One Soldier's War In Chechnya

by Arkady Babchenko

  Fence to the left, gardens to the right, and the next house straight ahead. You could approach us standing up and cut us down at your leisure, we have no field of vision. Only to the left of the open gate can you see a bit of the road and the windows of a house standing at an angle on the other side.

  If they’d been smart they’d have put the lookout over in that house. One machine-gun over there, one here, and no son of a bitch could slip past. I tell this to Yurka, who looks over at the house, estimates the distance separating it from us, looks at the machine-guns and then surprises me by saying that our lookout is excellently situated. I look at him in puzzlement and see fear etched on his face. He clearly has no desire to enter that house at night and sit there for an hour and a half on his own, cut off from the rest of the platoon, and then have to crawl back. What’s more, if it kicked off now he wouldn’t be able to get back. Thirty metres is a long way to go under fire and he’d have to shoot his way out on his own, drawing all the enemy fire towards him.

  Yurka knows that I see his fear and starts to mumble about how over there we’d have to sit on the bare floor in the cold and not on these soft, comfy armchairs, how the field of vision here is more or less OK. The other lads are close by too, so why bother going over there? So that’s settled, we’re staying in this comfortable but badly set-up lookout, because I’m not going over there on my own either.

  A stream of tracer rounds flashes by from the Chechen side. I take my night vision sight and go outside. Everything is unusually green but pretty clearly visible through the aperture. Over on the other side of the street the twigs of an apple tree quiver in the wind and it seems there is someone in the window. But it’s only my eyes playing tricks. I see the 3rd platoon’s carrier. The driver is moving around near the vehicle, fixing something. He’s about a hundred and fifty metres away but in such visibility I could put a bullet in his ear. The thought unnerves me and I tear myself away from the night sight and crouch down behind the wall. A green light is still flashing in my eyes and for a while I can’t make out anything until my pupils accustom themselves to the darkness. Then objects start to emerge and I see the stairs, the doorstep and the door. I go back inside and sit down in my armchair. Yurka and I sit in silence for the rest of our shift, listening to the darkness and keeping close watch.

  At ten to four our night vigil comes to an end and I wake Denis and Pashka. They appear yawning and say nothing as they flop heavily into the armchairs, their eyes still half closed. I’m sure they’ll fall asleep the moment we shut the door. I look at the backs of their shorn heads and remember how about five days ago two guys from the next company had fallen asleep at the lookout. It was during the day and all they had to worry about were snipers: after all, who’s going to crawl around enemy positions in broad daylight? And since they were shielded from telescopic sights by piles of earth they relaxed and fell asleep, their heads resting on their chests, the napes of their necks turned up to the sun. Then two Chechens crawled out of the ruins and, without even bothering to hide, walked up to them, shot both soldiers in the back of the head and strolled off with their rifles and some boxes of ammo.

  I look at Denis and Pashka. I should shake them, chat for ten minutes so they wake up properly, but I don’t; sleeping time is too valuable to waste on idle talk. To hell with them, after all they’ll be the first to get the chop if anything happens, and they might manage to at least yell first.

  Next morning, the dank misty dawn meets us in silence. We go out of the house and take a leak as we listen for the sounds of nature. There are none; it’s quiet outside, as if there’s no storming operation going on at all. A garden, apple trees, mist, silence. Back home at our country cottage, if you get up a bit earlier at the end of August, when the trees have not yet shaken off the night cold and the puddles are covered with a brittle crust of ice, you can witness the same chilly silence. And it smells just the same, of shrivelled leaves, of morning and autumn.

  Taking advantage of the lull, we decide to have a wash. We take turns: two of us heat up water, two snort and splash over tubs set outside on stools, and two stand alongside with rifles. We hurry - today we’ll have to advance again and it’s already gone seven. Sure enough, before we even have breakfast we get the order to prepare to move out. The company commander orders me to summon the platoon commanders to the command post, and I call up Likhach and Pioneer. There’s no contact with the 3rd platoon. The company commander sends me over there to find out what’s wrong.

  The 3rd platoon’s command post is located to our right, in a smart house two streets down. I stuff five grenades into my webbing, six rifle magazines, ten packs of bullets and a spare radio battery in case theirs has run down. I hop up and down, tighten my belt and adjust my webbing, flex my shoulders. Not bad, it feels comfortable enough.

  I cross the gardens to reach the first street, my rifle at the ready in case some bearded fighter has been sitting in the cellars since last night, laying in wait for some lone soldier like me. I climb over a stack of firewood behind the barn and jump into the next yard. It’s tidy and well tended, the stone ground covered in sand. A Lada the colour of wet tarmac stands under a carport. It looks new, and only its windows are broken. I go over to the car; it’s bare inside, there’s nothing to take and no keys to start it. But the house is in good shape and doesn’t seem to have been looted. I should take a look on the way back for blankets, socks, gloves and other warm bits and pieces that can take the edge off the soldiering life.

  I look out of the gates, on my guard: if anything happens here there’s no-one to help me. With one eye I check out the street and I keep an ear out for anything going on behind me in the yard. Both places are quiet. I have to run across the street but I can’t force myself to leave the yard. After the peace of the early morning this seems far more terrifying than it did yesterday, when we were constantly showered with shrapnel. During this short peaceful morning I have managed to shed the continual readiness to die; I have relaxed and I am now loathe to throw myself headfirst back into cold death.

