hist2004
07-16-2004, 10:50 AM
SERGEANT, INFANTRY PLATOON LEADER
It's like in a dream, as if I've already seen this before in some film, and the feeling now is that I've never killed anyone...
I volunteered. I wanted to find out what I was capable of. I'm very ambitious. I went to university, but you can't show - or know what you're made of in a place like that. I dropped out in my second year. I wanted to be a hero and looked for a chance to be one. They say it was a man's war but the truth is, it was a boy's war. It was kids not long out of school who did the fighting. It was like a game for us. Self esteem and pride were terribly important: can I do it or can't I? He can - can I? That's what we were worried about, not politics. I'd been preparing myself for a challenge of some kind since I was a young boy. My favourite author was Jack London. A real man had to be strong - and war makes you strong. My girlfriend tried to talk me out of it. 'Do you really think writers like Bunin or Mandelstam thought that way?' she asked me. None of my friends understood me either.
Some got married, others got involved in Zen or yoga and such-like. I was the only one who went to the war.
The mountains above you, scorched by the sun, down below, a little girl calling her goat, and a woman hanging out her washing.
Just like at home in the Caucasus... To tell the truth, I was a bit disappointed, until one night they shot at our campfire. I picked up the teakettle and there was a bullet under it.
On route-marches the thirst was sheer torture and utterly humiliating. Your whole mouth dried up, it seemed to be full of dust and you couldn't work up enough saliva to swallow. We licked up the dew and even our own sweat. I was determined to get through it. I caught a tortoise, slit its throat with a sharp stone, and drank its blood. No one else could face it. I was the only one.
I realised I was capable of killing. I had a gun in my hand. The first time we went into battle I noticed how some of the lads were in a state of shock. They fainted, or started vomiting when they realised they'd killed people or saw human brains or eyes being blown out. I could take it though. One of the lads was a hunter who bragged that before he joined the army he'd killed hares and wild boar, but he vomited with the rest of them. It's one thing to shoot animals, quite another to kill human beings. In battle you go as stiff as wood, cold reason takes over, you calculate... This is my gun and my life. The gun becomes part of your body, like a third arm...
It was a partisan war, and set-piece battles were rare. It was you against him. You grew as sharp as a lynx. You fire a burst -he stays still. You wait - what next? You feel the bullet whistle past you even before you hear the bang. You crawl from stone to stone, you hide, you race behind him like a hunter. Your body's like a coiled spring and you don't breathe until you pounce. If it comes to it you kill him with your gun-butt. You kill him and you sense you're alive! 'I'M ALIVE!' But there's no joy in killing a man. You kill so you can get home safe.
No two dead bodies look the same. Water, for instance, does something to the human face that gives it a kind of smile. After rain they all look clean. Death in the dust, without water, is more honest, somehow. The uniform may be brand-new but there's a dry red leaf where the head should be, squashed flat like a lizard.
You find bodies propped against the wall of a house: I saw one by a pile of nut-shells he must've just cracked, his eyes were open because there'd been no one to close them. You've only got 10-15minutes to close the eyes after death - then it's too late... BUT I'M ALIVE! I saw another, curled up, with his flies undone, he was relieving himself. They lie there the way they were at the last moment of their lives... BUT I'M ALIVE! I need to touch myself to make sure...
Birds aren't scared of death, they sit and watch. Nor are children, - they sit there too, and look on calmly, like the birds.
They're curious.
Back in the canteen you eat your soup, look at your neighbour and imagine him dead. There was a time when I couldn't bear to look at photos of my family. When I got back from action I wouldn't look women and children in the face. Eventually you get used to it, go and work out next morning as us usual - I was into weight training. I was keen on fitness and wanted to be in good shape to go home. I admit I couldn't sleep, but that was because of the lice, especially in winter. We sprayed the mattresses with some kind of dust, but it didn't make much difference...
I only started to be afraid of dying when I was back home and my son was born. Then I was scared that if I died he'd grow up without me. I was hit seven times, I could easily have kicked the bucket, but I didn't. Sometimes I even have the feeling I didn't play the game to the end, or fight to the finish, rather...
I don't feel guilty and I don't get nightmares. I always chose honest combat - him against me. If I saw a couple of our lads beating up a POW with his hands tied behind his back, lying on the ground like a bundle of rags, I'd chase them away. I despised people like that. One chap started shooting eagles with his automatic and I socked his ugly mug for him. The birds hadn't done anything wrong, after all.
When my family asked what it was like over there I'd just say, 'Look, I'm sorry, I'll tell you some other time.' I graduated and now I'm an engineer. I just want to be an engineer, not a 'veteran of the Afghan war'. I want to forget all that, although I don't know what will become of us, the generation that went through it.
This is the first time I've talked about it, talking like we're strangers in a train and getting off at different stops. Look, my hands are shaking, I'm upset for some reason. I thought I'd come out of it relatively unscathed. If you write about me don't mention my surname. I'm not afraid of anything, I just don't want to be involved again...
PRIVATE, GRENADIER REGIMENT
I went to Afghanistan thinking I'd come home with my head held high. Now I realise the person I was before this war has gone forever.
Our company was combing through a village. I was patrolling with another lad. He pushed open a hut door with his leg and was shot point-blank with a machine-gun. Nine rounds. In that situation hatred takes over. We shot everything, right down to the domestic animals. In fact, shooting animals is the worst. I was sorry for them. I wouldn't let the donkeys be shot - they'd done nothing wrong, had they? They had amulets hanging from their necks, exactly the same as the children. It really upset me, setting fire to that wheat-field - I'm a country boy myself.
When I was over there I only remembered the good things about life back home, especially my childhood, like the way I used to lie on the grass among the bluebells and marguerites, how we roasted ears of wheat over a log-fire and ate them...
The heat from the fire was so terrific that it melted the iron on the roofs of the little shops. The field was swallowed up by the flames in an instant. It smelt of bread and that reminded me of when I was a boy, too.
In Afghanistan night falls like a curtain. One moment it's light, the next - night. A bit like me - I was a boy but I became a man all at one go. That's war for you.
Sometimes when it rains there you look up and see the rain falling, but it never hits the ground. We watched TV programmes by satellite showing life at home going on as normal, but it was irrelevant to us somehow... I can talk about all this to you but I feel terribly frustrated, because I can't get over to you what it was really all about.
Sometimes I want to write down everything I saw. Like, in hospital, the lad who'd lost his arms, his legs and his mate. I remember sitting on his bed writing a letter for him to his mother.
Or the little Afghan girl who pinched a sweet from a Soviet soldier and had both her hands hacked off by her own people. I'd like to write it all down exactly as it was and without any comments. If it rained I'd say it rained, just that, without a lot of talk about whether it was a good or bad thing that it was raining.
When it was our time to go home we expected a warm welcome and open arms - then we discovered that people couldn't careless whether we'd survived or not. In the courtyard of our block of flats I met up with the kids I'd known before. 'Oh, you're back- that's good,' they said, and went off to school. My teachers didn't ask about anything either. This was the sum total of our conversation: I, solemnly: 'We should perpetuate the memory of our school fellows who died doing their international duty.' They: 'They were dunces and hooligans. How can we put up a memorial plaque to them in the school?' People back home had their own view of the war. 'So you think you were heroes, were you? You lost a war, and anyhow, who needed it, apart from Brezhnev and a few war mongering generals? 'Apparently my friends died for nothing, and I might have died for nothing too.
Well, at least my Mum was looking out of the window, the day I got home, and saw me coming, and ran out on to the road shouting for joy. Whatever anyone says, and however much history gets rewritten, I know that those boys who died there mere heroes.
I had a talk with an old lecturer at college. 'You were a victim of a political mistake,' he said. 'You were forced to become accomplices to a crime.' 'I was eighteen then,' I told him. 'How old were you? You kept quiet when we were being roasted alive. You kept quiet when we were being brought home in body bags and military bands played in the cemeteries. You kept quiet over here while we were doing the killing over there. Now all of a sudden you go on about victim sand mistakes... 'Anyhow, I don't want to be a victim of a political mistake. And I'll fight for the right not to be! Whatever anyone says, those boys were heroes!
ARTILLERY CAPTAIN
I was lucky. I've come home alive, with my arms, legs and eyes.
I wasn't burnt and I didn't go mad. We soon realised this wasn't the war we'd expected to fight, but we just decided to get it over with, stay alive and go home. There'd be plenty of time to analyse it later.
Mine was the first relief contingent to go to Afghanistan. We had orders, not ideals. You don't discuss orders - if you did you wouldn't have an army for long. You know what Engels said? 'A soldier must be like a bullet, constantly ready to be fired.' I learnt that by heart. You go to war in order to kill. Killing is my profession - that's what I was trained to do.
Was I afraid for myself? I just assumed that other people might get killed, but not me. You can't really comprehend the possibility of your own annihilation. And don't forget - I wasn't a boy when I went out there, I was thirty years old.
That's where I learnt what life was about. I tell you straight -they were the best years of my life. Life here is rather grey and petty: work - home, home - work. There we had to work every-thing out for ourselves and test our mettle as men.
So much of it was exotic, too: the way the morning mist swirled in the ravines like a smoke screen, even those burubukhaiki, the high-sided, brightly decorated Afghan trucks, and the red buses with sheep and cows and people all crammed together inside, and the yellow taxis... There are places there which remind you of the moon with their fantastic, cosmic landscapes. You get the feeling that there's nothing alive in those unchanging mountains, that it's nothing but rocks - until the rocks start shooting at you! You sense that even nature is your enemy.
We existed between life and death - and we held other men's life and death in our hands too. Is there any feeling more powerful than that? We'll never walk, or make love, or be loved, the way we walked and loved and were loved over there. Everything was heightened by the closeness of death: death hovered everywhere and all the time. Life was full of adventure: I learnt the smell of danger - I've got a sixth sense for it now. We're homesick for it, some of us; it's called the 'Afghan syndrome'.
We never bothered ourselves with questions about whether we were doing the right thing or not. We carried out our orders the way we were trained to. Now, of course, with the benefit of hind sight and a lot of information which we didn't have at the time, the whole business is being reconsidered and re-evaluated.
After less than ten years! At the time we had the clear image of an enemy, an enemy very familiar to us from books and school and all those films about the basmach [members of the anti-Soviet independence movement in Central Asia, particularly in the late 1920s]. The Write Desert Sun, for instance. I must have seen that film five times at least. Just when we were complaining that we'd been born too late for World War II - eureka! A ready-made enemy appeared on the horizon. We were brought up to find inspiration in war and revolution - and nothing else.
As I said, we were the first relief contingent to be sent out. We were quite happy digging foundations for barracks, canteens and army clubs. We were issued with TT-44 pistols dating from World War II, the ones you see political commissars swaggering about with in old films. They were no use at all except to shoot yourself with, or sell in the bazaar. We walked around like partisans, in whatever we could find, usually sweat pants and trainers.
I was like the Good Soldier Schweik. When it was 50' Celsius our superiors still expected us to wear ties and full uniform as per Army Regulations from the North Pole to the Equator! In the morgue I saw body-bags with human flesh hacked to pieces. That was a nasty shock. But within a few months we'd be watching a film in the open air and if tracer shells flashed past the screen we'd just carry on watching... Or we'd be playing volleyball and a bombardment would begin, so we'd check where the shells were coming from and go back to the game. The films they sent out were either about war, or Lenin, or wives cheating on their husbands. I'd gladly have machine-gunned all those women sleeping with other men while their husbands were away! We all wanted comedies but they never sent a single one. The screen was two or three sheets sewn together and strung between a couple of trees, with the audience sitting on the sand.
Once a week we had bath and drinks night. A bottle of vodka cpst 30 cheki, so we brought it with us from home. Customs regulations permitted two bottles of vodka, four of wine but unlimited beer, so we'd pour out the beer and fill the bottles with vodka. Or else you might open a bottle of mineral water and find it was 40' proof! People drank used aeroplane kerosene and antifreeze. We'd warn new recruits not to touch antifreeze, whatever else they drank, but within a few days they'd be in hospital with their insides corroded.
We smoked hash. One friend of mine got so high in battle he was sure every bullet had his name on it, wherever it was really headed. Another smoked at night and hallucinated that his family was with him, started kissing his wife. Some had all-colour visions such as in a film. At first the traders in the bazaar sold us the stuff but later they gave it us for free. 'Go on, Russky, have a smoke!' they would say. The kids would run after us, pushing it into our hands.
A lot of my friends were killed. One touched the trip wire of a mine with his heel, heard the detonator click and, as always happens, looked at the noise in surprise instead of hurling himself to the ground. He died of dozens of shrapnel wounds. Then there was a tank which exploded so violently that the base opened up like a can of jam and the caterpillars blew off their rollers. The driver tried to escape through the hatch, we saw one arm emerge and that was all - he was burnt in his tank. Back in barracks no one wanted to sleep in his bed. One day a new recruit arrived so we told him to take the bed. 'It doesn't matter to you, you never knew him anyhow... 'We were most upset by the ones with children, children who'd grow up without a Dad. On the other hand, what about those who left no one behind, who died as if they'd never been? We were incredibly badly paid for fighting that war: we got twice basic pay (basic pay being worth 270 foreign currency vouchers), less all kinds of stop pages, compulsory membership-fees, subscriptions and tax. At that time an ordinary volunteer worker in the far north was getting 1,500. 'Military advisers' earned five to ten times more than us. The difference was particularly obvious going through customs at the border: we'd have a tape-recorder and a couple of pairs of jeans, they'd have half a dozen trunks, so heavy the squad dies could hardly carry them.
