There he was, about to cut the cord that bound the dead Arab’s hands, when our Nosov noticed what was going on. He immediately kicked our car’s turret and shouted:
‘Halt, skulls![5] Halt!’
The car hadn’t come to a full stop before Nosov jumped down. Running up to the officer, he started yelling:
‘Soldier! What the hell do you think you’re doing with those pliers?’
The officer gave Nosov a sideways look, then said contemptuously:
‘Who are you, and why aren’t you acting according to regulations? Identify yourself! Name, rank, and unit!’
‘Captain Nosov, saboteurs…’
The officer, who was a little younger than Nosov but a rank higher, eyed him from beneath the brim of his hat:
‘Captain, I order you to return to your vehicle – you’re blocking the column!’
Nobody had ever dared talk to our captain like that before.
Nosov ripped the pliers out of his hands and threw them into the rubble, screaming at him like a madman; in fact, even we were startled.
‘Boy, you get back in your vehicle and never dare give orders to a saboteur again! When you were still jerking off or taking it in the arse from your schoolmates I was already burying my brothers in Qandahar! Who gave you permission to untie him?’ He pointed to the Arab’s flayed body. ‘Did you put him there? Well, when you’ve got the balls to do something like that then you can take him down…’
The officer tried to reply, serious and impassive:
‘Captain, I must inform you that when we reach our post I will be forced to report your conduct to command!’
‘Your piece of shit post only exists thanks to the sacrifice of those boys!’ Nosov snarled, pointing at the names of the dead paratroopers written on the piece of cardboard. ‘Go ahead and inform whoever you please, do whatever you want; I wipe my arse with your regulations… If I see you laying a hand on any other monuments around here, I swear on the souls of my dead brothers that I will shoot you!’
After these words Nosov gave the officer an impertinent military salute, turned around, and headed back to the car.
The officer stood there for a second, without moving, thinking about what he had just heard, returned the salute, albeit belatedly, almost instinctively, then returned to his car.
Throughout this whole incident, what struck me the most was what our captain had called that disfigured cadaver. He called it a monument.
Many veterans of the war in Afghanistan, especially the older paratroopers, would leave these ‘monuments’ in the streets after a particularly difficult battle. They were terrifying sights, always the body of a dead enemy that the soldiers would savage in a frightening way. But the real horror in this ritual lay in the fact that in order to make these ‘monuments’, soldiers used people who were still alive.
One time, after a skirmish in which a para group attacked and liberated a fortified area, we found a prisoner in this sort of condition who was still breathing. They had cut the skin on his torso and back into strips, in imitation of the stripes on the shirt the paratroopers wear, which back home they call a telnyashka. They had nailed the poor devil to a door, heavy tent stakes sharpened into points struck through his hands. Nearby someone had written the motto, also in blood: ‘We may be few, but we wear the telnyashka!’
However terrible this was, it had become a kind of custom for them, a matter of dignity and prestige, which the paras always tried to honour without anyone ever daring to go against it.
Our column kept scouting the liberated areas, headed for the line of fire. The line kept moving forward, and after every operation we would always lag behind, so every time we would have to catch up to it again. We forged ahead like waves of water, so as not to give the enemy a chance to rest, make a move, organise an attack against us. We were always fighting, always.
Every now and then we would run into various support units; the carriers restocked our supplies, took care of the injured and accompanied the soldiers who were going to rest.
A kilometre away from the front we had to stop; the car couldn’t go any closer, otherwise, in the midst of battle, it would have been torched in seconds. Running with heads down, taking cover behind a light tank, we began moving towards the site along with the paras.
The road was narrow, and the enemy was shooting at us crossways. I could feel the bullets ricocheting off the armour of the tank and then dispersing in every direction. We couldn’t stick even our noses beyond the tank, the gunfire was so heavy.
After a while the tank stopped, and the turret turned towards the shots. A cannon blast went off, and at the same time, a volley of bullets from the heavy machine gun, which was next to the cannon inside turret. The explosion was so violent and sudden it made me fall down; my head spun.
When we reached the position, we realised it was an inferno. The paras were agitated and running all over the place, by that point not even covering themselves. Our task was to liberate a house; they had tried to attack it twice, unsuccessfully, and were now waiting for support from us and the tank. We all advanced together, breaking through the enemy defence.
We had been able to push back the enemy’s defence almost twenty kilometres. Command was happy because usually only five kilometres at most would get liberated in a day, whereas we had been really fast. But every time we concluded one operation, our assistance was needed elsewhere. They ordered us to take out snipers positioned in various buildings, to launch assaults on buildings, help surround enemy-controlled areas, sabotage their equipment… We were exhausted. The paratroopers took turns, whereas we saboteurs hadn’t slept for three days. I felt so tired that I didn’t have any strength left to eat.
After a short skirmish on a narrow road – where we had destroyed a nursery school, our tanks razing the playground completely – we found ourselves who knows how running through the rooms of a destroyed building, shooting the enemy from such a close range that we could almost reach out and touch them.
I ended up on the top floor with Shoe, to try to eliminate the last big gun. We launched two hand grenades.
