‘Are you shell-shocked?’
I could barely hear the voice, but from the intonation it seemed as though someone was shouting a question at me.
‘No, just a bit deafened, it’ll pass,’ I shouted back in reply. My own voice surprised me; it was deep, as if it had come from a barrel, and it wasn’t my internal hearing that had picked it up but something outside.
I blew through my ears again and shook my head. The ringing sound diminished a little, but my head still felt like it was packed with cotton wool and my thinking was fogged.
The Kombat appeared on the embankment, shooting frenziedly at the village, aiming carefully at one spot and saying something as he fired. I crawled over and lay down beside him trying to make out what he was shooting at. Seeing nothing except the same empty houses, I began to fire in the same -direction.
Hearing me next to him, the Kombat tore himself away from his rifle and elbowed me.
‘You, call up Armour for me.’
‘What?’
‘Call Armour, you dumb prick!’
Both armoured carriers answered immediately.
‘Armour-185 receiving you, Pioneer.’
‘Armour-182 receiving you, Pioneer.’
‘Comrade Major, Armour on the line,’ I said, passing the headphones and mouthpiece to the Kombat, who pressed one earpiece to his head.
‘Armour, Armour, this is the commander. OK, now fire on the village, starting with the houses in front of us and slightly to the left, where the brick one is.’ He motioned towards the houses as if the guys in the carriers could see him. ‘Then move back and cover us. We’re pulling out. Everyone, let’s go!’
He returned the headphones to me and gave the order: ‘Pass this down the line, we’re pulling out. Small dashes, one at a time. And get Sitnikov over here.’
Sitnikov lay about ten metres to my right. I crawled over to him, tugging on the trouser legs of two soldiers as I went. ‘We’re pulling out.’
‘Comrade Captain, the Kombat wants you. We’re pulling out.’ Then, turning to the machine-gunner lying next to him with his face buried in the ground, I yelled in his ear: ‘We’re pulling out, short runs, pass it on. Do you hear?’
The gunner lifted his head, looked blankly at me and
buried his face in the ground again. His machine-gun lay idly beside him and clearly hadn’t been fired once in all this time.
The kid’s stunned, I thought, and shook him. ‘Why aren’t you firing? I said why aren’t you firing, have you been hit?’
The gunner raised his head again and looked at me with indifferent, empty eyes. I realized then that he hadn’t been hit. I knew that stupid, indifferent gaze: the guy had lost it, been broken by the marsh. It happens.
A soldier who seems normal can all of a sudden barely work his legs; he moves like a sleepwalker, his head drooping as if he doesn’t have the strength to hold it straight, snot pouring ceaselessly from his nose. The war can break a guy like that, and very quickly. In just two or three days he can just let himself go without even resisting, apathetically taking everything as it comes. You could beat him, kick him or cut his fingers off, and he still won’t wake up or speed up, or even say anything. The only cure for this is sleep, rest and food.
I shook the machine-gunner again by the shoulder, trying to get some life out of him.
‘Can you hear me? Why aren’t you shooting, eh?’
The gunner said nothing, and then after a while ventured timidly: ‘Don’t have much ammo...’
I could barely control my anger.
‘What the fuck did you come here for, to fight or to stand round scratching your balls?! Like hell do we need you and your machine-gun! So you’re running low on ammo, are you? What do you plan on doing with it, salting it and taking it home with you? What are you saving it for then? Don’t you see you’re in battle? Now give it here!’
I grabbed his machine-gun, dug the bipod into the ground and loosed off an entire belt at the village in one long burst. I angrily thrust the weapon back at the guy’s broad but sagging chest and snapped: ‘Take it! Now pull back. Get your sorry ass out of here and use your machine-gun; shut their Goddamn mouths for them!’
The gunner silently took the machine-gun from me, and without having fired a shot, he crawled back into the woods, dragging the weapon along the ground. I felt another surge of fury and wanted to kick him up the backside, but in the end I just dismissed him with a wave of the hand. Idiot.