When we got back in the Soviet Union, in Tashkent, it was no easier.
'Back from Afghan? Want a girl? I've got one for you as soft as a peach, dear... ''No thanks, I'm trying to get home on leave. To my wife. I need a ticket.' 'Tickets cost money... D'you want to sell your Italian sun-glasses?' 'It's a deal.' To get on the plane to Sverdlovsk cost me 100 roubles, those Italian sun-glasses, a Japanese lurex scarf and a French make-upset. In the ticket-queue I learnt the way things worked: 'Why stand here for days? Forty vouchers slipped into your service passport and you'll be home next day.' I get to the ticket-window. 'Ticket for Sverdlovsk.' 'No tickets. Open your eyes and look at the board!' I slip the forty vouchers in and try again. 'Ticket to Sverdlovsk please, miss.' 'I'll just go and check. Oh, lucky you came by, we've just had a cancellation. 'You get home and land in a completely different world - the world of the family. The first few days you don't hear a thing they say. You just watch them, touch them. I can't explain what it means to stroke your child's head after everything that's happened.
The morning smell of coffee and pancakes, your wife calling you to breakfast...
In one month you have to leave again. Why and where - you don't know. You don't think about it - you simply mustn't think about it. You just know you'll go because you must. At night, lying beside your wife, you still taste the Afghan sand, soft as flour, between your teeth. A few days ago you were lying in that red dust next to the APC... You wake up, jump out of bed -no, you're still home, it's tomorrow you're going back.
Today my father asked me to help him slaughter a piglet. In the past I'd refuse and run out of the house with my hands over my ears so as not to hear the screaming.
'Hold it a moment,' says my father.
'No, not like that, straight to the heart, like this,' I say, and take the knife and kill it myself.
In the morgue I saw body bags with human limbs hacked off.
Yes, that was a nasty shock. You should never be the first to spill blood - it's a process that's hard to stop. Once I saw some soldiers sitting around while an old man and a little donkey passed by on the street below. Suddenly they lobbed a mortar and killed the old man and his donkey.
'Hey, lads! Have you gone mad? It was just an old man and a donkey. What did they do to you?' 'An old man and a donkey came by here yesterday, too. By the time they'd gone past our mate was lying here dead.' 'But it might have been a different old man and a different donkey?' Never be the first to spill blood, or you'll forever be shooting yesterday's old man and yesterday's donkey.
We fought the war, stayed alive and got home. Now's the time to try and make sense of it all...
A MOTHER
I sat by the coffin. 'Who's in there? Is it you, my little one?' I repeated over and over again. 'Who's in there? Is it you, my boy?' Everyone thought I'd gone in sane.
Time passed, and I wanted to find out how my son was killed.
I went to the local recruitment HQ. 'Tell me how and where my son was killed,' I begged. 'I don't believe he's dead. I'm sure I've buried a metal box and my son is alive somewhere.' The officer in charge got angry and even started shouting at me. 'This is classified information! You can't go around telling everyone your son has been killed! Don't you know that's not allowed?' He had a long and painful birth, but when I realised I had a son I knew the agony had all been worthwhile. I worried about him from the day he was born - he was all I had in this world.
We lived in a little one-room hut with just enough space for a bed, pram and two chairs. I worked on the railways, switching points, for 60 roubles a month. The day I left hospital I went straight on nightshift. I took him to work with me in the pram, I had my little hotplate with me and fed him and put him to sleep at the same time I was meeting the trains. When he was a bit older I left him at home alone; I had to tie his ankle to the pram and leave him alone all day long. Still, he grew up a fine boy.
He got into building college in Petrozavodsk, up in Karelia, near the Finnish border. I went to visit him there once. He gave me a kiss and then ran off somewhere. I was quite hurt - until he came back, smiling.
'The girls are coming', he said.
'What girls? 'He'd gone off to tell these girls I'd arrived and they were coming to inspect this mother of his they'd heard so much about.
No one had ever given me a present. He came home for Mother's Day and I met him at the station.
'Let me help you with that bag,' I said.
'It's heavy, Mum. You take my portfolio-case, but be careful with it!'.
I carried it carefully and he made sure I did. Must be important drawings, I thought. When we got home he went to change and I rushed to the kitchen to check on my pies. I looked up and there he was with three red tulips in his hand. How on earth had he managed to get hold of tulips up there in March? He'd wrapped them in cloth and put them in his case so they didn't freeze. It was the first time anyone had ever given me flowers.
That summer he worked on one of those special intensive building projects. He came home just before my birthday. 'I'm sorry I couldn't get here earlier, but I've brought you a little something,' he said, handing me a money order. I looked at it.
12 roubles 50 kopecks,' I read out.
'Hey, Mum, you've forgotten the noughts! That's for 1250 roubles! ''Well, I've never had a crazy sum like that in my hands! How would I know how it's written?' He was very good-hearted. 'You're going to retire and I'm going to earn a lot of money for both of us. Do you remember when I was a boy, I promised I'd carry you in my arms when I grew up?' And so he did. He was 6 foot 5 inches tall and he carried me around like a little girl. We loved each other so much because we had no one else, probably. I don't know how I'd have let a wife have him. I don't suppose I would have.
He got his conscription papers and decided he wanted to be a paratrooper. 'They're enlisting for the pairs, Mum, but they won't take me because I'm so big. They say I'll break the parachute shroud-lines! And I just love those berets.' All the same, he got into the Vitebsk Parachute Division. I went to the swearing-in ceremony, when they have to take the oath. I noticed he'd straightened up - he wasn't ashamed of his height any more.
'Why are you so tiny, Mum?' he asked.
'I've stopped growing because I miss you so much,' I tried to joke.
'We're being sent to Afghanistan, but I'm not going because I'm an only child. Why didn't you have a little girl after you had me?'.
Lots of the parents came to the oath-taking ceremony. All of a sudden I heard someone on the platform asking, 'Where is Mama Zhuraleva? Mama Zhuraleva, come up and congratulate your son!' I went up to give him a kiss, but I couldn't reach the6 foot 5 inch bean-pole. 'Private Zhuralev! Bend down so that your mother can give you a kiss! ' ordered the commandant. As he bent down and kissed me someone took a photograph of us.
It's the only photo I've got of him in uniform.
After the ceremony they were given a few hours off and we went to a nearby park. We sat on the grass. When he took off his boots I saw that his feet were covered in blood. He told me they'd done a 30-mile route-march, but there were no size II boots so he had to wear 91/2s. But he didn't complain - on the contrary.
'We had to run with our backpacks full of sand, and I didn't pour half mine out like some of the lads.' I wanted to do something special for him. 'Shall we go to a restaurant, dear? We've never been to a restaurant together.' 'I tell you what, Mum - buy me a couple of pounds of sweets.
That's what I'd really like! 'Then it was time for him to go back to barracks. He waved me goodbye with his bag of sweets.
They put us relatives up for the night on mattresses in the sports hall, but we hardly slept a wink - we couldn't help walking round and round the barracks where our boys were fast asleep.
When reveille sounded I rushed outside, hoping to see him one more time as they marched off to the gym, even if it was only from a distance. I saw them running, but they all looked the same in their striped vests so I couldn't make him out. They had to keep in groups all the time, even going to the canteen or the toilet- they weren't allowed to go anywhere on their own because before, when the lads realised they were going to Afghanistan, some had hanged themselves in the toilets or slashed their wrists.
In the bus I was the only one who cried. I just sensed I'd never see him again. Soon I had a letter from him: 'I saw your bus, Mum, and ran after it so that I could see you one last time.' When we were sitting in the park they'd played that lovely old song over the loudspeakers, 'When my mother said goodbye to me'. I hear it in my head all the time now.
His next letter began, 'Hello from Kabul... ' I started screaming, so loud that the neighbours rushed in. 'It's against the law and civil rights!' I shouted, banging my head on the table. 'He's my only child - even under the Tsar they didn't take an only child into the army. And now he's been sent to fight a war.' It was the first time since Sasha was born that I was sorry I hadn't got married. Now I had no one to protect me.
Sasha used to tease me: 'Why don't you get married, Mum?' he'd ask.
'Because you'd be jealous!' I told him. He'd laugh and say no more about it. We thought we'd be living together for a long, long time.
He wrote a few more letters and then there was such a long gap that I wrote to his commanding officer. Soon afterwards I got a letter from Sasha. 'Mum, don't write to the CO any more, your last letter got me into trouble. The reason I didn't write is, I was stung on the hand by a wasp. I didn't ask anyone else to write a letter for me because a stranger's hand writing on the envelope would have given you a shock.' He was sorry for me and made up stories - as if I didn't watch TV every day and couldn't guess she'd been wounded. After that, if I didn't get a letter every day I could hardly get up in the morning. He tried to explain. 'How can you expect them to send off our letters every day when we only get fresh drinking-water delivered every ten days?' One letter was happy: 'Hurrah! Hurrah! We escorted a convoy to the Soviet border, and even though we weren't allowed to cross, we saw the Motherland in the distance. It's the best country in the world! 'In his last letter he wrote: 'If I can get through the summer I'll be home.' On the 29th of August I decided summer was over and went to buy him a suit and some shoes. They're still in the cup board...
On the 30th I took off my earrings and ring before I went to work. For some reason I just couldn't bear to wear them.
That was the day he was killed.
I only went on living after his death thanks to my brother. For a whole week he slept by my bed like a dog, watching over me, because all I wanted to do was run to the balcony and throw myself out of our seventh-floor window. When the coffin was brought into the sitting-room I lay on it, measuring it with my arms over and over again. Three foot, six foot, six and a half, because that's how tall he was. Was it long enough for him? I talked to the coffin like a mad woman: 'Who's there? Is it you, my love? Who's there? Is it you, my love? Who's there? Is it you, my love?' The coffin was already sealed when they brought it so I couldn't kiss him goodbye, or stroke him one last time. I don't even know what he's wearing.
I told them I'd choose a place for him in the cemetery myself.
They gave me a couple of injections and I went with my brother.
There were already some 'Afghan' graves in the central alley.
'That's where I want my son to be - he'll be happier with his friends.' The man who was with us, some boss or other, shook his head.
'It's forbidden for them to be buried together. They have to be spread about the rest of the cemetery. 'That was when I exploded! 'Don't get so angry, Sonya, don't get so angry,' my brother tried to calm me down. But how can I not be angry? When I saw their Kabul on TV I wanted to get a machine-gun and shoot the lot of them. I'd sit there 'shooting' until, one day, it showed one of their old women, an Afghan mother, I suppose.
'She's probably lost a son, too,' I thought. After that I stopped 'shooting'.
I'm thinking of adopting a boy from the children's home, a little blond chap like Sasha. No, I'd be frightened for a boy, he'd only get killed, a girl would be better. The two of us'll wait for Sasha together... I'm not mad, but I am waiting for him. I've heard of cases where they've sent the mother the coffin and she's buried it, and a year later he's home, alive, wounded but alive. The mother had a heart attack. I'm still waiting. I never saw him dead so I'm still waiting... '
1st LIEUTENANT, BATTERY COMMANDER
Only a madman will tell you the whole truth about what went on there, that's for sure. There's a lot you'll never know. When the truth is too terrible it doesn't get told. Nobody wants to be the first to come out with it - it's just too risky.
Did you know that drugs and fur coats were smuggled in coffins? Yes, right in there with the bodies! Have you ever seen necklaces of dried ears? Yes, trophies of war, rolled up into little leaves and kept in match boxes! Impossible? You can't believe such things of our glorious Soviet boys? Well, they could and did happen, and you won't be able to cover them up with a coat of that cheap silver paint they use to paint the railings round our graves and war memorials...
I didn't go over there with a desire to kill people. I'm a normal man. We were told over and over again that we were there to fight bandits, that we'd be heroes and that everyone would be grateful to us. I remember the posters: 'Soldiers, Let Us Strengthen Our Southern Borders!' 'Uphold The Honour Of Your Unit!' 'Flourish, Lenin's Motherland!' 'Glory To The Communist Party!' When I got home I caught sight of myself in a big mirror- over there I'd only had a small one - and didn't recognise the person staring back at me, with his different eyes in a different face. I can't define how I'd changed, but I had, outside and inside.
I was serving in Czechoslovakia when I heard about my transfer to Afghanistan.
'Why me?' I asked.
'Because you're not married.' I made my preparations as if I were going away on ordinary army business. What should I pack? No one knew, because we didn't have any Afgantsi with us. Someone recommended rubber boots, which I didn't use once in my two years there and left in Kabul. We flew from Tashkent sitting on crates of ammunition and landed in Shindanta. The first thing I saw was the Tsarandoi, or Afghan police, armed with Soviet tommy-guns of World War II vintage. Soviet and Afghan soldiers were equally dirty and shabby and looked as though they'd just crawled out of the trenches - a sharp contrast to what I'd been used to in Czechoslovakia.
Casualties were being loaded on to the plane. One, I remember, had shrapnel wounds in the stomach: 'This one won't survive, he'll die on the way,' I heard one of the helicopter crew, ferrying the wounded from the front line, comment casually. I was shocked how calmly they talked of death.