In the dust coming down from the ceiling we couldn’t see anything, and we ran right into four enemies who, like us, were circling around like blind kittens in the grey, dirty cloud which smelled like rubble and burnt explosives.
There in Chechnya I had never shot anyone from such a close range.
Meanwhile on the second floor our captain had taken a prisoner and downed eight enemies, all by himself.
When I came out with Shoe I was completely dazed. Captain Nosov was asking Moscow to keep an eye on the Arab prisoner while he, Spoon and Zenith went to check on the basement.
I sat down on the stairs next to Moscow, across from the terrified prisoner, who kept on trying to communicate something to us. Moscow wasn’t listening to him; he was sleepy and worn out, as we all were. As soon as the captain turned his back, Moscow pulled out his gun, an Austrian Glock, one of his ‘trophies’, and with a derisive scowl shot the prisoner in the head and the chest.
The captain turned around and without saying a word looked at him with pity.
Moscow went and sat down next to the dead man and closed his eyes, succumbing to a wave of exhaustion.
Looking at all of us as if he were actually meeting us for the first time, the captain said:
‘This is too much, boys. Everyone to the carrier, to rest behind the line.’
In single file, like zombies, we headed for our cars. My head felt so heavy that I was convinced if I stopped at all it would explode.
We went behind the line, into the area guarded and defended by our infantry. We fell asleep instantly – I didn’t even have the chance to finish taking off my coat and side bags before I fell into oblivion, like a dead man.
It wouldn’t seem so, but the scariest time of all in war is when you’re resting. In those moments you become aware of all the horrors of the situation you’ve found yourself in. While you don’t even have the time to t
hink during operations and just worry about the essential actions needed to carry out an order, everything that would have an impact on your spirit – impressions, doubts, feelings of guilt – comes to the surface when you stop to rest. Then you can’t help but despair, because you’d like to rest and forget the war for a few hours, but you know it’s not possible. You spend a lot of time half-awake and half-asleep, reliving what you’ve just gone through and thus fuelling your tiredness even more.
The only time when you can really rest is when you simply pass out, as if someone had pulled your plug all of a sudden. That’s how I felt then.
… A little later, Moscow woke me up by tapping my chest with the butt of his Kalashnikov.
Slowly and reluctantly I opened my eyes and looked around. I struggled to remember where I was. I couldn’t put anything into focus.
Moscow’s face looked tired. He was chewing on a piece of bread. It was dark outside, impossible to tell the time. I checked my watch, but I couldn’t even see the numbers; it was like everything was shrouded in fog.
‘What’s going on, how long did we sleep?’ I asked Moscow.
‘We didn’t sleep for shit, brother… And it doesn’t look like we’ll be going back to sleep any time soon.’
I put my face in my hands, trying to muster the strength to get up and start thinking. I needed to sleep, I felt utterly exhausted. My clothes were dirty and damp, my jacket smelled like sweat and dirt. I was a wreck.
Moscow went to wake the others:
‘Come on, guys, we’re leaving now… They need us.’
They were all in despair – they didn’t want to get up. But griping and cursing, they got to their feet.
Captain Nosov was going around with the handset to his ear and an infantryman with the field radio in a backpack was running after him like a little dog. The captain was getting angry, he kept repeating to who knows who, on the radio, that we had got rest for the first time in three days, that we were beat. All to no avail, because after a while Nosov said, in a tone that recalled the sound of tap shoes:
‘Yes, Comrade Colonel! I confirm, order received!’
So they were sending us to the front lines again.
I didn’t even want to think about it.
I went to the metal vat filled with water. I plunged my hands in; the water was nice and cool; it gave me a light shiver. So I dunked my whole head underwater, and lingered for a moment, holding my breath.
I opened my eyes inside the vat and saw complete darkness. Startled, I pulled my head out immediately and gasped for breath.
The darkness I saw in the vat gave me a bad feeling, it seemed as if death might be like that – dark and airless.
I stood over the vat, and watched the reflection of my face and of my life up to that point dancing on the water. But I stepped back immediately – I didn’t want the water to become still, too much like a mirror. According to an old Siberian tradition, looking in the mirror before facing a risk brings bad luck.
And from what I understood from the bits of the radio conversation between Nosov and some unknown colonel, we would be facing many a risk indeed…
We all sat in a circle, next to the car, as we always did before leaving for a mission. Moscow explained the situation: during the night a group of enemies had broken through the ring we had around the city, and some of our infantry were trapped in a building surrounded by Arabs… We had to free them; the attack was set for six in the morning. Only two hours away.
I chewed on a piece of buttered bread, trying to reestablish contact with reality. Moscow was talking; I was taking little sips of boiling hot soup from a cup made out of an old tin. I was slowly waking up.
Fifteen minutes later we were in the car, once again headed for the line of fire.
