The long war in Afghanistan was changing more than just brave combat soldiers like Valery Tallokonikov. When the 512th Regiment’s 2nd Squadron returned to Vaziani from Kandahar, the commanding officer, Major Nikolai Gorbunov, received a much-deserved decoration. He had led his men for a year in some of the worst of the mountain fighting, without losing a single pilot or aircraft. In fact, Major Gorbunov was ordered to help revise the ground-attack tactics manual, based on his successful experience. Then suddenly one Monday morning, the Osobii Otdel descended on the regiment and the major was placed under investigation.
Apparently some Osobist “knocker” had informed on Gorbunov, revealing a relatively minor but embarrassing indiscretion. It was reported that, in Afghanistan, the major had quickly acquired a mistress, a reasonably good-looking waitress in the officers’ dining room in Kandahar, and the major treated her well.
The Voyentorg at the Kandahar Air Base was one of the best in the entire Soviet military, stocked with a rich variety of contraband: Japanese electronics, blue jeans, and cigarettes seized from Afghan smugglers. And the prices were incredibly low: A soldier or airman paid in military script, which meant that a pair of Levi’s or a Sony video recorder often cost less than a hundred rubles. Gorbunov, not an especially handsome man, was said to have been generous toward the woman with his Voyentorg bounty, so she was generous with her own favors. Their liaison was open. This was a common practice, one of the advantages of rank. No one complained, because Gorbunov was a brave officer who always flew the most dangerous strikes and never departed the target area until the objective had been hit. And he was always the last man to drop his bombs or fire his rockets, which was the most dangerous slot in any attack formation.
But Gorbunov had gone too far toward the end of his tour. He decided to reward the waitress by taking her along as a backseat passenger in a MiG-23UB on a routine strike. She was thrilled to see the bombs impact far below in the steep gorge and to glimpse a few orange and green tracer rounds sparkle against the overcast winter sky. And that was the end of the indiscretion.
Gorbunov probably saw the incident as a minor diversion in his long combat tour. But he inadvertently broke an important Soviet Air Force taboo: putting women in the cockpit. Unlike Western air forces, neither the VVS nor the PVO had women pilots in combat or transport aircraft. The most important position a woman could obtain in the VVS was control tower dispatcher; most were clerks or waitresses. During the Great Patriotic War, there had been the famous Night Witches “bomber” squadron, in which women pilots flew night milk runs in old Po-2 biplanes, dropping small harassment bombs in safe areas behind German lines. Stalin made a lot of these women pilots, and even decorated several personally with major medals for valor. He understood that the image of women in combat would encourage men in the front lines toward even greater sacrifice. But since this small propaganda unit was disbanded, no Soviet woman had ever flown a military aircraft.
Certainly the waitress’s “combat” mission was an innocent fluke. But when the Osobists were finished with their dirty work, Major Gorbunov was stripped of his decoration and cashiered from the Air Force — discharged onto the street with no pension and no possibility of finding work as a civilian pilot. But one year later his small pension was restored under a new regulation meant to protect the rights of Afghanistan veterans who had committed infractions during the stress of combat.
What made all this even more distasteful was the fact that staff officers from Kabul routinely earned combat pay and presented each other decorations by flying as backseat “observers” on such routine strikes. They knew full well there was little danger on these missions, so it was obvious that Gorbunov had not “risked” State property or the life of a noncombatant Soviet citizen, as he had been charged.
When I told Valery about this, he merely shook his head and smiled. The logical explanation, he said, was that some senior staff rat had been pissed off at Gorbunov for stealing his girlfriend and had sent the Osobist mice out to nibble at crumbs. Russian girls in Kabul, Valery said, were earning a lot of money by performing “extra duty.” Some of them even received decorations from their patrons among the headquarters staff.
“Those girls earn the Order of the Red Banner for lying on their backs,” Valery said. “But you know what a young paratrooper gets for leading a charge?”
I shook my head.
“The Order of the Dick in the Ass.” Valery laughed bitterly. That particularly “decoration” was very familiar to the “Afghansti,” as the veterans had come to be called.