I think that was the most incomprehensible thing of all over there - the attitude to death. As I said before, the whole truth you'd never... What's unthinkable here was everyday reality over there. It's frightening and unpleasant to have to kill, you think, but you soon realise that what you really find objectionable is shooting someone point-blank. Killing en masse, in a group, is exciting, even - and I've seen this myself - fun. In peacetime our guns are stacked in a pyramid, with each pyramid under separate lock and key and protected by alarms. Over there you had your gun with you all the time - it was a part of you. In the evening you'd shoot out the light bulb with your pistol if you were feeling lazy - it was easier than getting up and switching it off. Or, half-crazy with the heat, you'd empty your submachine gun into the air - or worse... Once we surrounded a caravan, which resisted and tried to fight us off with machine-guns, so we were ordered to destroy it, which we did. Wounded camels were lying on the ground, howling... Is this what we were awarded medals from 'the grateful Afghan people' for? War is war and that means killing. We weren't given real guns to play cops and robbers with. We weren't sent to mend tractors and build houses. We killed the enemy wherever and whenever we could, and vice versa. But this wasn't the kind of war we knew about from books and films, with a front line, a no man's land, avant-guard and rear echelons, etc. You know the word kiriz? It's the word the Afghans use for the culverts, originally built for irrigation purposes. This was a 'kiriz war'. People would come up out of them like ghosts, day and night, with a Chinese sub-machine-gun in their hands, or the knife they'd just slaughtered a sheep with, or just a big stone. Quite possibly you'd been haggling with that same 'ghost' in the market a few hours before.
Suddenly, he wasn't a human being for you, because he'd killed your best friend, who was now just a lump of dead flesh lying on the ground. My friend's last words to me were: 'Don't write to my mother, I beg you, I don't want her to know anything about this... ' And to them you're just a Russky, not a human being.
Our artillery wipes his village off the face of the earth so thoroughly that when he goes back he literally can't find a trace of his mother, wife or children. Modern weaponry makes our crime even greater. I can kill one man with a knife, two with a mine... dozens with a missile. But I'm a soldier and killing's my profession. I'm like the slave of Aladdin's magic lamp, or rather the slave of the Defence Ministry. I'll shoot wherever I'm told to.
When I hear the order 'Fire!' I don't think, I fire, that's my job.
Still, I didn't go there to kill people. Why couldn't the Afghan people see us as we saw ourselves? I remember their kids standing in the snow and ice, barefoot except for their little rubber slipovers, and us giving them our rations. Once I saw a little boy run up to our truck, not to beg, as they usually did, but just to look at us. I had twenty Afganis in my pocket, which I gave him. He just knelt there in the sand, and didn't move until we'd got back in the APC and driven away.
On the other hand, there were instances of our soldiers stealing a few miserable kopecks from the kids who brought us water and so on... No, I wouldn't go there again, not for anything. I repeat: the truth is too terrible to be told. You lot, who stayed at home, don't need to know it, and neither do we, who were over there.
There were more of you, but you kept quiet. Our behaviour there was a product of our upbringing. Our children will grow up and deny their fathers ever fought in Afghanistan.
I've come across fake veterans. 'Oh, yes, I was there... ' they'll say.
'Where was your unit?' 'Er... in Kabul.' 'What unit was that?' 'Well... er... Spetsnaz' [Special Forces, somewhat equivalent to the SAS in the public mind].
Lunatics in asylums used to shout, 'I'm Stalin!'; now, normal guys stand up and claim: 'I fought in Afghanistan.' I'd put the lot of them in the madhouse.
I prefer to be on my own when I think about those days. I have a drink, sit down and listen to the songs we used to sing. Those times are pages from my life, and, although they're soiled I can't throw them away.
The young vets get together and get very angry that nobody wants to know. They find it hard to settle down and find some kind of moral values for themselves. 'I could kill someone - if I knew I'd get away with it,' one admitted to me. 'I'd do it just like that, for no particular reason. I wouldn't care.' They had Afghanistan, now it's gone and they miss it.
You can't go on repenting and praying for forgiveness all your life. I want to get married and I want a son. The sooner we shut up about all this the better it'll be for everyone. The only people who need this 'truth' are the know-nothings who want to use it as an excuse to spit in our faces. 'You bastards! You killed and robbed and now you expect special privileges?' We're expected to take all the blame, and to accept that everything we went through was for nothing.
Why did it all happen? Why? Why? Why? Recently in Moscow I went to the toilet at one of the railway stations. I saw a sign saying 'Cooperative toilet' [i.e. private enter-prise]. A young lad sat there, taking money. Another sign behind him read: 'Children up to 7 years, invalids, veterans of World War II and wars of liberation - free.' I was amazed: 'Did you think that up yourself?' I asked him.
'Yes!' he said proudly. 'Just show your ID and in you go.' 'So my father went through the whole war, and I spent two years with my mouth full of Afghan sand, just so we could piss for nothing in your toilet?' I said. I hated that boy more than I hated anyone all the time I was in Afghan. He had decided to pay me.
PRIVATE, GUN LAYER
Sometimes I wonder how things would have turned out if I hadn't gone to the war. I'd be happy, I think, and wouldn't have found out things about myself which I'd rather not have known. Thus spoke Zarathustra: Not only have I looked into the abyss but the abyss has looked into my soul...
I was in my second year at the radio-technical institute here in Minsk, but my main interest was in music and art. I was vacillating between those two worlds when I got my call-up papers. I have no willpower - by which I mean I'm not the sort of person who tries to meddle with his fate. If you do try to influence it you lose anyhow. My way, whatever happens you're not responsible - or guilty. I didn't want to go into the army, of course. The first thing I learnt about army life was that you're a slave. I felt the army took my personality away from me.
They didn't say it straight out but it was obvious we were going to Afghanistan. I didn't try to influence my fate. We were lined up on the parade ground and they read out this order that we were 'fighters in the international struggle'. We listened very quietly - well, we couldn't very well shout out, 'I'm frightened! I don't want to go!' We were off to fulfil our international duty - it was all cut and dried.
It really started at the Gardez clearing-centre, when the dembels took everything of any value off us, including our boots, paratrooper vests and berets. And we had to pay: an old beret cost us 10 foreign currency vouchers, a set of badges 25. A pair's meant to have a set of five - one to show you're a member of a guards' regiment, the others are the insignia for the airborne forces and your pair battalion, your class-number and your army-sportsman badge. They also stole our parade shirts, which they traded with Afghans for drugs. A gang of dembels came up to me. 'Where's your kit-bag?' They poked around in it, took what they wanted and there was nothing I could do about it. All of us in our company had our uniforms taken and had to buy old ones in return. The Quartermaster's department said simply, 'You won't be needing your new togs - they will, they're going home.' I wrote a letter home describing the beautiful Mongolian sky, the good food and the sunshine. But my war had already started.
The first time we drove out to a village the battalion commander taught us how to behave towards the local populace: 'You call all Afghans, regardless of age, "batcha", which means "boy', roughly.
Got that? I'll show you the rest later.' On the way we came across an old man. 'Halt! Watch this! ' The commander jumped down from the vehicle, went up to the old man, pushed his turban off his head, poked his fingers in his beard. 'Right, on your way, batcha! ' Not quite what we'd been expecting. In the village we threw briquettes of pearl barley to the kids, but they ran away thinking they were grenades.
My first taste of action was escorting a convoy. This is exciting and interesting - this is war! I thought. I'm holding a gun and carrying grenades, just like in the posters! As we approach the so-called 'green' zone (scrub and bush) I, as gun layer, look carefully through the gun sight. I see some kind of turban.
'Seryozha!' I shout to the chap sitting by the barrel. 'I can see a turban! What do I do?' 'Fire!' 'What d'you mean - fire?' 'What d'you think I mean?' He shoots.
'The turban's still there. It's white. What do I do?' 'Fire!!! 'We use up half the carrier's ammunition supply firing the 30mm gun and the machine-gun.
'Where's this white turban? It's a mound of snow.' Then: 'Seryozha! Your mound of snow's moving! Your little snowman's got a gun!' We jump down and let him have it with our automatics.
It wasn't a question of, 'do I kill him or don't I?' Never. All you wanted was to eat and sleep and get it all over and done with, so you could stop shooting and go home. We'd be driving over that burning sand, breathing it in, bullets whistling round our heads - and we'd sleep through the lot. To kill or not kill? That's a post-war question. The psychology of war itself is a lot more urgent. The Afghans weren't people to us, and vice versa. We couldn't afford to see each other as human beings. You blockade a village, wait 24 hours, then another 24, with the heat and tiredness driving you crazy. You end up even more brutal than the 'greens', as we called our allies, the Afghan National Army.
At least these were their people, they were born in these villages, where as we did what we did without thinking, to people quite unlike us, people we didn't understand. It was easier for us to fire our guns and throw our grenades.
Once we were going back to barracks with seven of our boys dead and two more shell-shocked. The villages along the way were silent, the inhabitants had either fled into the mountains or gone to ground. Suddenly an old woman hobbled up to us, crying, screaming, beating her fists on the APC. We'd killed her son and she was cursing us - but our only reaction was, what's she crying and threatening us for? We ought to shoot her, too. We didn't, but the point is, we could have done. We pushed her off the road and drove on. We were carrying seven dead - what was she crying for? What did she expect? We didn't want to know anything about anything. We were soldiers in a war. We were completely cut off from Afghan life -the locals weren't allowed to set foot in our army compound. All we knew about them was that they wanted to kill or injure us, and we were keen to stay alive. Actually I wanted to be lightly wounded, just to have a rest or at least a good night's sleep, but I didn't want to die.
One day two of our lads went to a shop, shot the shopkeeper and his family and stole everything they could lay their hands on.
There was an enquiry and of course everyone denied having anything to do with it. They examined the bullets in the bodies and eventually charged three men: an officer, an NCO and a private. But when our barracks were being searched for the stolen money, etc, I remember how humiliated and insulted we felt -why all this fuss about a few dead Afghans? There was a court martial and the NCO and the private were sentenced to the firing squad. We were all on their side - the general opinion was that they were being executed for their stupidity rather than for what they'd done. The shopkeeper's dead family didn't exist for us.
We were only doing our international duty. It was all quite cut and dried. It's only now, as the stereotypes begin to collapse, that I see things differently. And to think, I used not to be able to read 'Mumu' [a sentimental story by Turgenev about the relationship between a dumb peasant and his dog] without crying my eyes out! War affects a person in a strange way: it takes some of his -or her - humanity away. When we were growing up we were never taught 'Thou shalt not kill'. On the contrary - all these war veterans, with rows of medals pinned to their splendid uniforms, came to our schools and colleges to describe their exploits in detail. I never once heard it said that it was wrong to kill in war.
I was brought up to believe that only those who killed in peacetime were condemned as murderers. In war such actions were known as 'filial duty to the Motherland', 'a man's sacred work' and 'defence of the Fatherland'. We were told that we were reliving the achievements of the heroes of the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis, and who was I to doubt it? It was continually hammered into us that we were the best of the best, so why should I question whether what we were doing was right? Later, when I began to see things differently, my army mates said, 'Either you've gone mad or you want to go mad.' And yet, as I said, I was too fatalistic to try to change anything. (I was brought up by my mother, who was a powerful and dominant woman.) At training-camp veterans from the Special Forces described to us how they'd stormed villages and slaughtered all the inhabitants. It seemed romantic. We wanted to be as strong and fearless as they were. I love music and books but I also wanted to storm villages, cut throats and boast about it afterwards. I've probably got an inferiority complex.
My actual memories, though, are very different... My first attack of sheer panic, for example. We were driving in the APC when the shelling started. The APCs came to a halt. 'Take defensive positions!' someone shouted. We started jumping off. I stood up, ready to jump, but another lad took my place and was killed by a direct hit from a grenade. I felt I was falling, slowly, horizontally, like in a cartoon... with bits of someone else's body raining down on me. It's fixed in my memory forever, that's what's so terrible. I guess that's how you experience your own death, from a distance. Strange. I managed to crawl into an irrigation-ditch, stretched out and lifted my wounded arm. After a bit I realised I wasn't seriously injured, but I cradled my arm and didn't move.
No, I didn't turn into one of those supermen who storm villages and cut throats. Within the year I was in hospital, suffering from dystrophy. I was the only 'new boy' in our unit, the other ten, nearing the end of their tour of duty, were known as 'granddads'. I was forced to do all their washing, chop all the wood, and clean the whole camp - I never got more than three hours' sleep a night. One of the things I had to do was fetch water from the stream. One morning I had a strong instinct not to go - I had a strong feeling the mujahedin had been about that night, planting mines, but I was so scared I'd be beaten again, and there was no water for washing. So off I went, and duly stepped on a mine. It was only a signal mine, thank God, so a rocket went up and illuminated the whole area. I fell, crawled on..' must get at least a bucket of water, for them to clean their teeth with. They won't care what's happened, they'll just beat me up again... 'That was typical of camp life. It took just one year to turn me from a normal, healthy lad into a dystrophic who couldn't walk through the ward without the help of a nurse. I eventually went back to my unit and got beaten up again, until one day my leg was broken and I had to have an operation. The battalion commander came to see me in hospital.
'Who did this?' he asked.
It had happened at night but I knew perfectly well who'd done it. But I wasn't going to grass. You just didn't grass - that was the iron law of camp life.
'Why keep quiet? Give me his name and I'll have the bastard court-martialled.' I kept quiet. The authorities were powerless against the unwritten rules of army life, which were literally life and death to us. If you tried to fight against them you always lost in the end. Near the end of my two years I even tried to beat up someone myself.
I didn't manage it, though. The 'rule of the granddads' doesn't depend on individuals - it's a product of the herd instinct. First you get beaten up, then you beat up others. I had to hide the fact that I couldn't do it from my fellow dembels. I would have been despised by them as well as by the victims.
