One Soldier's War In Chechnya

by Arkady Babchenko

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a couple of blankets. And some trousers to put on under my camouflage.’

  ‘I’ve got some. Come on, I’ll give you a pair.’

  ‘No, I can’t come now. We’re going to the marsh as your reinforcements.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard? You infantry make me laugh! All around you the war has kicked off big time, there are six hundred Chechens in Alkhan-Yurt and you don’t even know it! Basayev got out of Grozny and now they’re surrounding him, the 15th and the interior ministry troops, and they’re going to force them out towards us. We’re plugging the gap in the marsh.’ ‘What, seriously?’

  ‘No, I’m joking. Actually we’re just out for a stroll!’

  Sitnikov came out of the wagon with Korobok, the commander of the 7th company. They shook hands and Sitnikov went back to our vehicles. I headed back there too.

  ‘OK Vasya, I’m off. Don’t give anyone else the blankets and definitely keep the trousers for me. I’ll drop by for them if I can.’

  The infantry vehicles got stuck in a ditch and lagged behind. We didn’t bother waiting for them and went on ahead.

  Our carrier drove into a clearing. On three sides - behind us, on the left and on the right - the clearing was surrounded by damp, gloomy woods that began sixty or seventy metres away from us. Deep inside the woods some constructions towered over the tree-tops, either grain silos or an oil refinery, enormous surreal beasts sketched onto the cloudy sky. The wind whipped round their metal innards with a deep howl, low and full of dread like the dogs of Grozny as they scavenged meat from the dead. On the fourth side the clearing was bordered by a marsh thickly overgrown with rushes.

  The carrier crawled up a small hillock near the edge of the swamp and bounced to a halt. ‘We’re here,’ Sitnikov muttered, sounding more like ‘We’re done for.’ He jumped down from the top of the carrier and ran along the edge of the marsh to the nearest clump of hawthorn bushes, which grew everywhere here. I hurriedly grabbed the radio and dismounted by the wheel to cover him. Ventus jumped down on the other side, crawled under the back end of the carrier and covered our rear.

  When he reached the bushes, Sitnikov turned to us and waved. I adjusted the radio on my back and looked at Ventus to say: ‘I’m going, cover me.’ I ducked down and ran over to the staff commander and threw myself down with a thump on the wet moss. We lay quietly, side by side, listening and looking round.

  Just beyond the bushes, the swampy river plain stretched about a kilometre to the edge of Alkhan-Kala, the upper part of Alkhan-Yurt, situated opposite us on a high precipice. To our left, about three hundred metres away, I could see the edge of Alkhan-Yurt, and in front of it, floodlands on a loop of the river We didn’t need to worry about the left flank; it was clear and we had a good field of view. To our right and in front of us were tall clumps of rushes the height of a man that stretched two or three hundred metres into the marsh. Behind us, reaching as far as the mountains, there was another flood plain about two or three kilometres in length.

  And... silence. There was none of the fighting we had expected, nothing and no-one. It was quiet as the grave.

  What a lousy place, I thought to myself. Rushes in front and to the right, behind us woods, and in Alkhan-Yurt, Chechens. They’re probably in the lowlands too, and in those silos in the woods. They could hide all six hundred of them there, easy as anything, and we’d never see them. And then they’d make short work of us and our three vehicles, for sure.

  Behind my back, as if to confirm my thoughts, came the droning of an engine. I tried not to make a sound as I unslung my rifle. Sitnikov didn’t move, he just kept on looking at the marsh through his binoculars.

  The engine noise ebbed and then picked up again as the vehicle climbed slopes. Its distance from us seemed to vary with the surge and fall of its engine; first it was close, then far away. I waited, glancing at the staff commander as he motionlessly studied the marsh.

  Was he posing for my benefit? Was he just trying to show how brave he was, or was he really the nutcase they say he was in the battalion, indifferent to everything: his life, mine, Ventus’s. In war there is a breed of people who, like bears that have tasted human flesh for the first time, will keep killing to end. They look normal enough, but when it comes down to it, all they can think about is plunging themselves into yet another slaughter. They care little about anything, they wait for nobody and they see nothing but battle. They make great soldiers, but lousy commanders. Like the rest of them, Sitnikov will get right into the thick of it and drag us all in behind him, failing to measure his experience against that of his men. Dangerous people. They survive but they lose their men. And later these are the people they write about in the papers: the hero, the only one to survive in his regiment.