During the trip Nosov gave us his take:
‘First our command makes a mistake by leaving a weak spot in the ring around the city. Then the Arabs come in and make trouble, and even if they don’t manage to advance or to do anything serious they take our soldiers hostage… Our nearby troops can’t make it in time, and now it’s up to us to break through their defence for the second time. And if we don’t attack now, our men will die for sure… It’s a farce, the colonels in command know very well that prisoners get killed, but it’s in their interest to look like they tried to save them…’
To tell the truth, at that moment I understood absolutely nothing about the situation, I was just trying to rest as much as possible so that I wouldn’t collapse later during battle. None of my comrades said anything; the captain went on talking by himself, pondering military tactics, making comparisons to similar cases he had encountered in the past.
At some point Moscow turned to me and whispered with irritation:
‘I really hope this is the last time. If they ask us to do anything else, I’m going to tell them all to shove it.’
I was in total agreement.
We soon reached our destination. The car stopped in the courtyard of a small building defended by our men. The yard was full of equipment randomly strewn across the ground. On the opposite side there was a road that separated our territory from the territory held by the enemies. We jumped out of the car and began gathering Kalashnikov clips, tying them together with the wide bandages from our medi-kits, attaching them to our vests.
The captain ordered:
‘Prepare ten clips for me too, boys!’
Then he went off to the tent in the middle of the yard, which was surrounded by sandbags stacked up to a man’s height around the perimeter. It was the mobile command base, where there was usually some low-ranking officer, a major or at most a lieutenant colonel.
Our captain was very critical towards the men in command – he called any contact with them ‘listening to babies cry’, referring to the story in the Gospel about the massacre of the innocents. There was something about their behaviour, he told us, that he had never really been able to understand, and when he had to deal with them face to face they always ended up arguing and he would insult them. As he admitted himself, that’s precisely the reason why he never went up in military rank – sometimes he would jokingly add the word ‘eternal’ to his title of captain; he was aware that nobody in command was very fond of him, either.
That day, I could tell just from the way he stormed over to the tent that Nosov was going to get into trouble the moment he walked in there.
Not even ten minutes had passed before we started to hear shouting coming from the tent, along with a string of accusations and insults, with which our captain was always very generous.
Right after that Nosov came by the sandbags, and called me over, his voice breaking:
‘Kolima! Come here, I have a job for you!’
I could imagine what it would be, so I walked towards the tent with some reluctance. Inside there was an infantry major sitting at a table, improvised from empty cases for heavy machine gun rounds. He had a battle knife in his hand, which he was using to show Nosov various points on a map that was spread out in front of them.
On the map, our area was surrounded by empty shells and various calibres of cartridge, which were supposed to represent the different military units. Next to that was a package of black bread, open, and a piece of paper with a pat of butter on top, a Kalashnikov survival knife stuck inside. There was also a big pot full of black tea, which was so hot it was steaming, and in fact its smell filled the entire tent. In one corner, on top of a zinc case, an infantry explorer, a private, ate silently. Next to him, leaning against the case, was his precision rifle: a VSS with an integrated silencer, exactly the same as mine. He was a sniper too.
The major was angry with Nosov, but he paid no attention and made himself at home. He spread some butter on a thick hunk of bread and passed it to me.
‘Here. Eat while you can…’
I didn’t need him to tell me twice, and in a single bite I’d chomped off half the piece. Then the major took an empty tin from a pile of rubbish on the ground and poured a drop
of hot tea in it. He rinsed out the tin with a vigorous swish and dumped the dirty tea on the rubbish. Finally he filled the tin up with tea and said to me:
‘Drink up, soldier, don’t just eat stale bread!’
I liked him right off the bat, this major; he had a very friendly demeanour and he treated me like a son. It was clear that he found himself in an awkward situation, that’s why he was trying to get some support.
While I drank the tea, with the residue of the oil from the tin still floating on top, Nosov bent over the map. He said to me, without ever looking up:
‘Look, Kolima, your colleague here has managed to find the spots where the Arabs are. You have to memorise them, study them carefully…’ I turned towards the explorers’ sniper, who still hadn’t said a word.
‘You left the area by yourself? How did you do it?’
The guy gave me a serious look, and while he was still chewing, he said:
‘I went into the sewer system. In the yard, behind the house where our post is, there’s an entrance to the sewers. Our lieutenant ordered me to search it and, if possible, follow it all the way to you guys.’
It seemed incredible, looking at the guy. Alone, with a precision rifle and a few clips, that boy had gone through over a kilometre of sewer. Even if they were completely dry, since in the city the water pipes weren’t working and there was no drinking water, the biggest danger in the sewers was the mines. During the First Chechen Campaign, all the sewers were mined – first by the enemies, then by us – to keep anyone from using them as underground passageways from one part of the city to another. Nobody dared go in there, the risk was too high.
‘That’s some luck, brother! You weren’t just born with a bulletproof vest, you had a full-on jacket!’ I said, looking on the map at the path he had taken.
I had only been in the sewers once. We were clearing out a neighbourhood in the Chechen capital, the city of Grozny. To get closer to the position of an Arab sniper I had to take down, I went through nearly two hundred metres of sewer, but it was nice and wide, and there was no danger of being discovered. The city was under the control of our troops, and two soldiers from the strategic unit had already passed through that same tract of sewer and deactivated the mines they found on the path.
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