When you get home for demob you have to report to the local recruiting office. A coffin was brought in while I was there - our 1st lieutenant, by sheer chance. 'He died in the execution of his international duty,' I read on the little brass plate, and remembered how he used to stumble along the corridor, blind drunk, and smash the sentry's jaw in. It happened regularly once a week.
If you didn't keep out of the way you'd end up spitting your teeth out. There's not much humanity in a human being - that's what war taught me. If a man's hungry, or ill, he'll be cruel - and that's just about all humanity amounts to.
I only went to the cemetery once. 'He died a hero.' 'He displayed courage and valour.' 'He fulfilled his military duty.' That's what the gravestones said. There were heroes, of course there were, in the particular sense in which the word is used in war; like when a man throws himself over his friend to protect him, or carries his wounded commander to safety. But I know that one of those heroes in that cemetery deliberately overdosed, and another was shot dead by a sentry who caught him breaking into the food store (we'd all climbed in there at some time or other...
I longed for biscuits and condensed milk). Forget what I said about the cemetery, please, tear it up. No one can say what's true about them and what isn't, now. Let the living have their medal sand the dead their legends - keep everyone happy! The war and life back home have one thing in common: neither are anything like the way they're described in books! I've created a world of my own for myself, thank God, a world of books and music which has cut me off from all that and been my salvation.
It was only here at home that I began to sort out who I really was and what had happened to me. I prefer to sort it out alone. I don't like going to the Afgantsi clubs, and I can't see myself going to schools to give speeches about war, and telling the kids how I was turned from an immature boy into a killer, no, not even a killer, into a machine that just needed food and sleep and nothing else. I hate those Afgantsi. Their clubs are just like the army itself, and they have the same army mentality. 'We don't like the heavy metal fans, do we, lads? OK, let's go and smash their teeth in!' That's a part of my life I want to leave behind forever. Our society is a very cruel one, which is a fact I never noticed before.
When I was in hospital over there we stole some Phenazipam- it's used to treat mental breakdown and the dose is one or two tablets per day. One night a couple of the boys took 30 between them, and at three in the morning went to the kitchen to wash the dishes (which were all clean). A few others and I sat there grimly, playing cards. Someone else pissed on his pillow. A totally absurd scene, until a nurse rushed out in horror and called the guards.
That's how I mainly remember the war - as totally absurd.
'MAJOR COMMANDING A MOUNTAIN INFANTRY COMPANY
A lot of people now claim it was all a waste of time. I suppose they want to carve 'It Was All In Vain' on the gravestones.
We did our killing over there but we're being condemned for it at home. Casualties were flown back to Soviet airports and unloaded in secret so the public wouldn't find out. You say that's all in the past now, do you? But your 'past' is very recent. I came home on leave in 1986. 'So you get a nice suntan, go fishing and earn fantastic amounts of money, do you?' people asked me. How could they be expected to know the truth, when the media kept quiet.
Even the air is different over there. I still smell it in my dreams.
'We were an occupying force' - that's what the newspapers claim now. If so, why did we give them food and medicine? We'd arrive in a village, and they'd all be happy to see us. We'd leave, and they'd be equally happy to see us go. I never understood why they were always so happy.
Once we stopped a bus for a security check. I heard the dry click of a pistol and one of my men fell to the ground. We turned him on his back and saw a bullet had gone through his heart...
I felt like mortaring the lot of them. We searched the bus but didn't find the pistol or anything else, except copper kettles and baskets full of fruit being taken to market. The passengers were all women, but someone killed my man...
Go on! Carve 'It Was All In Vain!' on the gravestones...
We were on foot, on a routine patrol. I tried to shout 'Halt! ' but for some reason I was struck dumb. We carried on and bang! Some moments later I lost consciousness; then I realized I was at the bottom of the crater. I tried to crawl but I didn't have the strength and the others overtook me. I wasn't in pain, though. I managed to crawl 40 yards or so, until I heard someone say, 'Sit! It's safe now.' I tried to sit like the others, then I saw my legs were gone. I dragged my gun towards me to shoot myself but someone snatched it out of my hand. 'The major's lost his legs!' I heard him say, and then, 'I'm sorry for the major.' When I hardhat word 'sorry' pain raced through my whole body, such a dreadful pain that I began to howl.
Even now, here at home, I never take the path through the forest - I stick to asphalt and concrete. I'm scared of grass.
There's a soft, springy lawn by our house but it still frightens me.
In hospital we men who'd lost both legs asked to be put together in one ward. There were four of us. Two wooden legs stood beach bed, eight wooden legs in total. On 23 February, Soviet Army Day, some schoolgirls came with their teacher to give us flowers. They stood there crying. None of us ate a thing or said a word for two days afterwards.
Some stupid relative or other came to visit and brought a cake.
'It was all a waste of time, boys!' he said. 'Don't worry, though, you'll get a nice pension and sit and watch television all day long!' 'Get out!' Four crutches flew at his head.
Some time after that one of the four tried to hang himself in the toilet. He wound one end of a sheet round his neck and tied the other to a window-handle. He'd received a letter from his girlfriend: 'You know, Afgantsi are out of fashion now,' she'd written. And he'd lost both his legs...
Go on! Carve 'It Was All In Vain!' on the gravestones.
I ST LIEUTENANT, INTERPRETER
Two years were enough... I just want to forget the whole stupid nightmare. I never went there.
But the truth is, I did.
In 1986 I graduated from the military academy, took my accumulated leave and that summer went to Moscow to report for duty at the HQ of a certain important military organization.
It wasn't easy to locate. I eventually found the reception desk and dialed the three-figure number I'd been given.
'Hello? Colonel Sazonov speaking.' 'Good morning, Comrade Colonel! I am at your disposal. At the moment I'm down at reception.' 'Ah, yes, I know... Do you know where you're being posted>''To the DRA [Democratic Republic of Afghanistan]. Kabul.' 'Didn't expect it, eh?' 'On the contrary, Comrade Colonel!' And I was being completely honest, because for the previous five years it had been drummed into us that we mould be going over there.
You know the movie image of an officer departing for war? The hurried preparations after an urgent phone call, the stiff upper lip farewell to his wife and children before he strides to the waiting airplane, its engines roaring in the pre-dawn shadows? Well, it wasn't quite like that. My road to war was paved with bureaucratic documents. First I had to get my orders, my gun and my dry rations. Then, in addition to a certificate that said I had a 'correct understanding of Party and Government policy', I required a service passport, visa, testimonials, instructions, vaccination certificates, customs declarations and ration cards. Eventually, however, I boarded my plane, settled down in my seat and heard a drunken major exclaim, 'Forward! To the mines!' The newspapers informed us that the 'military and political situation in the DRA remains complex and contradictory'. Military opinion maintained that the withdrawal of the first six regiments was pure propaganda - there was no question of a total withdrawal of Soviet forces in the foreseeable future, and none of my fellow-passengers doubted that the war would last out our tour of duty.
'Forward! To the mines!' as the drunken major, already asleep, shouted again.
Well, I was a paratrooper and the army, as I soon found out, was divided into paras and the rest, known as solaria (a term whose etymology I never discovered). Many of our soldiers and NCOs, as well as some officers, had their arms tattooed. These tattoos were mostly rather similar, usually featuring an Ilyushin-p6 with a parachute beneath it, but there were some variations: one I saw as a romantic scene with clouds, birds, a para hanging from his' chute and the touching inscription 'Love the sky!' Among the unwritten rules of the paras was the following: 'A para kneels for two reasons only - to drink water with his hands, and to pay his respects to his dead friend. 'My war...
'Attention! Your route will take you from your camp here, via the district party offices in Bagram, to the village of Shevan.
Speed of the convoy will be dictated by the leading vehicle. Distance between vehicles to be dependent on speed. Code words: I'll be known as Freza, the rest of you by the numbers on the sides of your vehicles. Stand at ease!' This was the normal routine before the departure of one of our agitprop expeditions. The CO might add, 'You are forbidden to remove your helmets or flak jackets . Keep your gun in your hands at all times. 'I jump into my vehicle, a small, lightly armored and easily maneuverable affair known over there as a bali-bali. 'Bali' is Afghani for 'Yes'; when Afghans test their microphones they always say 'bali-bali' instead of our 'One two three four testing'.
As an interpreter I'm interested in anything to do with language.
'Salto, Salto, this is Freza. Let's get this show on the road! 'Behind a low stone wall we find a single store building of brick and plaster. A red sign proclaims, 'District Party Commit-tee'. There to greet us on the porch stands Comrade Lagmaan, dressed in Soviet khaki.
'Salaam Alejkum, raik Lagmaanf' 'Salaam Alejkum. Tchetour asti! thud asti! Dzhor asti! Khair asti?' He intones the familiar phrases of traditional Afghan welcome, thereby indicating his intense concern with our state of health.
No reply to these questions is required, although the identical phrases may be repeated.
The CO doesn't miss the opportunity to utter his favorite phrase: 'Tchetour asti? Khub asti? Afghan's nasty. 'Comrade Lagmaan doesn't understand and, bewildered, looks at me. 'It's a Russian proverb,' I explain.
We are invited into his study. Tea is brought in metal teapots on a tray. Tea is an indispensable aspect of Afghan hospitality.
Without tea work cannot begin and discussion is unthinkable. To decline a cup of tea is no less a snub than to refuse to shake hands on meeting.
In the village we are met by the elders and the eternally dirty kids (the youngest are never washed at all, in accordance with the Sheriat, their faith, which maintains that a layer of dirt protects them from evil influences). They are dressed in whatever rags they can find. Since I speak Farsi they all insist on testing my knowledge of the language. The test, as ever, is in the form of the question, 'What's the time?' My reply evokes a storm of pleasure: I really do speak Farsi, after all! 'Are you a Muslim?' 'I am,' I lie proof is required. 'Do you know the kalema?' The kalema is the special formulation one utters to become a Muslim.
'La ilyakh illya miakh va Mukhamed rasul allakh', I declare.
'There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet.' 'Dost! Dost! (A friend!),' the kids mutter, stretching out their skinny hands as a sign of acceptance.
They often ask me to repeat these words, and bring their friends, who also admiringly whisper, 'He knows the kalema!' Afghan songs blare out from the loudspeakers, which even the Afghans call 'Alla Pugacheva' [a universally popular Russian singer]. We soldiers hang out visual propaganda materials from our vehicles - flags, posters, slogans - and unfurl a screen for the film show. The medics put up tables and unpack their crates of medicines.
The meeting opens. A mullah in a long white robe and a white turban comes forward to read a sura from the Koran. Then he turns to Allah, begging him to protect believers from all the evils of the universe. Bending his arm at the elbow he raises his palms to Allah and we all copy his movements. Now Comrade Lagmaan begins to speak. His is a very long speech, a characteristic feature of Afghan life. They are all capable of making speeches and love to do so. There's a phenomenon known in linguistic jargon as 'emotional color'. Well, an Afghan speech is not only colored but highly decorated - with metaphors, epithets and elaborate comparisons...
(Afghan officers frequently expressed their surprise that our political workers used notes in their talks and discussions. At party meetings and political seminars our lecturers and propagandists relied on the same stiff and tired old phraseology and vocabulary learnt from countless books and pamphlets; for example, 'in the avant-garde of the wider communist movement', 'the importance of setting an example at all times', 'ceaselessly to put into practice', 'as well as successes there will be setbacks' and even the sinister' some Comrades do not understand'). Long before I arrived in Afghanistan such meetings as ours in the village had become meaningless obligations; the villagers came for their medical checkups and a free packet of flour each. The ovations and friendly shouts of 'zaido bod!' - 'Hail to the April Revolution' - were a thing of the past, as were the raised fists which invariably accompanied every speech in the early days, when the people still believed in our aims - the splendid ideals of the April Revolution and the brilliant future that it seemed to promise.
The children do not listen to the speech - they're waiting for the film. As usual, we have cartoons in English followed by two documentaries in Farsi and Pushtu. Their favorite movies are sentimental Indian love stories and adventures with lots of guns and violence.
After the film-show we distribute presents - today, toys and bags of flour. In fact we hand them over to the village headman who is meant to share them out among the poor and the families of war-victims. As he swears publicly that all will be done honestly and properly his son begins to carry the gifts to their house.
'Do you think he'll share things out fairly?' the CO worries.
'I doubt it. The locals have already warned us he's a grafted.
Tomorrow it'll all be for sale in the shops. 'Command: 'Prepare to move off!' 'Vehicle number 112 ready, 305 ready, 307, 308... ' The children see us off with a hail of stones. One hits me. "'From the grateful Afghan people", as they say,' I observe.
We return to our unit via Kabul. The shop-windows are hung with signs in Russian: 'Cheapest vodka', 'Any goods at any price' and 'Russian Friends, Come to Bratishka [brother] for All Your Purchases!' The merchants call out in Russian: 'T-shirts!', 'Jeans!', 'A Grey Count dinner service for six places!', 'Trainers with velcro! ', 'Lurex with blue and white stripes!' We pass barrows laden with our condensed milk, cans of peas, thermoses, electrickettles, mattresses, blankets... It's all so utterly, totally different from home.
'SERGEANT, INTELLIGENCE CORPS
I assumed people would become kinder and gentler after all the bloodshed. Surely they wouldn't want even more killing? But this friend of mine picks up the paper. 'They have returned from captivity,' he reads, and starts swearing.
'What's up with you?' I ask.
'I'd put 'em all up against the wall and shoot them myself!' 'Haven't you seen enough blood already?' 'They make me sick, those traitors. We were getting our arms and legs blown off while they were going round New York looking at skyscrapers.'* Over there we were so close I never wanted to be away from him. Now I'd rather be alone. Loneliness is my salva
It's like in a dream, as if I've already seen this before in some film, and the feeling now is that I've never killed anyone...
