‘Look!’ Zyuzik says, touching my arm and pointing towards the command tent. Sitting nearby in just his underwear is Smiler, fiddling around in the reducing gear, which he is holding to the ground with his bare feet. Bow-legged Sanya stands above him.
Smiler tears himself away from his work and looks at us.
‘So, Tall Boy,’ he says instead of a greeting and repeats the sergeant-major’s words, ‘welcome to the ass end of nowhere.’
The plains of Chechnya are surrounded by mountains and we are literally at the bottom of a giant, scorched bowl. The air is scorched, and the armoured vehicles, rifles, ammo boxes, tents, everything smells scorched. If you leave your boots out in the morning you can’t pick them up until the sun goes down in the evening and they cool off. Then again, nobody wears boots; you can easily cripple your feet in them.
‘You have to look after three things here,’ explains Berezhnoi. ‘Your feet, your teeth and your head. Make sure you brush your teeth twice a day - I’ll break the jaw of anyone who doesn’t. Throw your boots away and go barefoot, or your feet will rot and never heal. And keep your head down. If there’s any shooting get back to your tent; they’ll take care of it without you.’
I like Berezhnoi. He treats us well, doesn’t beat us and teaches us everything he can. We follow his advice and go barefoot. Andy even cuts off his long johns to the knee, revealing his white calves like a seaside holiday-maker. I don’t go that far, I don’t feel I have served long enough.
Thirst torments us in the sweltering heat and we are always stealing water from the kitchen. Our company has two forty-litre tubs of water made out of ten empty howitzer shell cases and a plastic child’s bath. One of our duties is to fill these to the top every day, which isn’t as easy as it sounds. The company gets allocated fourteen litres of water (not enough for everyone to even drink their fill), and it’s up to us to find the rest. The kitchen is run by a contract soldier called Sergei, who now knows us by sight and gives us a thrashing if he catches us. So we try to sneak up to the water-truck unobserved.
The driver of the water-truck is from Moscow like me, and this solves a lot of problems. Every morning he sets off for Achkhoi-Martan with an armoured escort, and every morning we try to intercept him on the way back. An observer is perched like a hawk on an ammo box in front of the tent. When a cloud of dust rises over Achkhoi-Martan we grab our containers and race to intercept the truck. If we make it, Zhenya is happy to fill us up. It’s the tastiest water, still so icy cold that it makes your teeth tingle, and it has no chlorine.
Today we overslept and missed the water run. Pan bursts into our dug-out and drags us out by the feet, and we dash with the bathtub to the kitchen, hoping that there is some left there.
Abandoning all caution and happy to find a taut flow of Water we catch it with our lips. It’s cold and tart-smelling - the medics have already dumped two cups of chlorine into it. We scoop it up in our palms without spilling a drop - we’re aware of its value. Then Sergei appears. You can smell the stale alcohol a mile off; he’s evidently on a bender lasting more than a day.
‘Bloody hell, you lot again,’ he mumbles and kicks Pan with all his might, catching him in the coccyx. Pan cries out and falls doubled-up onto his back. He lies moaning in the puddle of drinking water that has formed at the wheels of the truck and is unable to get up. Sergei seems to have hit some nerve end.
‘What the fuck are you moaning for, dickhead, you think you’re injured or something? Get up! Stand to attention! One of these days I’ll shoot the bloody lot of you, you assholes,’ he shouts as we line up in front of him with the containers. ‘I’m sick to death of you, and I’m going to hand you to my eagles who will tear you to shreds! Won’t you, eagles?’ he asks his cooks, who are cleaning pans on a table next to the water-truck.
The cooks all have an unbelievably haggard look about them. They are even more wretched than we are. Sergei continually batters them about in punishment for something, or just for the hell of it, and makes them sweat away for twenty hours a day. The cooks are caked from head to toe in a layer of stinking fat that doesn’t wash off, and the skinniest one has a string of spaghetti hanging from his ear.
‘Yes, we’ll rip them apart,’ they answer.
The skinny one brushes his ear with the back of his hand.
