Category Archives: U.S.

by | 18 March 2025 · 6:25 am

Chinese Gold Rush Destinations

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 14-15:

GOLD MINING IS famously risky, with high stakes, often compared to gambling. Driven by the desire for wealth, gold seekers took great risks that were explainable only by the potential for reward. Gold fever drove daring, hard work, technological invention, and political experimentation, as well as violence against humans and against the environment. The cold calculus of business, banking, and geopolitical interests harnessed gold fever for profit and advantage. For companies and nation-states, the desire for gold led to enormous expenditures of capital for digging and operating deeper and deeper mines. But the deeper the ore, the scarcer it was and the lower its grade, such that more and more rock had to be excavated for smaller and smaller yields of the precious metal. In the Witwatersrand gold mines in South Africa, for example, in 1905 it took on average 2.3 tons of ore to yield one ounce of gold worth $20.67. Hence the relentless drive for cheap labor in order to make gold mining payable.

Thus, at the turn of the twentieth century, South Africa recruited sixty thousand indentured Chinese mine laborers to work in highly capitalized and industrialized, deep underground mines. Their indenture marked an important difference in experience from that of the independent prospectors who went to North America and Australasia. But there were also broad similarities in the patterns of Chinese workers’ culture and resistance. This book tracks the migration of Chinese gold seekers to California, to the Australian colony of Victoria, and to the deep mines of the Witwatersrand. It considers how their experience and reception contributed to the evolution of their identity as “Chinese,” to China’s identity as a nation, and to their identification in the West as a global racial danger.

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Filed under anglosphere, Australia, industry, labor, migration, nationalism, slavery, South Africa, U.S.

by | 16 March 2025 · 2:52 pm

Chinese Gold Rush Emigration

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 2-4:

THE CHINESE WHO WENT to the gold rushes were part of an expanding population of Chinese living abroad in the nineteenth century. Since at least the thirteenth century of the Common Era, people from China’s southeastern coastal provinces had traded in Southeast Asia, from Indonesia and the Philippines to Vietnam and the Malay Peninsula to Thailand. But in the nineteenth century they traveled much farther from home, spurred by both need and opportunity. A quarter-million Chinese went as indentured laborers to European plantation colonies in the Caribbean as part of the notorious coolie trade that exploited Chinese and Indian workers after the abolition of slavery.

An even greater number of Chinese, more than 300,000, went as voluntary emigrants to the United States and to British settler colonies in the nineteenth century, attracted first by the gold rushes. The Chinese gold seekers were not, of course, the first to cross the great ocean—that distinction is held by the Polynesian peoples whose seaborne migrations began over one thousand years BCE. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Spanish ran a yearly galleon trade between Acapulco and Manila, the long middle leg of a journey that traded New World silver to China for silks, porcelain, and other luxuries for Europe. By the early nineteenth century, a budding U.S.-China trade of northwestern American furs and pelts and Hawaiian sandalwood drew new routes across the ocean.

But the gold rushes were of another order. They exploded the early modern Pacific maritime world. Vibrant new routes and networks of trade and migration were established, nourished by gold first in California, then in Australia. Three new and lasting nodes of the transpacific rose to prominence: Hong Kong, San Francisco, and Sydney.

The goldfields were international contact zones on the frontiers of Anglo-American settler societies. The rushes attracted gold seekers from around the world—from the eastern and southern United States; from the British Isles and Continental Europe; from Mexico and Chile and Hawaii; from Australia and China. The gold seekers’ arrival to the frontiers of white settlement made them participants, to one degree or other, in the elimination of indigenous peoples and in the formation of new communities and nations. How would these new polities reckon with the diverse character of the goldfield populations? Who would be included and who would be excluded? And who would decide, and by what means?

The gold rushes occasioned the first mass contact between Chinese and Euro-Americans. Unlike other encounters in Asian port cities and on Caribbean plantations, they met on the goldfields both in large numbers and on relatively equal terms, that is, as voluntary emigrants and independent prospectors. Race relations were not always conflictual, but the perception of competition gave rise to a racial politics expressed as the “Chinese Question.”

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Filed under anglosphere, Australia, China, economics, labor, migration, nationalism, U.S.

by | 12 March 2025 · 5:24 am

U.S.–Russia Tensions, 1880s

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. 95-96:

Alexander’s assassination at first drew the United States and Russia even closer because of the still traumatic American memory of Lincoln’s assassination. The US Senate passed a resolution of sympathy for Russia emphasizing the “relations of genuine friendship that have always existed between the people and governments of Russia and of the United States.” Former president Grant recalled fond memories of his 1878 meeting with the late tsar. The New York Times ran an editorial attacking the “Nihilism” of the assassins as the “chief foe of the liberty of the Russian people.” The Russian government reciprocated the sympathy when Charles Guiteau mortally wounded President Garfield a few months after Alexander’s assassination.