I volunteered. I wanted to find out what I was capable of. I'm very ambitious. I went to university, but you can't show - or know what you're made of in a place like that. I dropped out in my second year. I wanted to be a hero and looked for a chance to be one. They say it was a man's war but the truth is, it was a boy's war. It was kids not long out of school who did the fighting. It was like a game for us. Self esteem and pride were terribly important: can I do it or can't I? He can - can I? That's what we were worried about, not politics. I'd been preparing myself for a challenge of some kind since I was a young boy. My favourite author was Jack London. A real man had to be strong - and war makes you strong. My girlfriend tried to talk me out of it. 'Do you really think writers like Bunin or Mandelstam thought that way?' she asked me. None of my friends understood me either.
Some got married, others got involved in Zen or yoga and such-like. I was the only one who went to the war.
The mountains above you, scorched by the sun, down below, a little girl calling her goat, and a woman hanging out her washing.
Just like at home in the Caucasus... To tell the truth, I was a bit disappointed, until one night they shot at our campfire. I picked up the teakettle and there was a bullet under it.
On route-marches the thirst was sheer torture and utterly humiliating. Your whole mouth dried up, it seemed to be full of dust and you couldn't work up enough saliva to swallow. We licked up the dew and even our own sweat. I was determined to get through it. I caught a tortoise, slit its throat with a sharp stone, and drank its blood. No one else could face it. I was the only one.
I realised I was capable of killing. I had a gun in my hand. The first time we went into battle I noticed how some of the lads were in a state of shock. They fainted, or started vomiting when they realised they'd killed people or saw human brains or eyes being blown out. I could take it though. One of the lads was a hunter who bragged that before he joined the army he'd killed hares and wild boar, but he vomited with the rest of them. It's one thing to shoot animals, quite another to kill human beings. In battle you go as stiff as wood, cold reason takes over, you calculate... This is my gun and my life. The gun becomes part of your body, like a third arm...
It was a partisan war, and set-piece battles were rare. It was you against him. You grew as sharp as a lynx. You fire a burst -he stays still. You wait - what next? You feel the bullet whistle past you even before you hear the bang. You crawl from stone to stone, you hide, you race behind him like a hunter. Your body's like a coiled spring and you don't breathe until you pounce. If it comes to it you kill him with your gun-butt. You kill him and you sense you're alive! 'I'M ALIVE!' But there's no joy in killing a man. You kill so you can get home safe.
No two dead bodies look the same. Water, for instance, does something to the human face that gives it a kind of smile. After rain they all look clean. Death in the dust, without water, is more honest, somehow. The uniform may be brand-new but there's a dry red leaf where the head should be, squashed flat like a lizard.
You find bodies propped against the wall of a house: I saw one by a pile of nut-shells he must've just cracked, his eyes were open because there'd been no one to close them. You've only got 10-15minutes to close the eyes after death - then it's too late... BUT I'M ALIVE! I saw another, curled up, with his flies undone, he was relieving himself. They lie there the way they were at the last moment of their lives... BUT I'M ALIVE! I need to touch myself to make sure...
Birds aren't scared of death, they sit and watch. Nor are children, - they sit there too, and look on calmly, like the birds.
They're curious.
Back in the canteen you eat your soup, look at your neighbour and imagine him dead. There was a time when I couldn't bear to look at photos of my family. When I got back from action I wouldn't look women and children in the face. Eventually you get used to it, go and work out next morning as us usual - I was into weight training. I was keen on fitness and wanted to be in good shape to go home. I admit I couldn't sleep, but that was because of the lice, especially in winter. We sprayed the mattresses with some kind of dust, but it didn't make much difference...
I only started to be afraid of dying when I was back home and my son was born. Then I was scared that if I died he'd grow up without me. I was hit seven times, I could easily have kicked the bucket, but I didn't. Sometimes I even have the feeling I didn't play the game to the end, or fight to the finish, rather...
I don't feel guilty and I don't get nightmares. I always chose honest combat - him against me. If I saw a couple of our lads beating up a POW with his hands tied behind his back, lying on the ground like a bundle of rags, I'd chase them away. I despised people like that. One chap started shooting eagles with his automatic and I socked his ugly mug for him. The birds hadn't done anything wrong, after all.
When my family asked what it was like over there I'd just say, 'Look, I'm sorry, I'll tell you some other time.' I graduated and now I'm an engineer. I just want to be an engineer, not a 'veteran of the Afghan war'. I want to forget all that, although I don't know what will become of us, the generation that went through it.
This is the first time I've talked about it, talking like we're strangers in a train and getting off at different stops. Look, my hands are shaking, I'm upset for some reason. I thought I'd come out of it relatively unscathed. If you write about me don't mention my surname. I'm not afraid of anything, I just don't want to be involved again...
PRIVATE, GRENADIER REGIMENT
I went to Afghanistan thinking I'd come home with my head held high. Now I realise the person I was before this war has gone forever.
Our company was combing through a village. I was patrolling with another lad. He pushed open a hut door with his leg and was shot point-blank with a machine-gun. Nine rounds. In that situation hatred takes over. We shot everything, right down to the domestic animals. In fact, shooting animals is the worst. I was sorry for them. I wouldn't let the donkeys be shot - they'd done nothing wrong, had they? They had amulets hanging from their necks, exactly the same as the children. It really upset me, setting fire to that wheat-field - I'm a country boy myself.
When I was over there I only remembered the good things about life back home, especially my childhood, like the way I used to lie on the grass among the bluebells and marguerites, how we roasted ears of wheat over a log-fire and ate them...
The heat from the fire was so terrific that it melted the iron on the roofs of the little shops. The field was swallowed up by the flames in an instant. It smelt of bread and that reminded me of when I was a boy, too.
In Afghanistan night falls like a curtain. One moment it's light, the next - night. A bit like me - I was a boy but I became a man all at one go. That's war for you.
Sometimes when it rains there you look up and see the rain falling, but it never hits the ground. We watched TV programmes by satellite showing life at home going on as normal, but it was irrelevant to us somehow... I can talk about all this to you but I feel terribly frustrated, because I can't get over to you what it was really all about.
Sometimes I want to write down everything I saw. Like, in hospital, the lad who'd lost his arms, his legs and his mate. I remember sitting on his bed writing a letter for him to his mother.
Or the little Afghan girl who pinched a sweet from a Soviet soldier and had both her hands hacked off by her own people. I'd like to write it all down exactly as it was and without any comments. If it rained I'd say it rained, just that, without a lot of talk about whether it was a good or bad thing that it was raining.
When it was our time to go home we expected a warm welcome and open arms - then we discovered that people couldn't careless whether we'd survived or not. In the courtyard of our block of flats I met up with the kids I'd known before. 'Oh, you're back- that's good,' they said, and went off to school. My teachers didn't ask about anything either. This was the sum total of our conversation: I, solemnly: 'We should perpetuate the memory of our school fellows who died doing their international duty.' They: 'They were dunces and hooligans. How can we put up a memorial plaque to them in the school?' People back home had their own view of the war. 'So you think you were heroes, were you? You lost a war, and anyhow, who needed it, apart from Brezhnev and a few war mongering generals? 'Apparently my friends died for nothing, and I might have died for nothing too.
Well, at least my Mum was looking out of the window, the day I got home, and saw me coming, and ran out on to the road shouting for joy. Whatever anyone says, and however much history gets rewritten, I know that those boys who died there mere heroes.
I had a talk with an old lecturer at college. 'You were a victim of a political mistake,' he said. 'You were forced to become accomplices to a crime.' 'I was eighteen then,' I told him. 'How old were you? You kept quiet when we were being roasted alive. You kept quiet when we were being brought home in body bags and military bands played in the cemeteries. You kept quiet over here while we were doing the killing over there. Now all of a sudden you go on about victim sand mistakes... 'Anyhow, I don't want to be a victim of a political mistake. And I'll fight for the right not to be! Whatever anyone says, those boys were heroes!
ARTILLERY CAPTAIN
I was lucky. I've come home alive, with my arms, legs and eyes.
I wasn't burnt and I didn't go mad. We soon realised this wasn't the war we'd expected to fight, but we just decided to get it over with, stay alive and go home. There'd be plenty of time to analyse it later.
Mine was the first relief contingent to go to Afghanistan. We had orders, not ideals. You don't discuss orders - if you did you wouldn't have an army for long. You know what Engels said? 'A soldier must be like a bullet, constantly ready to be fired.' I learnt that by heart. You go to war in order to kill. Killing is my profession - that's what I was trained to do.
Was I afraid for myself? I just assumed that other people might get killed, but not me. You can't really comprehend the possibility of your own annihilation. And don't forget - I wasn't a boy when I went out there, I was thirty years old.
That's where I learnt what life was about. I tell you straight -they were the best years of my life. Life here is rather grey and petty: work - home, home - work. There we had to work every-thing out for ourselves and test our mettle as men.
So much of it was exotic, too: the way the morning mist swirled in the ravines like a smoke screen, even those burubukhaiki, the high-sided, brightly decorated Afghan trucks, and the red buses with sheep and cows and people all crammed together inside, and the yellow taxis... There are places there which remind you of the moon with their fantastic, cosmic landscapes. You get the feeling that there's nothing alive in those unchanging mountains, that it's nothing but rocks - until the rocks start shooting at you! You sense that even nature is your enemy.
We existed between life and death - and we held other men's life and death in our hands too. Is there any feeling more powerful than that? We'll never walk, or make love, or be loved, the way we walked and loved and were loved over there. Everything was heightened by the closeness of death: death hovered everywhere and all the time. Life was full of adventure: I learnt the smell of danger - I've got a sixth sense for it now. We're homesick for it, some of us; it's called the 'Afghan syndrome'.
We never bothered ourselves with questions about whether we were doing the right thing or not. We carried out our orders the way we were trained to. Now, of course, with the benefit of hind sight and a lot of information which we didn't have at the time, the whole business is being reconsidered and re-evaluated.
After less than ten years! At the time we had the clear image of an enemy, an enemy very familiar to us from books and school and all those films about the basmach [members of the anti-Soviet independence movement in Central Asia, particularly in the late 1920s]. The Write Desert Sun, for instance. I must have seen that film five times at least. Just when we were complaining that we'd been born too late for World War II - eureka! A ready-made enemy appeared on the horizon. We were brought up to find inspiration in war and revolution - and nothing else.
As I said, we were the first relief contingent to be sent out. We were quite happy digging foundations for barracks, canteens and army clubs. We were issued with TT-44 pistols dating from World War II, the ones you see political commissars swaggering about with in old films. They were no use at all except to shoot yourself with, or sell in the bazaar. We walked around like partisans, in whatever we could find, usually sweat pants and trainers.
I was like the Good Soldier Schweik. When it was 50' Celsius our superiors still expected us to wear ties and full uniform as per Army Regulations from the North Pole to the Equator! In the morgue I saw body-bags with human flesh hacked to pieces. That was a nasty shock. But within a few months we'd be watching a film in the open air and if tracer shells flashed past the screen we'd just carry on watching... Or we'd be playing volleyball and a bombardment would begin, so we'd check where the shells were coming from and go back to the game. The films they sent out were either about war, or Lenin, or wives cheating on their husbands. I'd gladly have machine-gunned all those women sleeping with other men while their husbands were away! We all wanted comedies but they never sent a single one. The screen was two or three sheets sewn together and strung between a couple of trees, with the audience sitting on the sand.
Once a week we had bath and drinks night. A bottle of vodka cpst 30 cheki, so we brought it with us from home. Customs regulations permitted two bottles of vodka, four of wine but unlimited beer, so we'd pour out the beer and fill the bottles with vodka. Or else you might open a bottle of mineral water and find it was 40' proof! People drank used aeroplane kerosene and antifreeze. We'd warn new recruits not to touch antifreeze, whatever else they drank, but within a few days they'd be in hospital with their insides corroded.
We smoked hash. One friend of mine got so high in battle he was sure every bullet had his name on it, wherever it was really headed. Another smoked at night and hallucinated that his family was with him, started kissing his wife. Some had all-colour visions such as in a film. At first the traders in the bazaar sold us the stuff but later they gave it us for free. 'Go on, Russky, have a smoke!' they would say. The kids would run after us, pushing it into our hands.
A lot of my friends were killed. One touched the trip wire of a mine with his heel, heard the detonator click and, as always happens, looked at the noise in surprise instead of hurling himself to the ground. He died of dozens of shrapnel wounds. Then there was a tank which exploded so violently that the base opened up like a can of jam and the caterpillars blew off their rollers. The driver tried to escape through the hatch, we saw one arm emerge and that was all - he was burnt in his tank. Back in barracks no one wanted to sleep in his bed. One day a new recruit arrived so we told him to take the bed. 'It doesn't matter to you, you never knew him anyhow... 'We were most upset by the ones with children, children who'd grow up without a Dad. On the other hand, what about those who left no one behind, who died as if they'd never been? We were incredibly badly paid for fighting that war: we got twice basic pay (basic pay being worth 270 foreign currency vouchers), less all kinds of stop pages, compulsory membership-fees, subscriptions and tax. At that time an ordinary volunteer worker in the far north was getting 1,500. 'Military advisers' earned five to ten times more than us. The difference was particularly obvious going through customs at the border: we'd have a tape-recorder and a couple of pairs of jeans, they'd have half a dozen trunks, so heavy the squad dies could hardly carry them.