‘They’ll rip you apart, you just remember that,’ warns Sergei. ‘If I catch you again I’ll have your hides. Dismissed.’
We go to our tent, not forgetting to take our containers with us. We didn’t even manage to fill the bathtub which Pan carries along, limping and rubbing the base of his spine.
‘Bastard, almost broke my ass,’ he says with a moan.
*
We sit in the perimeter trench, heads drawn into our shoulders, listening into the darkness. The darkness of the southern nights is impenetrable. If you peer a long time into the dark you tire quickly, so we sit with our eyes closed. It even seems I can hear the lice moving in Pan’s armpits. He too is sitting motionlessly, but I know he’s not asleep.
Just over the top of the trench there’s a minefield so we don’t worry too much - if someone comes this way we are sure to hear. But the rebels can still remove the tripwires and we have to watch out for this.
A carrier towers over us like a mountain. We hear voices from inside and chinks of light show from the loosely closed hatches. That’s bad - any light is visible through night sights from a long way off, making the carrier a prime target.
Pan and I have crawled to the far end of the trench so we don’t get hit if the rebels decide to loose a couple of Fly rockets at its side.
Sanya occasionally opens the hatch and bothers Pan and me about something, either to bring him sweets or to go and scour for smokes or whatever. I feel a mix of love and hate for the lads in the carrier. Yeah, sure enough they are wankers, but if the shit goes down then these two recon guys with their carrier will be the most important people on earth for me. All I have is a rifle and four magazines.
There’s marijuana growing on the minefield. A whole field of weed that reaches as far as the mountains. I suggest to Pan that we pick a couple of bushes.
‘You can’t even spit there,’ he says. ‘There are tripwires just beyond the trench and then land mines.’
I give up the idea.
The hatch on the carrier swings open once again and Sanya appears.
‘Radiomen! You, Tall Boy!’ he says in my direction. ‘Got any sweets left?’
‘Yes, Sanya, in the tent.’
‘Go and get them then.’
I get up and see Pan looking at me.
‘Don’t go,’ he says.
‘Why not?’
‘Why are you running errands for them? They’ve got their own greenhorns, let their guys run errands for them.’
‘What are you piping up for? I’ll smash your head in with a rifle butt, you piece of crap!’
‘Sanya, you know Fixa doesn’t let them run errands like that for you,’ Pan says in justification.
Fixa is a serious argument. To me he is the most important guy in the regiment. He wants to get the communications team standing on its own feet and tells us not to do the recon’s bidding. He is my senior and his every word is gospel. We just have to listen to him and do what he says.
‘I couldn’t give a damn about your Fixa, that dumb dembel. I’ll go and smash his head in right now. So, Tall Boy, get moving.’
I get up and go for the sweets in silence.
‘Climb on,’ Sanya says when I return with a handful of caramels and a bottle of lemonade.
He is wearing his webbing over his bare torso, sunglasses (even though it’s pitch black), bullet belts round his neck and a Kalashnikov on his knee. Rambo. He sets off the whole picture with a beret and the recon badge of a bat with its wings spread against a globe.
I climb up and sit next to him, my back resting against the barrel of the machine-gun. Sanya offers me a couple of my own sweets: ‘Help yourself,’ he says. I take some an
d we chew.
‘Where are you from, Tall Boy?’
‘Moscow.’
‘Ah. Have you seen Red Square?’
I nod.
‘Me too. I’ve been to Moscow twice, not bad. But where I’m from is better.’
‘Where’s that then, Sanya?’
‘Nizhny Novgorod.’
The hatch opens and Boxer climbs out holding a gun magazine in his hand. He looks at me for a second and hurls it at me. A loaded magazine is pretty heavy and it gives me a hard crack on the head.
‘What the hell are you sitting in front of the barrel for, dickhead!’ He yells. ‘Get the hell out of the way, I nearly shot you, you idiot.’
I move over.
‘Pick up the magazine,’ he orders and goes back inside the hatch.