I could have dismissed Major Gorbunov’s sad story as an aberration if it hadn’t been for a sensational news story that exploded that summer. One of the first stories to appear in military journals in the civilian press concerned drug smuggling among the military in Afghanistan.
Valery had told me about finding burlap-wrapped bundles of opium and pasty white heroin base in the camps of Mujahedin his unit had overrun. The official policy was to burn this contraband. But some enterprising Soviet troops — in both the Army and the Air Force — had another disposal technique. Soviet soldiers killed in the war were embalmed in primitive field mortuaries and sealed in zinc coffins for air transport home. But some of these coffins did not contain the eviscerated body of a young Soviet soldier, but rather forty or fifty kilos of opium, hashish, or heroin.
No one knew how long this practice had been going on. That summer, however, a family in Leningrad insisted on opening their son’s coffin. Inside were bundles of hashish and opium sealed in plastic wrapping, but no body. The KGB investigation eventually led to a smuggling network centered on an Air Force transport squadron. Normally the caskets arriving in the Soviet Union would be secretly opened in a hangar, the drugs removed, and a suitable weight of sandbags put inside before resealing. Somehow, this one slipped through.
In the middle of the summer, a message came to the 283rd Division in Tskhakaya that my friend Boris Bagomedov had been shot down and was missing in action. Three days later a second message confirmed that he had been killed. A week later we received a briefing on the shoot-down from the division intelligence officer. After the briefing I was both shocked and saddened. And I began to better understand Valery’s point of view.
Boris had been flying number four position in a four-plane strike, which included two Su-17s from another regiment. A squadron commander from that regiment led the mission, because his unit had more experience. The strike had been planned as a routine daylight bombing attack on a suspected Mujahedin village high in the Panjshir Valley northeast of Kabul. The intelligence on ground offenses indicated the enemy had only a few light machine guns and small arms.
The two MiG-23s from the 2nd Squadron rendezvoused with the Su-17s and proceeded to the target area. The weather was perfect, clear and warm. Boris’s friend, Eduard Igorov, flew the number three aircraft and reported that Boris was in good spirits that morning. Even though the squadron commander had almost a year’s experience in the war, he accepted the intelligence report on face value and planned a simple straight-in approach on the target. The planes were to strike from one direction only.
That would have been acceptable tactics, I suppose, if the Mujahedin had only been armed with Kalashnikovs. In fact, the rebel “village” turned out to be a major fortified staging area, a warren of bunkers, caves, and air-defense sites. The enemy had DShK 12.7mm machine guns, at least one ZU-23 twin-barreled 23mm antiaircraft cannon, and American Redeye and Stinger shoulder-fired infrared homing missiles.
The flight lead made his bomb run without receiving ground fire. But by the time the second and third aircraft rolled in, heavy red tracers looped and twisted around the target zone. Eduard Igorov’s plane was hit in the tail, but he retained control. Boris must have known the situation when he rolled in on his own bomb run. The enemy was wide awake and had definitely gotten the range. They were so confident of shooting him down that they didn’t even use one of their valuable missiles.
Boris�
�s plane exploded even before he pulled out of his dive. The tumbling fireball smashed into the ridgeline across the valley from the enemy fort. Eduard saw the ejection seat fire from the tumbling mass of debris. But he couldn’t be sure Boris’s parachute deployed before impact. The surviving pilots definitely saw an orange and white parachute canopy crumpled on the rocks not far from the smoke of the crash site.
They called in an Mi-8 rescue helicopter and requested more fighters to suppress the ground fire. Two helicopters answered the call. After the surviving MiG-23 and the Su-17s made strafing runs on the enemy ridgeline, one of the Mi-8s flew across the valley to strike the enemy bunkers with its own rockets and machine guns while the second helicopter flew straight toward the parachute on the ground.