When we got back in the Soviet Union, in Tashkent, it was no easier.
'Back from Afghan? Want a girl? I've got one for you as soft as a peach, dear... ''No thanks, I'm trying to get home on leave. To my wife. I need a ticket.' 'Tickets cost money... D'you want to sell your Italian sun-glasses?' 'It's a deal.' To get on the plane to Sverdlovsk cost me 100 roubles, those Italian sun-glasses, a Japanese lurex scarf and a French make-upset. In the ticket-queue I learnt the way things worked: 'Why stand here for days? Forty vouchers slipped into your service passport and you'll be home next day.' I get to the ticket-window. 'Ticket for Sverdlovsk.' 'No tickets. Open your eyes and look at the board!' I slip the forty vouchers in and try again. 'Ticket to Sverdlovsk please, miss.' 'I'll just go and check. Oh, lucky you came by, we've just had a cancellation. 'You get home and land in a completely different world - the world of the family. The first few days you don't hear a thing they say. You just watch them, touch them. I can't explain what it means to stroke your child's head after everything that's happened.
The morning smell of coffee and pancakes, your wife calling you to breakfast...
In one month you have to leave again. Why and where - you don't know. You don't think about it - you simply mustn't think about it. You just know you'll go because you must. At night, lying beside your wife, you still taste the Afghan sand, soft as flour, between your teeth. A few days ago you were lying in that red dust next to the APC... You wake up, jump out of bed -no, you're still home, it's tomorrow you're going back.
Today my father asked me to help him slaughter a piglet. In the past I'd refuse and run out of the house with my hands over my ears so as not to hear the screaming.
'Hold it a moment,' says my father.
'No, not like that, straight to the heart, like this,' I say, and take the knife and kill it myself.
In the morgue I saw body bags with human limbs hacked off.
Yes, that was a nasty shock. You should never be the first to spill blood - it's a process that's hard to stop. Once I saw some soldiers sitting around while an old man and a little donkey passed by on the street below. Suddenly they lobbed a mortar and killed the old man and his donkey.
'Hey, lads! Have you gone mad? It was just an old man and a donkey. What did they do to you?' 'An old man and a donkey came by here yesterday, too. By the time they'd gone past our mate was lying here dead.' 'But it might have been a different old man and a different donkey?' Never be the first to spill blood, or you'll forever be shooting yesterday's old man and yesterday's donkey.
We fought the war, stayed alive and got home. Now's the time to try and make sense of it all...
A MOTHER
I sat by the coffin. 'Who's in there? Is it you, my little one?' I repeated over and over again. 'Who's in there? Is it you, my boy?' Everyone thought I'd gone in sane.
Time passed, and I wanted to find out how my son was killed.
I went to the local recruitment HQ. 'Tell me how and where my son was killed,' I begged. 'I don't believe he's dead. I'm sure I've buried a metal box and my son is alive somewhere.' The officer in charge got angry and even started shouting at me. 'This is classified information! You can't go around telling everyone your son has been killed! Don't you know that's not allowed?' He had a long and painful birth, but when I realised I had a son I knew the agony had all been worthwhile. I worried about him from the day he was born - he was all I had in this world.
We lived in a little one-room hut with just enough space for a bed, pram and two chairs. I worked on the railways, switching points, for 60 roubles a month. The day I left hospital I went straight on nightshift. I took him to work with me in the pram, I had my little hotplate with me and fed him and put him to sleep at the same time I was meeting the trains. When he was a bit older I left him at home alone; I had to tie his ankle to the pram and leave him alone all day long. Still, he grew up a fine boy.
He got into building college in Petrozavodsk, up in Karelia, near the Finnish border. I went to visit him there once. He gave me a kiss and then ran off somewhere. I was quite hurt - until he came back, smiling.
'The girls are coming', he said.
'What girls? 'He'd gone off to tell these girls I'd arrived and they were coming to inspect this mother of his they'd heard so much about.
No one had ever given me a present. He came home for Mother's Day and I met him at the station.
'Let me help you with that bag,' I said.
'It's heavy, Mum. You take my portfolio-case, but be careful with it!'.
I carried it carefully and he made sure I did. Must be important drawings, I thought. When we got home he went to change and I rushed to the kitchen to check on my pies. I looked up and there he was with three red tulips in his hand. How on earth had he managed to get hold of tulips up there in March? He'd wrapped them in cloth and put them in his case so they didn't freeze. It was the first time anyone had ever given me flowers.
That summer he worked on one of those special intensive building projects. He came home just before my birthday. 'I'm sorry I couldn't get here earlier, but I've brought you a little something,' he said, handing me a money order. I looked at it.
12 roubles 50 kopecks,' I read out.
'Hey, Mum, you've forgotten the noughts! That's for 1250 roubles! ''Well, I've never had a crazy sum like that in my hands! How would I know how it's written?' He was very good-hearted. 'You're going to retire and I'm going to earn a lot of money for both of us. Do you remember when I was a boy, I promised I'd carry you in my arms when I grew up?' And so he did. He was 6 foot 5 inches tall and he carried me around like a little girl. We loved each other so much because we had no one else, probably. I don't know how I'd have let a wife have him. I don't suppose I would have.
He got his conscription papers and decided he wanted to be a paratrooper. 'They're enlisting for the pairs, Mum, but they won't take me because I'm so big. They say I'll break the parachute shroud-lines! And I just love those berets.' All the same, he got into the Vitebsk Parachute Division. I went to the swearing-in ceremony, when they have to take the oath. I noticed he'd straightened up - he wasn't ashamed of his height any more.
'Why are you so tiny, Mum?' he asked.
'I've stopped growing because I miss you so much,' I tried to joke.
'We're being sent to Afghanistan, but I'm not going because I'm an only child. Why didn't you have a little girl after you had me?'.
Lots of the parents came to the oath-taking ceremony. All of a sudden I heard someone on the platform asking, 'Where is Mama Zhuraleva? Mama Zhuraleva, come up and congratulate your son!' I went up to give him a kiss, but I couldn't reach the6 foot 5 inch bean-pole. 'Private Zhuralev! Bend down so that your mother can give you a kiss! ' ordered the commandant. As he bent down and kissed me someone took a photograph of us.
It's the only photo I've got of him in uniform.
After the ceremony they were given a few hours off and we went to a nearby park. We sat on the grass. When he took off his boots I saw that his feet were covered in blood. He told me they'd done a 30-mile route-march, but there were no size II boots so he had to wear 91/2s. But he didn't complain - on the contrary.
'We had to run with our backpacks full of sand, and I didn't pour half mine out like some of the lads.' I wanted to do something special for him. 'Shall we go to a restaurant, dear? We've never been to a restaurant together.' 'I tell you what, Mum - buy me a couple of pounds of sweets.
That's what I'd really like! 'Then it was time for him to go back to barracks. He waved me goodbye with his bag of sweets.
They put us relatives up for the night on mattresses in the sports hall, but we hardly slept a wink - we couldn't help walking round and round the barracks where our boys were fast asleep.
When reveille sounded I rushed outside, hoping to see him one more time as they marched off to the gym, even if it was only from a distance. I saw them running, but they all looked the same in their striped vests so I couldn't make him out. They had to keep in groups all the time, even going to the canteen or the toilet- they weren't allowed to go anywhere on their own because before, when the lads realised they were going to Afghanistan, some had hanged themselves in the toilets or slashed their wrists.
In the bus I was the only one who cried. I just sensed I'd never see him again. Soon I had a letter from him: 'I saw your bus, Mum, and ran after it so that I could see you one last time.' When we were sitting in the park they'd played that lovely old song over the loudspeakers, 'When my mother said goodbye to me'. I hear it in my head all the time now.
His next letter began, 'Hello from Kabul... ' I started screaming, so loud that the neighbours rushed in. 'It's against the law and civil rights!' I shouted, banging my head on the table. 'He's my only child - even under the Tsar they didn't take an only child into the army. And now he's been sent to fight a war.' It was the first time since Sasha was born that I was sorry I hadn't got married. Now I had no one to protect me.
Sasha used to tease me: 'Why don't you get married, Mum?' he'd ask.
'Because you'd be jealous!' I told him. He'd laugh and say no more about it. We thought we'd be living together for a long, long time.
He wrote a few more letters and then there was such a long gap that I wrote to his commanding officer. Soon afterwards I got a letter from Sasha. 'Mum, don't write to the CO any more, your last letter got me into trouble. The reason I didn't write is, I was stung on the hand by a wasp. I didn't ask anyone else to write a letter for me because a stranger's hand writing on the envelope would have given you a shock.' He was sorry for me and made up stories - as if I didn't watch TV every day and couldn't guess she'd been wounded. After that, if I didn't get a letter every day I could hardly get up in the morning. He tried to explain. 'How can you expect them to send off our letters every day when we only get fresh drinking-water delivered every ten days?' One letter was happy: 'Hurrah! Hurrah! We escorted a convoy to the Soviet border, and even though we weren't allowed to cross, we saw the Motherland in the distance. It's the best country in the world! 'In his last letter he wrote: 'If I can get through the summer I'll be home.' On the 29th of August I decided summer was over and went to buy him a suit and some shoes. They're still in the cup board...
On the 30th I took off my earrings and ring before I went to work. For some reason I just couldn't bear to wear them.
That was the day he was killed.
I only went on living after his death thanks to my brother. For a whole week he slept by my bed like a dog, watching over me, because all I wanted to do was run to the balcony and throw myself out of our seventh-floor window. When the coffin was brought into the sitting-room I lay on it, measuring it with my arms over and over again. Three foot, six foot, six and a half, because that's how tall he was. Was it long enough for him? I talked to the coffin like a mad woman: 'Who's there? Is it you, my love? Who's there? Is it you, my love? Who's there? Is it you, my love?' The coffin was already sealed when they brought it so I couldn't kiss him goodbye, or stroke him one last time. I don't even know what he's wearing.
I told them I'd choose a place for him in the cemetery myself.
They gave me a couple of injections and I went with my brother.
There were already some 'Afghan' graves in the central alley.
'That's where I want my son to be - he'll be happier with his friends.' The man who was with us, some boss or other, shook his head.
'It's forbidden for them to be buried together. They have to be spread about the rest of the cemetery. 'That was when I exploded! 'Don't get so angry, Sonya, don't get so angry,' my brother tried to calm me down. But how can I not be angry? When I saw their Kabul on TV I wanted to get a machine-gun and shoot the lot of them. I'd sit there 'shooting' until, one day, it showed one of their old women, an Afghan mother, I suppose.
'She's probably lost a son, too,' I thought. After that I stopped 'shooting'.
I'm thinking of adopting a boy from the children's home, a little blond chap like Sasha. No, I'd be frightened for a boy, he'd only get killed, a girl would be better. The two of us'll wait for Sasha together... I'm not mad, but I am waiting for him. I've heard of cases where they've sent the mother the coffin and she's buried it, and a year later he's home, alive, wounded but alive. The mother had a heart attack. I'm still waiting. I never saw him dead so I'm still waiting... '
1st LIEUTENANT, BATTERY COMMANDER
Only a madman will tell you the whole truth about what went on there, that's for sure. There's a lot you'll never know. When the truth is too terrible it doesn't get told. Nobody wants to be the first to come out with it - it's just too risky.
Did you know that drugs and fur coats were smuggled in coffins? Yes, right in there with the bodies! Have you ever seen necklaces of dried ears? Yes, trophies of war, rolled up into little leaves and kept in match boxes! Impossible? You can't believe such things of our glorious Soviet boys? Well, they could and did happen, and you won't be able to cover them up with a coat of that cheap silver paint they use to paint the railings round our graves and war memorials...
I didn't go over there with a desire to kill people. I'm a normal man. We were told over and over again that we were there to fight bandits, that we'd be heroes and that everyone would be grateful to us. I remember the posters: 'Soldiers, Let Us Strengthen Our Southern Borders!' 'Uphold The Honour Of Your Unit!' 'Flourish, Lenin's Motherland!' 'Glory To The Communist Party!' When I got home I caught sight of myself in a big mirror- over there I'd only had a small one - and didn't recognise the person staring back at me, with his different eyes in a different face. I can't define how I'd changed, but I had, outside and inside.
I was serving in Czechoslovakia when I heard about my transfer to Afghanistan.
'Why me?' I asked.
'Because you're not married.' I made my preparations as if I were going away on ordinary army business. What should I pack? No one knew, because we didn't have any Afgantsi with us. Someone recommended rubber boots, which I didn't use once in my two years there and left in Kabul. We flew from Tashkent sitting on crates of ammunition and landed in Shindanta. The first thing I saw was the Tsarandoi, or Afghan police, armed with Soviet tommy-guns of World War II vintage. Soviet and Afghan soldiers were equally dirty and shabby and looked as though they'd just crawled out of the trenches - a sharp contrast to what I'd been used to in Czechoslovakia.
Casualties were being loaded on to the plane. One, I remember, had shrapnel wounds in the stomach: 'This one won't survive, he'll die on the way,' I heard one of the helicopter crew, ferrying the wounded from the front line, comment casually. I was shocked how calmly they talked of death.