The infantry stirred at the other end of the clearing and began to pull back. One after the other the men stood up, ran six or seven metres and fell to the ground. Then the others ran after them.
The carriers started their engines in the bushes and revved up, sending clouds of diesel smoke into the air. They drove out onto the track and stopped between our positions and the village. The turrets turned towards the houses and froze, their barrels quivering like elephants’ trunks sniffing out the enemy, and then they opened up simultaneously.
I had never seen a large-calibre cannon fire at close range before, and the effect was staggering. A mighty roar of fourteen-millimetre rounds muffled everything and my ears blocked up again. The impact of the sound was so powerful that I felt my body reverberating through the plates in my flak jacket. Cones of fire from the muzzles illuminated the clearing with a flickering light, and tracer rounds ripped through the walls into the houses where they exploded, shredding the roofs, tearing down trees. A vast quantity of metal hit the village with such unbelievable kinetic energy that it was dead in an instant, torn to shreds by the shells.
I felt uneasy again, plagued by the same feeling I’d had when the self-propelled guns were shelling Alkhan-Kala. Every time I heard heavy-calibre shellfire, ours or the Chechens’, I got this chilling sense of unease. It wasn’t fear, although fear feels just as cold. It was different, something more animal, left over from the genetic code of our ancestors. This is probably how a gopher freezes in horror when it hears the roar of a lion, and feels the power of its jaws through tremors in the ground.
I had killed before, or at least tried to kill those people who shot at me, but my killing was different, on a lesser scale and under my control. The death I administered was not grotesque - just a small hole in the body and that was it. My kind of death was fair; it gave them a chance to hide from the bullet behind a wall, just as I had hidden from their bullets. But to hide from a large-calibre cannon was impossible; this calibre could reach you everywhere, it crushed walls and killed terribly, with a roar, tearing off heads, turning bodies inside out, blowing the flesh off a person and leaving bare bones inside their tunics.
I did not feel any pity or twinges of conscience for the Chechens. We were enemies. They had to be killed to the last man, and in any way possible. And the faster and technically easier it was to do this, the better.
But there was just one thing... What if they had large-calibre cannons too?
While the carriers were pounding the village the infantry managed to regroup in the woods. Sitnikov and I let everyone pull back first, and were the last to get up from the embankment, loosed off a few parting shots and then ran after the rest.
We went straight through the woods and came out in a clearing where a cow pasture began. We fired our last shots, skirted the woods and moved slowly down the track past the village, occasionally letting off a couple of bursts at the houses.
Crouching, the infantry ran after us and then walked along in the cover of the carriers.
Just where the woods ended I ran slap-bang into Igor. He was also lagging behind, letting his unit go ahead. As usual he jabbed me playfully in the shoulder and bared his teeth in a grin.
‘You alive?’
I smiled back.
‘Alive. And you?’
‘Me? Of course I’m alive. Heck, we took a fair battering there, eh?’ Igor had not yet cooled off after the firefight; he was excited and in good spirits.
‘Our vehicles were behind yours. We heard you start shooting and
we followed. And then, oh boy, did it kick off, automatic rifle fire from all sides. I thought we were all done for. Bastards, they came in from behind. And then there was that recon guy of yours, what’s his name? Anton. We nearly shot him. We watched him run out of the bushes and try to climb up the side of our vehicle, thought he was a Chechen.’
‘So what happened to him, is he wounded?’
‘Nah, he just got knocked off your carrier by branches... Bugger, we’ve got a long way to run yet, look.’ Igor measured the distance to the turning where the Kombat’s carrier stood behind the barn. The field of view ended at the other end of the village where the Chechen positions were. ‘I got knackered running through the woods, and why the hell did I put on my body armour?! Come on then, you go first. I’ll cover you.’
While we’d been exchanging news the infantry had pulled out, leaving us on our own.
‘No, you go first, as far as that metal thing on the ground, and I’ll follow.’