He swings the turret round and lets off a long burst of fire at the mountains. The shells disappear with a rustle towards the peaks and the gorge lights up when they explode. When the noise dies down, Sanya calls me again. It’s a running dispute between him and Boxer: who’s the boss and which one I will obey, just like a dog. If I climb up on top again, Boxer will give me a thick ear; if I don’t, then Sanya will.
I decide that Sanya is better and climb up again next to him.
‘Hey, you got any weed?’ he asks.
‘No,’ I answer. I don’t like this conversation as I realize where it’s heading.
‘How about you go and get some?’
I shake my head.
He clambers over and lowers his head towards me. ‘Do you hear me? Go and rip up some weed. Well? Are you going or not?’
‘Sanya, don’t, he’ll get blown up,’ Pan says from the trench.
‘No, he won’t. So are you going?’
‘No,’ I say hoarsely, my throat drying up in anticipation of the blows. ‘No, Sanya, I’m not going.’
‘Is that so? We’ll see about that. Now piss off.’
I jump down from the carrier and return to the trench.
A mortar bombardment is a strange thing. It seems nothing is happening: the village stands unaltered a kilometre away, the metal roofs are still shining and the only visible movement is the plane trees swaying in the wind. But the mortar shells are coming from there and explode among us. You can’t see them flying or who is firing them. Death just appears as if from nowhere. No shot, no flash, it materializes from thin air and lands with a sharp whistling sound among the soldiers clinging to the ground.
I sit in the trench, my cheek pressed against the earth, clutching my rifle as I watch soil crumble from the walls in the blasts. Behind me, having just as much fun, are Andy, Zyuzik and Pan. Our whole battalion is now sitting in trenches, pressed into the earth, waiting.
Time has long since lost its meaning. I don’t know how long we sit here like this, a month, a century, longer? But it’s only a few hours.
We open fire on the village, aiming at the source of the mortar shells. Our bullets disappear into the yards of houses, and once again everything is just the same, the roofs shine and the trees sway, and death and emptiness. It’s just nonsense, some idiotic dream.
The shells finally stop falling. We wait a while and then climb out of the trench. The ground is a mass of craters as if the earth has suffered from chickenpox. A few shells have landed in the pond and turned it inside out. Mud and slime float on the surface and the water has turned black.
We have one dead guy, a tank crewman, killed by the very first shell. He is still lying there under the track, covered in his ground sheet. Another bloke had a leg torn off.
It turns out there is nothing out of the ordinary about war. It’s still just ordinary life, only taking place in very tough conditions with the constant knowledge that people are trying to kill you.
Nothing changes when someone dies. We still steal water at the kitchen, eat foul-tasting milk soup and get smacked in the eye. We live the same life that people lived in the steppe a thousand and even ten thousand years ago, and death here is just another natural phenomenon like hunger, thirst or a beating.
Sometimes the bombardments are pretty intensive and then turn into firefights. Occasionally under-barrel grenade launchers join in and we shoot in the dark at the red flashes. The carrier cannon opens up, and then everything goes quiet again. Sometimes one of our guys gets killed or wounded, sometimes not.
After the bombardment we sit in the trenches until morning with our rifles pressed to our cheeks. One of us keeps watch, the others listen, no-one sleeps. At night the diesel generator chugs away but the noise doesn’t bother us; it merged long ago with the other night noises and we don’t notice it any more.
In the morning life begins anew. The water-truck arrives and we take containers and go and steal water, and in the kitchen we get our ears boxed. And that’s all there is to it.
We get sent to the Severny airport in Grozny. The city is in ruins - nothing is left here, not a single house, not a single tree, not a single person. The streets, sewn with craters, are heaped with bricks and branches, with the odd body still lying unretrieved in the mess.
This is our first visit to Grozny and our heads turn in all directions as we take in the dead city.
There is shooting on all sides, uninterrupted for even a second. But there is no-one to be seen, and it’s not clear who is shooting at whom. Fighting rages in the courtyards that we race past without stopping.
‘It’s like Stalingrad,’ shouts Zyuzik, trying to out-shout the roar of the head wind. No-one answers.