I think that was the most incomprehensible thing of all over there - the attitude to death. As I said before, the whole truth you'd never... What's unthinkable here was everyday reality over there. It's frightening and unpleasant to have to kill, you think, but you soon realise that what you really find objectionable is shooting someone point-blank. Killing en masse, in a group, is exciting, even - and I've seen this myself - fun. In peacetime our guns are stacked in a pyramid, with each pyramid under separate lock and key and protected by alarms. Over there you had your gun with you all the time - it was a part of you. In the evening you'd shoot out the light bulb with your pistol if you were feeling lazy - it was easier than getting up and switching it off. Or, half-crazy with the heat, you'd empty your submachine gun into the air - or worse... Once we surrounded a caravan, which resisted and tried to fight us off with machine-guns, so we were ordered to destroy it, which we did. Wounded camels were lying on the ground, howling... Is this what we were awarded medals from 'the grateful Afghan people' for? War is war and that means killing. We weren't given real guns to play cops and robbers with. We weren't sent to mend tractors and build houses. We killed the enemy wherever and whenever we could, and vice versa. But this wasn't the kind of war we knew about from books and films, with a front line, a no man's land, avant-guard and rear echelons, etc. You know the word kiriz? It's the word the Afghans use for the culverts, originally built for irrigation purposes. This was a 'kiriz war'. People would come up out of them like ghosts, day and night, with a Chinese sub-machine-gun in their hands, or the knife they'd just slaughtered a sheep with, or just a big stone. Quite possibly you'd been haggling with that same 'ghost' in the market a few hours before.
Suddenly, he wasn't a human being for you, because he'd killed your best friend, who was now just a lump of dead flesh lying on the ground. My friend's last words to me were: 'Don't write to my mother, I beg you, I don't want her to know anything about this... ' And to them you're just a Russky, not a human being.
Our artillery wipes his village off the face of the earth so thoroughly that when he goes back he literally can't find a trace of his mother, wife or children. Modern weaponry makes our crime even greater. I can kill one man with a knife, two with a mine... dozens with a missile. But I'm a soldier and killing's my profession. I'm like the slave of Aladdin's magic lamp, or rather the slave of the Defence Ministry. I'll shoot wherever I'm told to.
When I hear the order 'Fire!' I don't think, I fire, that's my job.
Still, I didn't go there to kill people. Why couldn't the Afghan people see us as we saw ourselves? I remember their kids standing in the snow and ice, barefoot except for their little rubber slipovers, and us giving them our rations. Once I saw a little boy run up to our truck, not to beg, as they usually did, but just to look at us. I had twenty Afganis in my pocket, which I gave him. He just knelt there in the sand, and didn't move until we'd got back in the APC and driven away.
On the other hand, there were instances of our soldiers stealing a few miserable kopecks from the kids who brought us water and so on... No, I wouldn't go there again, not for anything. I repeat: the truth is too terrible to be told. You lot, who stayed at home, don't need to know it, and neither do we, who were over there.
There were more of you, but you kept quiet. Our behaviour there was a product of our upbringing. Our children will grow up and deny their fathers ever fought in Afghanistan.
I've come across fake veterans. 'Oh, yes, I was there... ' they'll say.
'Where was your unit?' 'Er... in Kabul.' 'What unit was that?' 'Well... er... Spetsnaz' [Special Forces, somewhat equivalent to the SAS in the public mind].
Lunatics in asylums used to shout, 'I'm Stalin!'; now, normal guys stand up and claim: 'I fought in Afghanistan.' I'd put the lot of them in the madhouse.
I prefer to be on my own when I think about those days. I have a drink, sit down and listen to the songs we used to sing. Those times are pages from my life, and, although they're soiled I can't throw them away.
The young vets get together and get very angry that nobody wants to know. They find it hard to settle down and find some kind of moral values for themselves. 'I could kill someone - if I knew I'd get away with it,' one admitted to me. 'I'd do it just like that, for no particular reason. I wouldn't care.' They had Afghanistan, now it's gone and they miss it.
You can't go on repenting and praying for forgiveness all your life. I want to get married and I want a son. The sooner we shut up about all this the better it'll be for everyone. The only people who need this 'truth' are the know-nothings who want to use it as an excuse to spit in our faces. 'You bastards! You killed and robbed and now you expect special privileges?' We're expected to take all the blame, and to accept that everything we went through was for nothing.
Why did it all happen? Why? Why? Why? Recently in Moscow I went to the toilet at one of the railway stations. I saw a sign saying 'Cooperative toilet' [i.e. private enter-prise]. A young lad sat there, taking money. Another sign behind him read: 'Children up to 7 years, invalids, veterans of World War II and wars of liberation - free.' I was amazed: 'Did you think that up yourself?' I asked him.
'Yes!' he said proudly. 'Just show your ID and in you go.' 'So my father went through the whole war, and I spent two years with my mouth full of Afghan sand, just so we could piss for nothing in your toilet?' I said. I hated that boy more than I hated anyone all the time I was in Afghan. He had decided to pay me.
PRIVATE, GUN LAYER
Sometimes I wonder how things would have turned out if I hadn't gone to the war. I'd be happy, I think, and wouldn't have found out things about myself which I'd rather not have known. Thus spoke Zarathustra: Not only have I looked into the abyss but the abyss has looked into my soul...
I was in my second year at the radio-technical institute here in Minsk, but my main interest was in music and art. I was vacillating between those two worlds when I got my call-up papers. I have no willpower - by which I mean I'm not the sort of person who tries to meddle with his fate. If you do try to influence it you lose anyhow. My way, whatever happens you're not responsible - or guilty. I didn't want to go into the army, of course. The first thing I learnt about army life was that you're a slave. I felt the army took my personality away from me.
They didn't say it straight out but it was obvious we were going to Afghanistan. I didn't try to influence my fate. We were lined up on the parade ground and they read out this order that we were 'fighters in the international struggle'. We listened very quietly - well, we couldn't very well shout out, 'I'm frightened! I don't want to go!' We were off to fulfil our international duty - it was all cut and dried.
It really started at the Gardez clearing-centre, when the dembels took everything of any value off us, including our boots, paratrooper vests and berets. And we had to pay: an old beret cost us 10 foreign currency vouchers, a set of badges 25. A pair's meant to have a set of five - one to show you're a member of a guards' regiment, the others are the insignia for the airborne forces and your pair battalion, your class-number and your army-sportsman badge. They also stole our parade shirts, which they traded with Afghans for drugs. A gang of dembels came up to me. 'Where's your kit-bag?' They poked around in it, took what they wanted and there was nothing I could do about it. All of us in our company had our uniforms taken and had to buy old ones in return. The Quartermaster's department said simply, 'You won't be needing your new togs - they will, they're going home.' I wrote a letter home describing the beautiful Mongolian sky, the good food and the sunshine. But my war had already started.
The first time we drove out to a village the battalion commander taught us how to behave towards the local populace: 'You call all Afghans, regardless of age, "batcha", which means "boy', roughly.
Got that? I'll show you the rest later.' On the way we came across an old man. 'Halt! Watch this! ' The commander jumped down from the vehicle, went up to the old man, pushed his turban off his head, poked his fingers in his beard. 'Right, on your way, batcha! ' Not quite what we'd been expecting. In the village we threw briquettes of pearl barley to the kids, but they ran away thinking they were grenades.
My first taste of action was escorting a convoy. This is exciting and interesting - this is war! I thought. I'm holding a gun and carrying grenades, just like in the posters! As we approach the so-called 'green' zone (scrub and bush) I, as gun layer, look carefully through the gun sight. I see some kind of turban.
'Seryozha!' I shout to the chap sitting by the barrel. 'I can see a turban! What do I do?' 'Fire!' 'What d'you mean - fire?' 'What d'you think I mean?' He shoots.
'The turban's still there. It's white. What do I do?' 'Fire!!! 'We use up half the carrier's ammunition supply firing the 30mm gun and the machine-gun.
'Where's this white turban? It's a mound of snow.' Then: 'Seryozha! Your mound of snow's moving! Your little snowman's got a gun!' We jump down and let him have it with our automatics.
It wasn't a question of, 'do I kill him or don't I?' Never. All you wanted was to eat and sleep and get it all over and done with, so you could stop shooting and go home. We'd be driving over that burning sand, breathing it in, bullets whistling round our heads - and we'd sleep through the lot. To kill or not kill? That's a post-war question. The psychology of war itself is a lot more urgent. The Afghans weren't people to us, and vice versa. We couldn't afford to see each other as human beings. You blockade a village, wait 24 hours, then another 24, with the heat and tiredness driving you crazy. You end up even more brutal than the 'greens', as we called our allies, the Afghan National Army.
At least these were their people, they were born in these villages, where as we did what we did without thinking, to people quite unlike us, people we didn't understand. It was easier for us to fire our guns and throw our grenades.
Once we were going back to barracks with seven of our boys dead and two more shell-shocked. The villages along the way were silent, the inhabitants had either fled into the mountains or gone to ground. Suddenly an old woman hobbled up to us, crying, screaming, beating her fists on the APC. We'd killed her son and she was cursing us - but our only reaction was, what's she crying and threatening us for? We ought to shoot her, too. We didn't, but the point is, we could have done. We pushed her off the road and drove on. We were carrying seven dead - what was she crying for? What did she expect? We didn't want to know anything about anything. We were soldiers in a war. We were completely cut off from Afghan life -the locals weren't allowed to set foot in our army compound. All we knew about them was that they wanted to kill or injure us, and we were keen to stay alive. Actually I wanted to be lightly wounded, just to have a rest or at least a good night's sleep, but I didn't want to die.
One day two of our lads went to a shop, shot the shopkeeper and his family and stole everything they could lay their hands on.
There was an enquiry and of course everyone denied having anything to do with it. They examined the bullets in the bodies and eventually charged three men: an officer, an NCO and a private. But when our barracks were being searched for the stolen money, etc, I remember how humiliated and insulted we felt -why all this fuss about a few dead Afghans? There was a court martial and the NCO and the private were sentenced to the firing squad. We were all on their side - the general opinion was that they were being executed for their stupidity rather than for what they'd done. The shopkeeper's dead family didn't exist for us.
We were only doing our international duty. It was all quite cut and dried. It's only now, as the stereotypes begin to collapse, that I see things differently. And to think, I used not to be able to read 'Mumu' [a sentimental story by Turgenev about the relationship between a dumb peasant and his dog] without crying my eyes out! War affects a person in a strange way: it takes some of his -or her - humanity away. When we were growing up we were never taught 'Thou shalt not kill'. On the contrary - all these war veterans, with rows of medals pinned to their splendid uniforms, came to our schools and colleges to describe their exploits in detail. I never once heard it said that it was wrong to kill in war.
I was brought up to believe that only those who killed in peacetime were condemned as murderers. In war such actions were known as 'filial duty to the Motherland', 'a man's sacred work' and 'defence of the Fatherland'. We were told that we were reliving the achievements of the heroes of the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis, and who was I to doubt it? It was continually hammered into us that we were the best of the best, so why should I question whether what we were doing was right? Later, when I began to see things differently, my army mates said, 'Either you've gone mad or you want to go mad.' And yet, as I said, I was too fatalistic to try to change anything. (I was brought up by my mother, who was a powerful and dominant woman.) At training-camp veterans from the Special Forces described to us how they'd stormed villages and slaughtered all the inhabitants. It seemed romantic. We wanted to be as strong and fearless as they were. I love music and books but I also wanted to storm villages, cut throats and boast about it afterwards. I've probably got an inferiority complex.
My actual memories, though, are very different... My first attack of sheer panic, for example. We were driving in the APC when the shelling started. The APCs came to a halt. 'Take defensive positions!' someone shouted. We started jumping off. I stood up, ready to jump, but another lad took my place and was killed by a direct hit from a grenade. I felt I was falling, slowly, horizontally, like in a cartoon... with bits of someone else's body raining down on me. It's fixed in my memory forever, that's what's so terrible. I guess that's how you experience your own death, from a distance. Strange. I managed to crawl into an irrigation-ditch, stretched out and lifted my wounded arm. After a bit I realised I wasn't seriously injured, but I cradled my arm and didn't move.
No, I didn't turn into one of those supermen who storm villages and cut throats. Within the year I was in hospital, suffering from dystrophy. I was the only 'new boy' in our unit, the other ten, nearing the end of their tour of duty, were known as 'granddads'. I was forced to do all their washing, chop all the wood, and clean the whole camp - I never got more than three hours' sleep a night. One of the things I had to do was fetch water from the stream. One morning I had a strong instinct not to go - I had a strong feeling the mujahedin had been about that night, planting mines, but I was so scared I'd be beaten again, and there was no water for washing. So off I went, and duly stepped on a mine. It was only a signal mine, thank God, so a rocket went up and illuminated the whole area. I fell, crawled on..' must get at least a bucket of water, for them to clean their teeth with. They won't care what's happened, they'll just beat me up again... 'That was typical of camp life. It took just one year to turn me from a normal, healthy lad into a dystrophic who couldn't walk through the ward without the help of a nurse. I eventually went back to my unit and got beaten up again, until one day my leg was broken and I had to have an operation. The battalion commander came to see me in hospital.
'Who did this?' he asked.
It had happened at night but I knew perfectly well who'd done it. But I wasn't going to grass. You just didn't grass - that was the iron law of camp life.
'Why keep quiet? Give me his name and I'll have the bastard court-martialled.' I kept quiet. The authorities were powerless against the unwritten rules of army life, which were literally life and death to us. If you tried to fight against them you always lost in the end. Near the end of my two years I even tried to beat up someone myself.
I didn't manage it, though. The 'rule of the granddads' doesn't depend on individuals - it's a product of the herd instinct. First you get beaten up, then you beat up others. I had to hide the fact that I couldn't do it from my fellow dembels. I would have been despised by them as well as by the victims.
When you get home for demob you have to report to the local recruiting office. A coffin was brought in while I was there - our 1st lieutenant, by sheer chance. 'He died in the execution of his international duty,' I read on the little brass plate, and remembered how he used to stumble along the corridor, blind drunk, and smash the sentry's jaw in. It happened regularly once a week.