But the policies of the new tsar, Alexander III, managed to blunt the American sympathy for Russia generated by his father’s assassination. A foreign diplomat anonymously reported that the tsar and his advisers were preparing to “adopt rigorous repressive measures, having no example in Russian history.” Among the measures was a decree allowing the regime, without a trial, to jail or exile to Siberia anyone whose presence in Russia was deemed “prejudicial to the public order” or “incompatible with public tranquility.” A former head of the Department of the Police remarked that the decree caused the fate of the “entire population of Russia to become dependent on the personal opinions of the functionaries of the political police.”

Simultaneously with political repression, Alexander III tolerated, if not encouraged, a wave of brutal pogroms against Jews in European Russia. In some places Russian soldiers, mobilized to restore order, joined the mob in ransacking Jewish homes and businesses, and raping Jewish women. As historian Edward Crankshaw observed, “it was under Alexander III, and thanks to Alexander III, that anti-Semitism in Russia became institutionalized, respectable—and violent.” Influential Americans began to debate the true nature of the Russian regime. Harper’s Weekly, which previously had run issue after issue with festive illustrations of Russian life, editorialized that there is “no question as to the existence of the most cruel, arbitrary and oppressive despotism in Russia.”

Just as he had defended Russia’s role in the Great Game in Central Asia several years earlier, Kennan again came to Russia’s defense. He publicly addressed only the emerging criticism of the Siberian exile system, and not the pogroms, but privately he expressed the belief that the Russian government had been “grossly misrepresented” in the reports of the mistreatment of Jews even though he did not then have “the facts” to prove it. In a widely publicized lecture in 1882 at the American Geographical Society, Kennan argued that while the exile system was hardly without flaws, “whatever exile may have been in the past, it is not now, in any just sense of the words, a cruel or unusual punishment,” but on the contrary should be regarded as a “more humane punishment than that inflicted upon criminals generally in other European states.”

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Filed under democracy, economics, migration, nationalism, religion, Russia, U.S.

by | 10 March 2025 · 3:12 am

First Transatlantic Telegraph Cable

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. 52-54:

The failure in 1865 to lay the Atlantic cable hardly deterred the directors of the Atlantic Telegraph Company. With the bitter learning experience of the earlier failed attempts, the engineers improved both the cable’s design and manufacture and made modifications to the gargantuan cable-laying ship, the Great Eastern, which sailed on June 30, 1866, from the Thames Estuary. Day after day, for the most part in calm waters, the Great Eastern steamed west, steadily paying out its cable. The ship anchored in late July in Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, in sight of the wildly cheering inhabitants of the flag-draped hamlet of Heart’s Content. The Great Eastern trailed two thousand miles of undersea cable, which was spliced into undersea lines that ran to mainland Canada. “All well. Thank God, the cable is laid and is in perfect working order,” went the telegraphed message from Heart’s Content, which set off worldwide celebrations.

With the benefit of hindsight, some newspapers criticized Western Union for spending millions of dollars based on the “mere conviction” that the Atlantic cable would never be successfully laid. For a time the Western Union directors insisted publicly that they would not abandon the overland route through Siberia, but they had every incentive to do just that. The month before the Great Eastern reached Heart’s Content, Western Union had hedged its investment in the Russian-American telegraph line by merging with the American Telegraph Company, one of the backers of the Atlantic cable. If the cable was successfully laid, Western Union would receive a share of the profits. In effect, Western Union had put down a bet against its own men in the Siberian wilderness.

Almost as an afterthought, Western Union dispatched a company ship to Siberia, the Onward, which arrived off Gizhiga on July 15, 1867. “We have come up to carry all the employees home,” said the captain. Kennan found it heartbreaking to close a project to which he had devoted nearly three years of his life and endured all possible hardships, but his thoughts were also of home. Maj. Abaza went by an overland route to St. Petersburg, where he hoped to persuade the Russian government to complete the line through Siberia. Kennan spent August cruising along the Siberian coast aboard the Onward to gather up the telegraph line working parties. In September the Onward put in at Okhotsk, where a letter from Maj. Abaza directed Kennan to come to St. Petersburg. The Onward, with almost all the American telegraph workers on board, prepared to sail to San Francisco. On the day of the Onward’s sailing, Kennan and Dodd were both on the edge of tears. “He could only wring my hand in silence.”

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Filed under Britain, Canada, industry, labor, Russia, travel, U.S.

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 | 8 March 2025 · 6:07 am

Railroad Telegraph Duties, 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. 34-35:

He became a messenger-boy and trainee in a railroad company telegraph depot in Norwalk [Ohio], working in a different office than his father’s. He was promoted to the position of telegraph operator and manager at a salary of twenty-five dollars a month. In nineteenth-century America, children did menial and exhausting work in factories, farms, textile mills, and mines. Industrialists regarded the ideal machine as one so simple that a child could operate it. It was rare to give a young boy like George Kennan a serious responsibility like the signaling of trains.