I always used to think that war was black and white. But it’s in colour.
It’s not true what the song says, that birds don’t sing and trees don’t grow in war. In fact, people get killed in the midst of such vivid colour, among the green foliage of the trees, under the clear blue sky. And life hums on all around. The birds brim with song, the grass blooms with brightly coloured flowers. Dead people lie in the grass, and they are not a bit scary in appearance as part of this multi-coloured world. You can laugh and chat alongside them - humanity doesn’t freeze and go crazy at the sight of a body. It’s only frightening when people shoot at you.
And it’s very frightening that the war is in colour.
On the way back from the airport our column comes under fire. We hurtle along a wide street and they take potshots at us from the windows of houses. There are so many of them it seems like bullets are coming from every window.
Two vehicles are knocked out but the column doesn’t stop to
pick up wounded. Survivors try to jump onto the moving Vehicles, jumping and scrabbling at the handles. One grabs hold and he is pulled aboard.
I am lying on my back and firing at the windows. We are all firing at the windows. The carrier shakes along and the bursts of fire fan out, sending spouts of dust from the walls.
Above me is the bright blue sky. You can’t kill people with such beauty around.
A burst of fire sweeps a soldier off the carrier in front of us. Our driver doesn’t manage to swerve round him and he flies under our wheels. The carrier jumps and I hear the crunching of bone.
We emerge from the field of fire. We have come to the end of the street. I don’t understand why I am alive.
I really want to know what the street is called, and it seems so important to me that I go and ask the sergeant.
He is standing near the tent and drinking water straight from a hose. Water runs down his chin, washing the dust from his skin.
‘Who cares,’ he says hoarsely. ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s Lenin Street, maybe not.’
We brought seventy-three new conscripts to the regiment. Two vehicles were burnt out, thirteen men were killed, eight more are missing in action.
Fighting rages on in Grozny. No-one collects the bodies any more and they lay on the asphalt and on the pavement, between the smashed trees, as if they are part of the city.
Carriers rumble over them at speed, they get tossed around by explosions. Blackened bones are scattered around burnt-out vehicles.
&nbs
p; When it gets dark, strange silhouettes in skirts appear on the streets, lots of them, wandering from kerb to kerb, stopping at the corpses. They turn them over onto their backs and study their faces for a long time.
We can’t work out who they are, and meanwhile the silhouettes steadily approach our block post.
‘Maybe it’s some kind of mountain tribe, eh? Maybe the highlanders here wear skirts like the Scots,’ ventures Osipov.
No-one replies.
The moon shines over the dead on the street and ghosts in skirts wander between the bloated corpses.
Someone’s nerves don’t hold out and he opens fire, joined by two or three others. They fire a few bursts and even drop one of the silhouettes before cries are heard from over there.
Women’s voices shout in Russian and we finally realize that these are the mothers of soldiers; they have come here to find their missing sons and are searching for them among these mangled bodies.
‘Hold your fire!’ shouts Loop. ‘They’re mothers, our mothers!’
Some of the women run over to the one who fell. She is wounded and they pick her up and carry her into one of the courtyards.
The mothers have it worst of all in this war. They don’t belong to either side, they get the brush off from the Russian generals in Khankala or Severny; our soldiers don’t let them sleep in the battalions and shoot at them from the block posts. And as one priest we freed from captivity told me, the Chechens take them off into the mountains and rape them, kill them and feed their innards to their dogs. They have been betrayed by everyone, these Russian women, they die by the dozen, yet still they wander round Chechnya with their photos, searching for their sons.
At dawn there are even more of them. They move from one body to another, study the mangled faces for a long time, holding a handkerchief over their mouths. They don’t cry - in the heat it’s hard to breathe near the bodies.
One woman manages to find her son. The commanders give her a vehicle and she takes the body to Khankala.
No-one collects the other bodies.
‘Hey, Russians,’ the Chechens shout from one of the houses. ‘Take your guys away! We won’t fire, pick them up!’
One Soldier's War In Chechnya Page 13