‘OK,’ agreed Igor. He straightened his flak jacket, crouched down and ran the fifty metres to what was either a piece of a turret crane or a bit from a silo. He came sliding down, turned to face the village, trained his rifle and waved at me.
It wasn’t pleasant to leave the cover of the trees and cross the open space. A picture flashed through my head of a silent tracer flying from the bushes, heading right for me, and the hard turret, and then the ricochet inside my body. I glanced at the houses. They were very close - at this distance you could hit someone in the ear with a sniper’s rifle. And if they decided to return fire you’d have no cover and they’d kill you with the first bullet.
Trying not to think about this I burst out of the trees and raced towards Igor.
We caught up with the infantry in two sprints and then started leapfrogging back with them. I was running with difficulty now; having to throw myself down and get up again each time was unbearable, my arms and legs were shaking and I cursed my ungainly flak jacket and this wretched radio. After the next run I didn’t throw myself down but just dropped onto one knee, breathing heavily and grimly preparing to run again, and again after that, and then on to the bend where the Kombat’s carrier was behind the bam, at least three hundred metres away.
I was desperate for a drink. The water we’d picked up the day before in the battalion as we were leaving for the swamp had run out almost immediately. The empty flask only got in my way, banging my hip, and it seemed even heavier now that it was empty.
Only with difficulty did I fend off the urge to drink from a puddle. I hadn’t drunk cold water all day in a bid to stay warm, and the reserves of liquid left in my body were being squeezed out by my flak jacket, a drop at a time through every pore.
Trickles of sweat flooded my eyes, my mouth dried up and my back ached so much it seemed I would never feel limber again! My sodden underwear stuck to my body and a damp heat rose from beneath my collar with every step. My rifle stretched my arms and I had the urge to empty my pockets of everything down to the last pin. As my energies dwindled, I stopped going down on one knee; I just plodded along wearily with my head lowered.
Igor dragged himself along next to me with just as much difficulty.
The infantry had stopped running too and were wandering along, all equally exhausted.
We trailed across the field strewn with cowpats, ignoring the houses behind us that could still hold Chechens, dreaming only of getting to the vehicles, lying down and stretching our aching legs.
But the Kombat had other ideas. When we reached the bend and went to clamber up the vehicles, he unleashed a hail of abuse at us and gave the order for us to pull back further to the positions of the 7th. They were half a kilometre away, at the place where I had spoken with Vasya yesterday. Yesterday? How long ago that was, how long a day can last and never bloody end. And now we had to go somewhere else!
We sheltered behind the vehicles and carried on walking, wading through the ditch full of filthy water that the carriers had got stuck in the day before, skidding in the wet clay, sliding and struggling to pull ourselves out, unable to do so unaided but having no energy to help others.
We only had about fifteen metres to go to the first trench, and we could see the heads of the 7th watching us inquisitively over the edge, when I suddenly felt I couldn’t go a single step further. Fighting through a kaleidoscope in front of my eyes,
I groped my way down onto a small rut and leant back on it, resting neatly between two cowpats. Igor fell down next to me. The infantry scattered on the ground too, just short of the trenches that the 7th had dug, a few steps beyond the bounds of human strength.
We sat there panting, unable to say a word, gulping the air into our parched mouths. Dozens of throats gasped to fill lungs with oxygen, and steam rose in the cold air around us.
But thirst was greater than our exhaustion, and licking my cracked lips, I managed to croak: ‘Lads... water... give us a drink.’
The soldiers of the 7th dragged out an aluminium milk churn, stood it in front of us and gave us a large ladle. I threw the lid off and looked inside. The water was murky and there were weeds in it. When I dipped the ladle in, two small fry darted out from under the tendrils, circling quickly in the enclosed space, bouncing off the side and sending silt to the surface.
I looked at the soldiers.
‘Where’s the water from?’
‘From over there,’ a pockmarked sergeant told me, nodding towards a near-stagnant stream that looped across the pasture. I followed it with my gaze. The stream came from the same woods we had just left. From the marsh. I shouldn’t have waited and just drunk from the ditch, I thought, and dismissing it all, I lowered my head to the ladle.