The helicopter pilots had a grim responsibility. According to Soviet military regulations, a man’s family did not receive death benefits or a pension if his body was not recovered from the war zone. Soldiers’ statements that they saw a comrade fall in battle were not considered sufficient evidence of his death. This cruel regulation stemmed from the desperate days early in the Great Patriotic War when some men had gone missing from their units in the thick of battle, but had actually deserted to the Germans or been captured. A soldier was meant to fight to the death if surrounded. To surrender willingly was a serious offense, punishable by years in prison.
But few of us actually considered surrender as an option in battle. All our intelligence briefings had stressed the fact that the NATO forces would torture Soviet pilots savagely to extract as much military information as possible. Then the poor devil would be either executed or killed in one of their horrible medical or drug experiments. Apparently the Westerners had carried on this barbaric tradition with the assistance of their ex-Nazi allies. No one in his right mind would surrender to the Afghan Mujahedin. Their torture methods were less sophisticated than the Americans’, but even bloodier.
By Soviet doctrine, pilots who are shot down are “transferred” to the infantry the moment their boots touch the ground and their parachute collapses. They are then bound by the same orders to fight on as the ground troops. Many of the fellows in Afghanistan carried hand grenades in their flight suits, and strapped a paratrooper’s folding-stock AKM Kalashnikov to their ejection harness.
Whatever the origin of the body-retrieval regulation, the crewmen of rescue helicopters knew they had an obligation not just to the airman on the ground but also to his family.
The rescue helicopter was halfway across the valley when it took a direct hit from a Stinger. Luckily the aircraft did not explode, but it did smash onto the side of the ridge several hundred yards below the wreckage of Boris’s aircraft. The sky above the ridges and valley was suddenly crisscrossed by streams of heavy-caliber tracers. At least one missile was fired, but exploded among the helicopter’s decoy flares. The pilot bore in to try to rescue the crew of the first Mi-8. But the valley was a death trap. The second helicopter went down on the lower slopes of the ridge. Now there were two helicopter crews on the ground and possibly an injured Soviet pilot.
By this time, rotating flights of strike aircraft were laying down an almost continuous bombardment on the enemy-held ridges. They dropped cluster bombs and napalm, fired rockets, and strafed with their cannons. The next morning a ground force of Spetsnaz commandos arrived in light-armored vehicles and rescued the helicopter crews. But the fire from the enemy positions intensified. Now the Air Force used powerful fuel-air explosives to neutralize the Mujahedin gun positions in the caves and bunkers. These were cruelly effective weapons. A mist of fuel droplets was dispersed from a canister by compressed gas and allowed to seep into the enemy positions before being ignited by a delayed fuse. The resulting explosion literally ripped the caves and bunkers apart, killing everyone inside. But the Mujahedin had devised means to counter even these bombs.
The fight dragged on for three days before the enemy fell back in good order. When the Spetsnaz finally reached Boris’s airplane, they found his burnt and mangled remains near the ejection seat. He had been dead before the parachute deployed. But at least Sultanat, his widow, would receive the pitiful death benefit of 120 rubles a month. Maybe back in her home village, I thought, as the major ended his briefing, she would be able to live on that shamefully small pension.
Walking down the corridor of division headquarters from the intelligence office, a picture suddenly rose in my mind. The previous winter in Vaziani, Boris had come down with the flu, and I had visited his small apartment to cheer him up. He had been newly married then. And Sultanat had been too shy to go out alone in the officers’ housing compound. When I entered the apartment, Boris was sleeping in bed, propped up with pillows, wheezing hoarsely. The room was almost dark except for a small reading lamp at the bedside table, where Sultanat had placed a tea tray. His young wife sat straight on a stool, six feet away, gazing intently at her sick husband, the way a faithful servant guarded her master’s sickbed in the old novels. Even though Boris only had a case of the grippe, the young woman’s face bore an expression of forlorn misery. In their world, he was more than just her husband. Boris was her lord and protector.
Now I could picture Sultanat sitting on a stool in the whitewashed parlor of a village house high in the pine mountains of Dagestan, staring at a zinc coffin on a tripod, draped in the red banner of the Soviet Union. What good had Boris’s faithful service to the Rodina done this unfortunate young woman? By marrying him, she had lost her firstborn son, a calamity that could never be extinguished. And now she was a widow with a baby daughter. And all she had in compensation was a pension that equaled a street-sweeper’s salary.
