that whole 30 percent of the vocabulary and an extra year of experience with the vagaries of Afghan language thing going for us—he too was ahead of the rest of our classmates.

…

I was spitballing, as I hadn’t fully fleshed out these thoughts back then, I just felt that the Dari word made more sense. As the course progressed, this kept happening. I think, in large part, this was due to the shared words between the languages; instead of having to spend hour upon hour learning new words, I was afforded the luxury of really trying to understand how Pashto worked, and often, it was easier to do that in relation to Dari (when English is their third or fourth language, sometimes it’s easier to use Dari to ask your professor if the attempt at past progressive you just made in Pashto was correct). Because of this learning of Pashto through both English and Dari, I wasn’t only finding the hidden meanings in Dari or Pashto words anymore, I was replacing entire concepts with them. It seemed that Sapir, or Whorf, or both, had been on to something. How I was thinking was changing.

Over the next few months, I spent hours a day talking with our professors. … We did all this talking in part to prepare for the final test, but mostly because speaking a language that you’re learning is by far the hardest thing to do with it; it’s much easier to recognize words than it is to pull them whole cloth from your memory. Speaking, putting those words and ideas into (hopefully) the same order as native speakers do, is by far the best way to strengthen your language skills. Taylor and I were both “good” at Pashto, but we had a problem; we couldn’t help but speak Dari.

We figured, given the no/minimal English rules, we should just use Dari whenever we didn’t know a Pashto word. The result was strange sentences that would be 60 to 70 percent Dari nouns and adjectives, with Pashto pronouns and verbs. Or, instead of asking “to drink څنګه وایئ” (“how do you say” in Pashto plus “to drink” in English) like our classmates, we would inevitably say say “څنګه وایئ نوشیدن” (“how do you say” in Pashto and “to drink” in Dari). The first time we did this with Rahimi he just paused, looked at us both, and said “I understand what you’re doing. But I hate this.” Us being us, this of course then meant that we kept doing it.

In part because it was fun, his faux exasperation a nice game we could play together, but mostly because we didn’t really understand how he could dislike this so much, we kept mixing and matching the two languages. We figured it was super-cool, ’cause like, how many other students could do that? We also figured that while Rahimi’s English was great, wasn’t his Dari better? Pashtun he may have been, but as far as we knew he was equally fluent in both. But when we finally got around to asking him about it, it turned out that it was harder for him to convert the Dari to Pashto, or vice versa, because he never thought that way. He was perfectly fluent in Dari—the man had been an interpreter all over Afghanistan—but it wasn’t one of the two languages he primarily thought in these days, nor did he ever combine it with Pashto. Mixing Pashto and English was common for him; that’s what he did all day at work. But if he thought in Pashto, Pashto it was. And if he thought in Dari, same. What we were doing was some weird bastardization of the two that did not sit well with him.

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