I just know that I belong to all of them. I don’t know if all of these kills belong to me. Sometimes I simply confirmed information so that the order to fire could be given. Sometimes that meant being a part of a team effort to kill, one crewmember among many who collectively contributed to death. Threat warning takes many forms, but it often results in the elimination of that threat. I was an airborne cryptologic linguist, tasked with providing threat warning to the planes I was on and to the troops on the ground. I’ve never operated a drone, but I have hunted from on high, in gunships, thousands of feet above the earth. Ian Fritz: What I learned while eavesdropping on the Taliban On August 29, when the United States fired a missile that was supposed to stop an ISIS-K attack at the Kabul airport during our withdrawal-but turned out to be an error that killed 10 civilians-this is what it was doing: hunting. I was taught these things so that I could hunt humans. I was taught these things in my training in the Air Force. And I was taught to count my kills, to make sure I recorded them, so that others would know and celebrate my accomplishments. I was taught that missing is bad, shame-worthy even, and that being a marksman is something to be proud of. I was taught how much patience it requires, how important it is to stay calm, how if you let the adrenaline take over, it’ll probably screw up your aim. I didn’t learn to actually hunt until I was an adult. But he had planned for this: The building was at the back of his property, with only woods behind it, so in the (evidently) likely event that we missed, no harm would come from the stray bullets. Between the two of us and half a box of ammo, I think we took out a single window. He showed us how to put the stock in the crook of our shoulder so the kick wouldn’t surprise us (though it still did I’d have sworn my shoulder was dislocated) how to focus on the front sight, not the target and how to softly squeeze the trigger to shoot. 22 at the windows of some decrepit building on his land in Georgia. The closest I got was the time my uncle taught my brother and me to shoot a.
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