Never in my life had I drunk anything more delicious than this brackish marsh water. I drank it in huge gulps, freezing cold and with weeds too, and occasionally I let down the ladle to take air and then gulped from it again. A little fry banged against my teeth, but I didn’t stop, I couldn’t, and I swallowed it live.
I drank the litre-sized ladle down in one gulp. The water made me sweat instantly and I wiped my chin on my sleeve recovered my breath and dipped the ladle in once more.
After I had drunk my fill I passed the ladle around and flopped down again in front of the trench. I lit up and finally stretched out my screaming legs, feeling an unbelievable but already diminishing exhaustion in my muscles. The fog and roaring in my ears passed, my energy started to return and I came back to life.
The infantry perked up too. They finished off the forty-litre churn in two minutes and then sat down on the ground and lit cigarettes.
Men of the 7th climbed out of the trenches and came over to us to ask about the fight. And the infantry fluffed up their feathers and, with the casual air of seasoned soldiers, recounted their ‘battle’. This was the first taste of action for many of them and it had gone well, with no casualties, and now that they had rested, they were filled with the feeling that it wasn’t so terrifying; the fighting had been a piece of cake this time, and maybe it would always be that easy. They had fired and been fired at, bullets really had whistled over their heads and they’d have something to tell the folks back home. They felt like real rangers who had walked through fire and water. The adrenalin that their fear had driven out of them in huge quantities now churned in their blood, and their energy flooded back.
I looked at them with a smile and listened to their chatter -I had been like them once myself.
‘...The Kombat and I were running, looking around, and this Chechen appears from a house porch to see what’s happening. So the Kombat whips off his rifle and goes for him. The guy falls down and crawls round the house to croak, and the Kombat keeps firing at him, must have loosed off a whole magazine. He’s got a big smirk on his face, very pleased with himself. “Huh, dumb prick,” he says...’
‘...These recon were checking out the routes to see where we could get out of the village. There weren’t many of them, see, so they didn’t stop to muck about, they even shot th
e hell out of the bushes. That’s their tactic. They crawl up, hit them with a grenade launcher and pull out. When we were going to reinforce the 15th outside Oktyabrskoye they burnt out a carrier doing just that...’
‘... I fell from the carrier and there were bullets going whack-whack in the branches, right over my bloody head. Man did they start up then! I crawled behind the bushes and then I saw our guys lying over in the clearing-.’
No-one was paying any attention to the village now. The battle had finished, the Chechen recon we’d run into had gone, they’d either pulled out or holed up somewhere. So we relaxed. We lay on the wet ground in front of the trenches, without digging in or camouflaging ourselves, we just sat around in a group. Which you do not do in war, under any circumstances.
The Chechens immediately punished us for this carelessness. We all heard the whistle.
It started in the village and grew in strength, cutting through the exhaustion in our brains and throwing us onto the ground.
‘Incoming!’
‘Get down!’
‘They aren’t letting us pull back, bastards!’
We landed in the ruts. My fatigue dissolved instantly and my body was flushed with heat once again.
The first shell exploded a fair distance away from us, on the pasture. But behind this one a few more flew out of the village and exploded closer and closer as they advanced on us.
I had landed badly. I lay exposed on a slope, presenting a perfect trap for shrapnel, and I was entirely visible from all sides. The next shell hit the ground like a fat raindrop; a shower of clay clods rained down from the sky, smacking me painfully on the back of the head.
I desperately wanted to shrink, become tiny, congeal into a ball and disperse into the ground, merging with its protective lap. I even managed to picture a tiny burrow where I would be safe from shrapnel and bullets, protected from all sides as I peeped out with one eye. With every fresh explosion my desire to be in the burrow grew stronger and stronger, and with my eyes pressed tightly shut, afraid to open them before I died, I groped around in the grass for a way in.
One Soldier's War In Chechnya Page 22