  Then the infantry carriers appeared in the forest, crawled into the hollow and turned onto the hillock. I relaxed and lowered my weapon.

  ‘Comrade Captain, the infantry have arrived.’

  Finally, he tore himself away from his binoculars and looked round. I tried to make out the expression on his handsome, well-bred face, guess what he thought of this marsh, and whether he rated our task as lousy or bearable. But Sitnikov was inscrutable.

  Why were we here? Bastards, surely they could have told us what we were here for? We weren’t soldiers, just cannon fodder. We’d been thrown into this marsh to rot, to lie and die here and not ask questions. Not once in the whole war had anyone explained a mission to me in a normal civilized manner. They sent us and off we’d go. Our job was to die, not to blather.

  ‘Inform the Kombat that we have reached our destination and are taking up positions.’ After he’d barked this order, Sitnikov grabbed his rifle, stooped down and ran towards the carriers. Once he’d got down the hillock he stood to his full height and waved his arms.

  The vehicles came to a halt and the infantry streamed off them in clusters, spreading out among the ditches and hollows. Right along the edge of the forest we could hear the cry ‘Battle stations!’

  I put on my headphones and called up Pioneer:

  ‘Poker to Pioneer, do you receive me Pioneer?’

  No-one answered for a long time, then from the headphones I heard ‘Receiving’. The metallic voice, distorted by distance and the marsh dampness, seemed familiar.

  ‘Is that you, Sabbit?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you fall asleep there or what? Just try dozing off on me, you big asshole with ears, and I’ll knock you down when I get back. Tell the boss we’ve reached our destination and are taking up our positions. Do you receive me, over?’

  ‘Received loud and clear, you’ve reached your destination and are taking up positions, over.’

  ‘Yes, and one more thing Sabbit, find out when we’ll be relieved, over.’

  ‘Roger. Is it Poker who’s asking, over?’

  ‘No, I’m asking, over and out.’

  I pushed the headphones to the back of my head and lay there a while, waiting for it to hiss in my ears.

  Everything was quiet. It suddenly seemed that I was alone in this clearing. The infantry had dispersed among the undergrowth, vanished into the marsh and frozen there, not revealing their position with the slightest movement. The dead carriers stood immobile in the dip and there was no sound from either of them.

  This tense, compressed silence magnified the sense of danger. The Chechens were already here, all around, and it would kick off any second now. Tracer rounds and grenades would pour down from all sides, from the silos, the marsh, the rushes - the air would be rent asunder by rumbling and explosions, and we wouldn’t have a chance even to shout or take cover.

  I felt scared. My heart beat faster and a rushing noise filled my temples. Bastards, where are the Chechens, where are we, where is everyone? Why don’t they tell us anything? Why did they throw us into this place and to do what? Swearing to myself, I heaved the radio onto my shoulder, got up and ran towards the carriers to find Sitnikov. I went down in
to the hollow and looked around. There was no-one by the carriers. I went over to the nearest one and banged on the side of it with my rifle butt.

  ‘Hey, you in there, where’s the staff commander?’

  The driver-mechanic’s head appeared from its oily, steely-smelling depths, the whites of his eyes flashing from a filthy black face that probably never got washed clean of mud, grease and diesel: ‘He’s gone with our platoon commander to pick positions.’

  ‘Where’s the infantry?’

  ‘Down there, along that pipe, lying in the ditch.’

  ‘And where are you going to park?’

  ‘We don’t know. They said to wait here for now.’

  ‘But which way did he go?’

  ‘That way, to the bushes, I think.’

  I went up the hillock, the way the driver had pointed, crouched down and looked around. Sitnikov and the platoon commander were standing in the bushes, surveying the area. I went over to them.