As a train came through Norwalk, small boys peered through the depot’s windows to watch Kennan busily work his instrument to alert a central dispatcher of the train’s passing. The dispatcher then sent orders to the telegraph depot ahead of the train to give to its engineer: speed up, slow down (to arrive on schedule), halt at a siding, or make an unscheduled stop to pick up freight or passengers. At the depot ahead, a hapless employee went out to the side of the tracks and held out a five-foot pole with a large wire hoop, to which the dispatcher’s written order was attached. As the steam-whistling, smoke-belching train barreled toward the “hooper,” the brakeman reached down and, unless the hooper flinched, grabbed the wire hoop.

Initially Kennan functioned in a state of panic. “The excitement and responsibility of taking and transmitting orders upon which depended the safety of trains and passengers were a severe trial, at first, to my inexperienced nerves.” But he made no serious mistakes and “gradually acquired self-confidence, as the routine of railroad business became familiar to me.” Once he set up a field telegraph office at the scene of a train wreck, and on one local election night he helped his father receive the telegraphed tallies and announce them to an excited gathering.

American Morse Code (also called Railroad Morse or land-line Morse) in those days differed from current International Morse Code, which latter is better adapted for transmission through undersea cables.

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by | 7 March 2025 · 11:23 am

George Kennan’s Siberian Adventures

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. 3-5:

George Kennan is a little-known American whose achievements have been overshadowed by a much younger, distant cousin, the diplomat George Frost Kennan, who was the chief architect of America’s Cold War containment strategy. The George Kennan of this story was an intrepid explorer, a leading American journalist, and after his Siberian exile investigation, a moral force whose writings and lectures about the inhumanity of the exile system compelled Russia to implement reforms.

Kennan went into Siberia twice. The first time was in 1865 when, as a member of a Western Union–backed venture called the Russian-American Telegraph Expedition, he explored a route for a telegraph line through the subzero wilderness of northeastern Siberia. It was a classic young man’s adventure filled with challenges and hardships and driven by Kennan’s quest to prove his courage. Twenty years later he returned to Siberia with George Frost to investigate the exile system and found himself on a moral journey. By then he had become one of America’s most prominent defenders of Russia and its centuries-old practice of banishing criminals and political dissidents to Siberia. Kennan, who spoke Russian fluently and was regarded as a leading expert on Russia, believed that a thorough, objective investigation would vindicate his contention that the exile system, while hardly without flaws, was more humane than penal systems in European countries. He also hoped that his articles about the Siberian exile system would make him rich and famous.

Kennan and Frost traveled eight thousand miles in Siberia in horse-drawn carriages, river steamers, and sleighs and on horseback. They suffocated in sandstorms in the summer and endured winter temperatures of minus forty-five degrees Fahrenheit. They inspected dozens of prisons, observed the marching parties of exiled convicts, spoke with Siberian officials, and met with more than a hundred exiled opponents of the tsarist regime. Both men were plagued by disease, vermin that infested their clothing and luggage, the jolting and pounding of carriages without springs or seats (they had to sit on their luggage), and by the stress of police surveillance. Worst of all was the nervous strain caused by their unrelenting exposure to human suffering because the exile system, as Kennan discovered, in fact was a brutal instrument of the Russian Empire’s exploitation of Siberia’s vast natural resources and a means of suppressing and punishing dissent.

Kennan’s investigation discredited his own defense of the exile system, as he was the first to admit, and changed him as a person. When he returned to the United States, his overarching goal was no longer wealth and fame but to end the suffering of the exiles and bring freedom to Russia. His concept of courage, his attitudes toward women, his views on the Russian government’s oppression of its Jews had all changed. “What I saw heard and learned in Siberia stirred me to the very depths of my soul—opened to me a new world of human experience, and raised, in some respects, all my moral standards.”

And Kennan’s investigation changed America. Today it is nearly impossible to conceive of the close diplomatic relations between Russia and the United States and the affection of Americans for Russia at the time of Kennan’s investigation. Many Americans held the benign perception of Russia as a “distant friend” of the United States, a colorful but mysterious land filled with tragically romantic characters. Kennan’s investigative reporting put an end to that. His articles for the Century magazine, a nearly one-thousand-page, two-volume book, Siberia and the Exile System, and a nine-year lecture tour about the exile system left Americans so appalled and angry at Russia’s mistreatment of its citizens that the relationship between the two countries was never the same.

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Filed under education, language, publishing, Russia, travel, U.S.

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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Filed under Afghanistan, military, religion, U.S., Vietnam, war

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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Filed under Afghanistan, language, military, religion, U.S., war

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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