Two days later I found myself seated in the regimental officers’ dining room near the new division commander, Colonel Mikhail Popov. When Popov had finished his meal, I followed him outside. The colonel, who had replaced Major General Anosov, had a reputation for openness. On an impulse, I stepped beside him.
“Comrade Colonel, I’d like permission to speak,” I told him. “We’ve all heard of the death of Senior Lieutenant Bagomedov, and I know the division will be sending a replacement for him. I want to be the man who replaces him.”
Popov looked serious, then shook his head. “Zuyev,” he said, “I can’t do this. You have a more important mission here learning to fly the MiG-29.”
“With respect, Comrade Colonel,” I persisted, “Boris was my friend. I feel an obligation to the other men in the squadron. They need good pilots out there, and also, I’m a bachelor.”
Again Colonel Popov paused, as if to make sure I wasn’t speaking from empty bravado. “They need a lot of things out there, Zuyev, including good pilots.” He stopped himself before speaking too frankly. “I know how you feel, captain. The war will still be there when you finish your training.”
The colonel’s words echoed in my head. I hoped he was right. The week before, I had been at the personnel office of the Transcaucasus Military District in Tbilisi, making inquiries about eventually applying for test pilot school. The old colonel in charge of the section was friendly and helpful. Then he asked if I had served a tour in Afghanistan yet.
“No, Comrade Colonel,” I told him. “I hope to go as soon as I complete training on the new aircraft.”
The gray-haired officer shook his head. “I wish you luck, young man. If you only knew the type of pilot I have to send out there to the war. They’re mostly brand-new Third Class pilots, six months out of the academy, who don’t know a combat turn from a barrel roll. Putting young boys like that into the cockpit of a Su-25 and sending them against Stingers is like sending sheep to the slaughterhouse.”
While we waited for the first MiG-29s to arrive in Tskhakaya, I was able to pay attention to other matters than flying for the first time in months. And once I was able to lift my nose from the training manuals and mission plans, I discovered there was only one topic of discussion among my military colleagues and my fellow citizens. Mikhail Gorbachev — affectionately known as “Mishka” to many peopl
e — had launched an anti-alcohol campaign that threatened to careen off course.
In quick succession, Gorbachev had addressed the Politburo, the Supreme Soviet, and in an unprecedented, unscripted television speech, the Soviet people themselves, warning all who would listen about the danger of alcohol in our national life. He named alcohol as the root cause of the nation’s economic stagnation.
Drunkenness, he said, provoked absenteeism and low productivity in the work place; alcohol destroyed families and sparked crime. In his speeches Gorbachev repeatedly made reference to a report of the Novosibirsk Scientific Academy that presented a dizzying array of statistical evidence on birth defects, domestic violence, and dismal industrial productivity caused by the presence of bountiful, cheap alcohol. This was a national scandal that had to be met face-on in the new spirit of glasnost.
Naturally the Party apparat all across the Soviet Union echoed the Moscow line. At the very next meeting of our regimental Partkom, the zampolit urged that we join the Communist officers of the division staff in voting that our dining room and sauna become completely abstemious.
“Not even beer?” Lieutenant Colonel Torbov asked, echoing the uneasy skepticism of his pilots.
“We have to set an example,” the zampolit answered, parroting the division line.
Luckily the commander was able to defer that vote.
At first I agreed with Gorbachev’s approach, because I had seen firsthand the destructive force of alcohol on our society. Certainly you could never ride a train or visit a city center on a weekend without encountering drunken hooligans. In recent years it had become very unpleasant to travel in civilian clothes. Every train station was full of drunken hoodlums, ready to curse and fight with strangers. And if you went to the summer open-air dances every town organized in their Gorky Park, you were sure to be challenged by a gang of drunks.
And the clumps of pathetic, burnt-out alcoholics forming in front of the State liquor stores every morning to “go three” on a seven-ruble bottle of Pshenichnaya were, indeed, a national disgrace.
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