  ‘So Sasha, you position your platoon on that knoll towards the marsh,’ Sitnikov said waving his hand along the edge of the marsh. ‘Put one unit with a machine-gun along the pipeline and cover the rear, and put the carrier in the same place, right behind us in the hollow. The second carrier goes on the left slope of the knoll, and your field of fire is from Alkhan-Yurt to Alkhan-Kala. My vehicle will be here, covering from Alkhan-Yurt as far as the 15th. Today’s password is “nine”, and everyone digs in!’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the platoon commander said with a nod.

  ‘That’s it, get cracking.’

  Then Sitnikov turned to me: ‘You come with me. Let’s go and see what we’ve got here.’

  We poked around by the edge of the wood for another hour and a half, picking our positions, looking around, listening. I felt tired. I was covered in sweat beneath my jacket; beads of sweat mixed with raindrops ran between my shoulder blades and cooled my heated body.

  When it was completely dark, we came back to the hillock and our carrier and settled down beside a concrete beam that lay randomly in the clearing. Ivenkov was nearby, and we silently awaited the next developments. The rain intensified. We lay motionlessly by the beam, listening in the darkness.

  Southern nights are pitch black and your eyesight doesn’t help. At night you have to rely on your hearing alone - only its perception can help you relax, reassuring you that everything is quiet. But then your body suddenly tenses, you catch your breath between your clenched teeth, your hand steals slowly towards your rifle and silently comes to rest there. Your eyes slowly move your head towards the unexpected sound, and you try not to brush your head on your collar, try not to make a sound that might hinder your ears from gauging the situation.

  Silence. The only noises that night were the dog howls of the silos and the quacking and rustling of the ducks as they moved in the rushes, just asking to be stuck on a spit. And nothing else, it was all quiet. The Chechens, if there were any in the lowland area, didn’t give themselves away. Maybe they were waiting too.

  The minutes stretched into years. The silence and night smothered everything; time that wasn’t measured with cigarettes had lost all meaning.

  Everything had died. Only we soldiers were still a little alive, despite being rooted in the cold. Like sunken submarines we lay on a shelf, our iron sides nestling closely to one another under water as we cooled off motionlessly, huddled in a pile to preserve warmth. And the night bore down on us with a kilometre-thick layer of expectation, our skulls cracked and collapsed and the darkness poured inside and filled our hull compartment, leaving alive only a drop of energy somewhere in our very core. And not another sign of life around, not a single soul, only the dead.

  It became increasingly hard to lie there: cramped, numbed muscles started to gnaw at my joints; cold rain penetrated my bones; my body cooled and started to shiver.

  My legs were unbelievably cold, and my feet throbbed in their sodden boots, almost as if they weren’t attached any more. But I couldn’t flap my arms or stomp on the spot, the night and the cold shackled my movements, pressing down on my chest.

  Four hours passed like this.

  I moved a little, trying to slip off the safety on my rifle but my stiff fingers couldn’t feel the little flag of metal and they slipped off.

  Everything was still just as quiet.

  Suddenly I didn’t give a damn about the prospect of fighting. I had waited for it for so long already, lying here on the ground in the winter rain. I had spent too long tensed up and nothing had happened. My physical resources were exhausted and I was about to surrender myself to total indifference. I wanted to go somewhere and warm up: into the carrier, to a fire, to a village or to the Chechens, anywhere that was dry and warm.

  That’s how they get slaughtered at the block posts, I thought to myself, and I raised myself up on one knee. I couldn’t lie like that any longer. To hell with them!

  ‘Listen, Ventus, help me get this radio off.’

  Ventus was also way out of it; he prised himself off the seabed and rose through the thick freezing night. He surfaced evenly, the night streaming off the decking of his body armour, pouring off his magazine pouches, churning in the layers of eyelashes, and then receding, leaving his eyes to regain their life.

  Sitnikov did not move; he kept his head firmly in combat mode as he listened to the marsh.

  Ventus took the radio off my back and I stood up to my full height, bent backwards, flexing my torso. My spine immediately felt better without the fourteen-kilo weight digging into my shoulders like a hump and cutting into my collarbones. I undid my flak jacket, removed it over my head and placed it on the ground by the concrete beam, with the warm and dry inner side facing upwards. Ventus put his jacket down next to it, forming a sort of seat.