If you didn't keep out of the way you'd end up spitting your teeth out. There's not much humanity in a human being - that's what war taught me. If a man's hungry, or ill, he'll be cruel - and that's just about all humanity amounts to.
I only went to the cemetery once. 'He died a hero.' 'He displayed courage and valour.' 'He fulfilled his military duty.' That's what the gravestones said. There were heroes, of course there were, in the particular sense in which the word is used in war; like when a man throws himself over his friend to protect him, or carries his wounded commander to safety. But I know that one of those heroes in that cemetery deliberately overdosed, and another was shot dead by a sentry who caught him breaking into the food store (we'd all climbed in there at some time or other...
I longed for biscuits and condensed milk). Forget what I said about the cemetery, please, tear it up. No one can say what's true about them and what isn't, now. Let the living have their medal sand the dead their legends - keep everyone happy! The war and life back home have one thing in common: neither are anything like the way they're described in books! I've created a world of my own for myself, thank God, a world of books and music which has cut me off from all that and been my salvation.
It was only here at home that I began to sort out who I really was and what had happened to me. I prefer to sort it out alone. I don't like going to the Afgantsi clubs, and I can't see myself going to schools to give speeches about war, and telling the kids how I was turned from an immature boy into a killer, no, not even a killer, into a machine that just needed food and sleep and nothing else. I hate those Afgantsi. Their clubs are just like the army itself, and they have the same army mentality. 'We don't like the heavy metal fans, do we, lads? OK, let's go and smash their teeth in!' That's a part of my life I want to leave behind forever. Our society is a very cruel one, which is a fact I never noticed before.
When I was in hospital over there we stole some Phenazipam- it's used to treat mental breakdown and the dose is one or two tablets per day. One night a couple of the boys took 30 between them, and at three in the morning went to the kitchen to wash the dishes (which were all clean). A few others and I sat there grimly, playing cards. Someone else pissed on his pillow. A totally absurd scene, until a nurse rushed out in horror and called the guards.
That's how I mainly remember the war - as totally absurd.
'MAJOR COMMANDING A MOUNTAIN INFANTRY COMPANY
A lot of people now claim it was all a waste of time. I suppose they want to carve 'It Was All In Vain' on the gravestones.
We did our killing over there but we're being condemned for it at home. Casualties were flown back to Soviet airports and unloaded in secret so the public wouldn't find out. You say that's all in the past now, do you? But your 'past' is very recent. I came home on leave in 1986. 'So you get a nice suntan, go fishing and earn fantastic amounts of money, do you?' people asked me. How could they be expected to know the truth, when the media kept quiet.
Even the air is different over there. I still smell it in my dreams.
'We were an occupying force' - that's what the newspapers claim now. If so, why did we give them food and medicine? We'd arrive in a village, and they'd all be happy to see us. We'd leave, and they'd be equally happy to see us go. I never understood why they were always so happy.
Once we stopped a bus for a security check. I heard the dry click of a pistol and one of my men fell to the ground. We turned him on his back and saw a bullet had gone through his heart...
I felt like mortaring the lot of them. We searched the bus but didn't find the pistol or anything else, except copper kettles and baskets full of fruit being taken to market. The passengers were all women, but someone killed my man...
Go on! Carve 'It Was All In Vain!' on the gravestones...
We were on foot, on a routine patrol. I tried to shout 'Halt! ' but for some reason I was struck dumb. We carried on and bang! Some moments later I lost consciousness; then I realized I was at the bottom of the crater. I tried to crawl but I didn't have the strength and the others overtook me. I wasn't in pain, though. I managed to crawl 40 yards or so, until I heard someone say, 'Sit! It's safe now.' I tried to sit like the others, then I saw my legs were gone. I dragged my gun towards me to shoot myself but someone snatched it out of my hand. 'The major's lost his legs!' I heard him say, and then, 'I'm sorry for the major.' When I hardhat word 'sorry' pain raced through my whole body, such a dreadful pain that I began to howl.
Even now, here at home, I never take the path through the forest - I stick to asphalt and concrete. I'm scared of grass.
There's a soft, springy lawn by our house but it still frightens me.
In hospital we men who'd lost both legs asked to be put together in one ward. There were four of us. Two wooden legs stood beach bed, eight wooden legs in total. On 23 February, Soviet Army Day, some schoolgirls came with their teacher to give us flowers. They stood there crying. None of us ate a thing or said a word for two days afterwards.
Some stupid relative or other came to visit and brought a cake.
'It was all a waste of time, boys!' he said. 'Don't worry, though, you'll get a nice pension and sit and watch television all day long!' 'Get out!' Four crutches flew at his head.
Some time after that one of the four tried to hang himself in the toilet. He wound one end of a sheet round his neck and tied the other to a window-handle. He'd received a letter from his girlfriend: 'You know, Afgantsi are out of fashion now,' she'd written. And he'd lost both his legs...
Go on! Carve 'It Was All In Vain!' on the gravestones.
I ST LIEUTENANT, INTERPRETER
Two years were enough... I just want to forget the whole stupid nightmare. I never went there.
But the truth is, I did.
In 1986 I graduated from the military academy, took my accumulated leave and that summer went to Moscow to report for duty at the HQ of a certain important military organization.
It wasn't easy to locate. I eventually found the reception desk and dialed the three-figure number I'd been given.
'Hello? Colonel Sazonov speaking.' 'Good morning, Comrade Colonel! I am at your disposal. At the moment I'm down at reception.' 'Ah, yes, I know... Do you know where you're being posted>''To the DRA [Democratic Republic of Afghanistan]. Kabul.' 'Didn't expect it, eh?' 'On the contrary, Comrade Colonel!' And I was being completely honest, because for the previous five years it had been drummed into us that we mould be going over there.
You know the movie image of an officer departing for war? The hurried preparations after an urgent phone call, the stiff upper lip farewell to his wife and children before he strides to the waiting airplane, its engines roaring in the pre-dawn shadows? Well, it wasn't quite like that. My road to war was paved with bureaucratic documents. First I had to get my orders, my gun and my dry rations. Then, in addition to a certificate that said I had a 'correct understanding of Party and Government policy', I required a service passport, visa, testimonials, instructions, vaccination certificates, customs declarations and ration cards. Eventually, however, I boarded my plane, settled down in my seat and heard a drunken major exclaim, 'Forward! To the mines!' The newspapers informed us that the 'military and political situation in the DRA remains complex and contradictory'. Military opinion maintained that the withdrawal of the first six regiments was pure propaganda - there was no question of a total withdrawal of Soviet forces in the foreseeable future, and none of my fellow-passengers doubted that the war would last out our tour of duty.
'Forward! To the mines!' as the drunken major, already asleep, shouted again.
Well, I was a paratrooper and the army, as I soon found out, was divided into paras and the rest, known as solaria (a term whose etymology I never discovered). Many of our soldiers and NCOs, as well as some officers, had their arms tattooed. These tattoos were mostly rather similar, usually featuring an Ilyushin-p6 with a parachute beneath it, but there were some variations: one I saw as a romantic scene with clouds, birds, a para hanging from his' chute and the touching inscription 'Love the sky!' Among the unwritten rules of the paras was the following: 'A para kneels for two reasons only - to drink water with his hands, and to pay his respects to his dead friend. 'My war...
'Attention! Your route will take you from your camp here, via the district party offices in Bagram, to the village of Shevan.
Speed of the convoy will be dictated by the leading vehicle. Distance between vehicles to be dependent on speed. Code words: I'll be known as Freza, the rest of you by the numbers on the sides of your vehicles. Stand at ease!' This was the normal routine before the departure of one of our agitprop expeditions. The CO might add, 'You are forbidden to remove your helmets or flak jackets . Keep your gun in your hands at all times. 'I jump into my vehicle, a small, lightly armored and easily maneuverable affair known over there as a bali-bali. 'Bali' is Afghani for 'Yes'; when Afghans test their microphones they always say 'bali-bali' instead of our 'One two three four testing'.
As an interpreter I'm interested in anything to do with language.
'Salto, Salto, this is Freza. Let's get this show on the road! 'Behind a low stone wall we find a single store building of brick and plaster. A red sign proclaims, 'District Party Commit-tee'. There to greet us on the porch stands Comrade Lagmaan, dressed in Soviet khaki.
'Salaam Alejkum, raik Lagmaanf' 'Salaam Alejkum. Tchetour asti! thud asti! Dzhor asti! Khair asti?' He intones the familiar phrases of traditional Afghan welcome, thereby indicating his intense concern with our state of health.
No reply to these questions is required, although the identical phrases may be repeated.
The CO doesn't miss the opportunity to utter his favorite phrase: 'Tchetour asti? Khub asti? Afghan's nasty. 'Comrade Lagmaan doesn't understand and, bewildered, looks at me. 'It's a Russian proverb,' I explain.
We are invited into his study. Tea is brought in metal teapots on a tray. Tea is an indispensable aspect of Afghan hospitality.
Without tea work cannot begin and discussion is unthinkable. To decline a cup of tea is no less a snub than to refuse to shake hands on meeting.
In the village we are met by the elders and the eternally dirty kids (the youngest are never washed at all, in accordance with the Sheriat, their faith, which maintains that a layer of dirt protects them from evil influences). They are dressed in whatever rags they can find. Since I speak Farsi they all insist on testing my knowledge of the language. The test, as ever, is in the form of the question, 'What's the time?' My reply evokes a storm of pleasure: I really do speak Farsi, after all! 'Are you a Muslim?' 'I am,' I lie proof is required. 'Do you know the kalema?' The kalema is the special formulation one utters to become a Muslim.
'La ilyakh illya miakh va Mukhamed rasul allakh', I declare.
'There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet.' 'Dost! Dost! (A friend!),' the kids mutter, stretching out their skinny hands as a sign of acceptance.
They often ask me to repeat these words, and bring their friends, who also admiringly whisper, 'He knows the kalema!' Afghan songs blare out from the loudspeakers, which even the Afghans call 'Alla Pugacheva' [a universally popular Russian singer]. We soldiers hang out visual propaganda materials from our vehicles - flags, posters, slogans - and unfurl a screen for the film show. The medics put up tables and unpack their crates of medicines.
The meeting opens. A mullah in a long white robe and a white turban comes forward to read a sura from the Koran. Then he turns to Allah, begging him to protect believers from all the evils of the universe. Bending his arm at the elbow he raises his palms to Allah and we all copy his movements. Now Comrade Lagmaan begins to speak. His is a very long speech, a characteristic feature of Afghan life. They are all capable of making speeches and love to do so. There's a phenomenon known in linguistic jargon as 'emotional color'. Well, an Afghan speech is not only colored but highly decorated - with metaphors, epithets and elaborate comparisons...
(Afghan officers frequently expressed their surprise that our political workers used notes in their talks and discussions. At party meetings and political seminars our lecturers and propagandists relied on the same stiff and tired old phraseology and vocabulary learnt from countless books and pamphlets; for example, 'in the avant-garde of the wider communist movement', 'the importance of setting an example at all times', 'ceaselessly to put into practice', 'as well as successes there will be setbacks' and even the sinister' some Comrades do not understand'). Long before I arrived in Afghanistan such meetings as ours in the village had become meaningless obligations; the villagers came for their medical checkups and a free packet of flour each. The ovations and friendly shouts of 'zaido bod!' - 'Hail to the April Revolution' - were a thing of the past, as were the raised fists which invariably accompanied every speech in the early days, when the people still believed in our aims - the splendid ideals of the April Revolution and the brilliant future that it seemed to promise.
The children do not listen to the speech - they're waiting for the film. As usual, we have cartoons in English followed by two documentaries in Farsi and Pushtu. Their favorite movies are sentimental Indian love stories and adventures with lots of guns and violence.
After the film-show we distribute presents - today, toys and bags of flour. In fact we hand them over to the village headman who is meant to share them out among the poor and the families of war-victims. As he swears publicly that all will be done honestly and properly his son begins to carry the gifts to their house.
'Do you think he'll share things out fairly?' the CO worries.
'I doubt it. The locals have already warned us he's a grafted.
Tomorrow it'll all be for sale in the shops. 'Command: 'Prepare to move off!' 'Vehicle number 112 ready, 305 ready, 307, 308... ' The children see us off with a hail of stones. One hits me. "'From the grateful Afghan people", as they say,' I observe.
We return to our unit via Kabul. The shop-windows are hung with signs in Russian: 'Cheapest vodka', 'Any goods at any price' and 'Russian Friends, Come to Bratishka [brother] for All Your Purchases!' The merchants call out in Russian: 'T-shirts!', 'Jeans!', 'A Grey Count dinner service for six places!', 'Trainers with velcro! ', 'Lurex with blue and white stripes!' We pass barrows laden with our condensed milk, cans of peas, thermoses, electrickettles, mattresses, blankets... It's all so utterly, totally different from home.
'SERGEANT, INTELLIGENCE CORPS
I assumed people would become kinder and gentler after all the bloodshed. Surely they wouldn't want even more killing? But this friend of mine picks up the paper. 'They have returned from captivity,' he reads, and starts swearing.
'What's up with you?' I ask.
'I'd put 'em all up against the wall and shoot them myself!' 'Haven't you seen enough blood already?' 'They make me sick, those traitors. We were getting our arms and legs blown off while they were going round New York looking at skyscrapers.'* Over there we were so close I never wanted to be away from him. Now I'd rather be alone. Loneliness is my salva