  We jumped up and down, flapped our arms, and ran on the spot doing silly kicks in our heavy boots. Our hearts beat faster, pumping blood into our frozen toes, and we began to glow.

  ‘I never thought I’d do warm-up exercises in the army of my own free will,’ grinned Ventus.

  ‘Yeah, but it’s pointless’ I said with a dismissive wave. ‘Our stomachs are empty; we’ve got no calories in us. When we sit down again we’ll be frozen in two minutes.’

  Once we’d got our circulation going again we quickly sat down back to back on our jackets so as not to waste the warmth or get the jackets wet in the rain. Through my thin trousers, my frozen backside caught a brief, comforting radiance from the jackets.

  We lit up, sheltering the smokes inside the sleeves of our jackets. A smouldering flicker caught Ventus’s face in the dark, illuminating his dirty fingers as he clutched his dog-end.

  I remembered how I had once spotted a guy smoking in my night vision sight. He was far away, but every feature on his face was clearly visible, as if it had been drawn with a pencil. You can hit someone a kilometre away, and it was only about that far to Alkhan-Yurt. But we were too cold and we had nothing else to warm ourselves with other than the acrid, stinking smoke of our Primas.

  The carrier’s hatch opened with a quiet, controlled clang. Coughing, the driver hoarsely whispered: ‘Hey, lads, give me a smoke, will you?’

  I had to smile. The war was now of secondary importance; now human needs came first, the eternal preoccupations of the soldier: get something to eat, warm up and have a smoke. Empty stomachs and cold got the better of our instinct to survive, of duty and the war. Ghosts in army jackets rose out of the trenches, began to move and wander around looking for food. If a soldier is fed, clothed and washed he fights ten times better, there’s no doubt about it.

  I threw my pack of Prima at the voice. The driver groped around on the vehicle, found the pack, took a cigarette and threw it back. The pack fell short and landed in the grass. I wiped it on my trouser leg.

  ‘Shit, it:s wet through... Hey, infantry, are you using your night sights?’

  ‘Do we need to?’

  ‘Damn!’ said Sitnikov, ‘I’ll shoot those dickheads in a minute.’ He grabbed a rott
en piece of wood that was lying on the ground, and without getting up threw it at the driver. ‘You’d bloody well better be using them. What do you think the carrier is, a hotel? You’ve warmed up, now get back to your positions, and don’t any of you monkeys think of going to sleep!’

  The driver disappeared back inside the hatch and I heard some voices as someone moved around inside. A second later the turret turned with a quiet rattle towards the mountains, sweeping its barrel as it looked into the night. Then it stopped, giving the impression of close vigilance, and turned the other way.

  I grinned. In half an hour they’d probably be asleep again.

  The moon, covered right up to its chin by a thick blanket of cloud, found a small gap and peeked out of the corner of its eye. The night gloom lit to grey.

  My stomach rumbled. I looked up at the sky and nudged Ventus.

  ‘It would be good to have a bite to eat now, wouldn’t it, while we can see something at least? Comrade Captain, how about supper? It doesn’t look like we’ll be getting any action today.’

  ‘Go ahead and eat,’ Sitnikov said, without turning round.

  I delved into the pocket of my webbing and started to scoop out my supplies. I happened to have four whole flat rusks, a tin of sprats in tomato sauce and a packet of raisins. Ventus only had three rusks.

  ‘Yeah, not exactly a feast. If only we could heat up the sprats, and at least have something hot to eat.’ I patted my pockets. ‘Have you got a bayonet?’

  Ventus rummaged in his pockets too and then shook his head.

  ‘Comrade Captain. Have you got a bayonet?’

  Sitnikov wordlessly handed me a hunting knife. It was a good one with a short, sturdy blade, a collector’s piece. The handle was made from expensive wood and lay snugly in my hand.

  ‘Wow, where did you get this, Captain? Is it a war trophy?’

  ‘I bought it before I left Moscow.’

  ‘How much was it?’

  ‘Eight hundred bucks.’