  Finally, I steel myself, draw my lungs full of air, exhale sharply and run out of the open gates in sprints. The street seems to be very large, enormous, like it’s thousands of kilometres wide, a whole continent covered in very fine smooth asphalt without a single rut that might afford protection. Slowly, like a slug, I am crawling into the sights of some sniper. That’s probably what I look like through a telescopic sight - a small, helpless slug trying to escape death in the middle of a huge street.

  I rocket through the gates on the other side but it remains quiet behind me, no-one shoots. They didn’t get me this time. I straighten my webbing, adjust my grip on my rifle and carry on. Fear has given my mood a boost and I start to whistle a song.

  I cross the second street more confidently. I’ve greeted death again and things have now settled into their usual rhythm.

  In the distance I can see the 3rd platoon’s large brick house. They are all in the yard and I can make out familiar faces,

  Zhenka, Drum and some of the other lads. We haven’t seen each other for ages and I’m glad they’re OK. I ask why they didn’t answer the radio calls. Their battery is flat. We change it and I call up the company commander to check contact. The sound is fine and I have to get back fast; we’re moving out in ten minutes. I relay the order to the 3rd platoon commander, and before I go I look around for Zhenka and Drum. Drum waves and smiles. I wave back, straighten my webbing, duck down and run back the way I came. A burst of fire echoes from the Chechen lines, then another. Our blokes shoot back and a firefight ensues. Then a mortar joins the fray. The day has begun.

  18/ Argun

  We are halted for the fourth day in a row at the canning

  factory in Argun. It’s the best place we’ve been so far during our deployment and we feel completely safe inside the fence that skirts the perimeter.

  The trouble with this war is that we are in a permanent state of encirclement and can expect a shot in the back at
any moment. But here we are sheltered.

  Two automatic mounted grenade launchers are positioned in the administration block and cover the whole street from the gates. There are two more launchers on the roof of the factory’s meat-packing section and a machine-gun nest on the second floor of the gatehouse. This way we completely control the surrounding area and feel relatively secure. We relax.

  April has arrived and the sun is already beating down. We walk around practically naked, wearing only our cut-off long johns and army boots, and we are alike as brothers. And brothers we are, for there’s no-one in the world closer than emaciated soldiers with lice-bitten armpits, sun-browned necks and otherwise white, putrefying skin.

  The battalion commanders leave us in peace to get our fill of food and sleep. Yesterday they even fixed up a steam bath for us in the old sauna room in the guardhouse and we sweated away there for almost an hour. They issued us with fresh underwear into the bargain, so now we can enjoy two or three blissful louse-free days.

  Fixa and I sit on the grass by the fence and wait for two Chechen kids to reappear. In the sunshine we bask in long-forgotten sensations of cleanliness and warmth. Our boots stand in a row and we wiggle our bare toes and smoke.

  ‘Bet you five cigarettes I can stub out this butt on my heel,’ he says.

  ‘Think you’ll wow me with that one, do you?’ I reply. ‘I’ll do the same trick but for two cigarettes.’

  The skin on my soles has grown as hard as a rhino’s from my boots. I once drove a needle into my heel for a bet and it went in more than a centimetre before it hurt.

  ‘You know, I reckon the brass is being too wasteful in handing over our guys’ bodies to the families,’ Fixa muses. ‘They could put us to far better use after we’re killed; they could make a belt sling from a soldier’s hide. Or you could knock out a pretty good flak jacket from the heels of a platoon.’

  ‘Uh-huh. And you could make a whole bunch of them from the guys who died up in the hills. Why don’t you tell the supply officer? - Maybe he’ll give you leave for the smart idea,’ I suggest.

  ‘No, I can’t tell him, he’ll just sell the idea to the Chechens and start trading in corpses.’

  A gentle breeze plays over our bodies and we laze ecstatically as we wait for the kids to show up.

  The knot of nervous tension inside me just won’t loosen up after the mountains, and fear keeps churning away somewhere below my stomach. We need to unwind. The two signal flares that we’re swapping for marijuana are stuffed into the tops of Fixa’s boots. We already gave three flares to the Chechen kids as an advance and now we’re waiting for them to come back with the promised matchbox of weed.

  There’s a small gap in the fence at this comer and a little market has sprung up. The kids sit all day on the other side and soldiers go to and fro on ours to offer their wares: tinned meat, diesel, bullets. Half an hour ago the battalion cook stuffed a whole box of butter through the gap. Fixa wonders if we should give him a beating but we can’t be bothered to get up.

  We get an unexpected treat of meat. The infantry caught and shot a guard dog, roasted it over a fire and gave us two ribs. It turns out that some of them are from Fixa’s home region. It’s a fine thing to have common roots with guys in your unit. Only when you are far from home do you realize what a bond you have with someone who wandered the same streets and breathed the same air as a child. You may never have met before and are unlikely to meet again later, but right now you are like brothers, ready to give up everything for the other, a Russian trait through and through.

  We chew the tough meat, and bitter-tasting fat runs down our fingers. Fantastic.

  ‘A spring onion would be good now - I love meat with greens,’ says Fixa. ‘But most of all I love pork fried with potato and onion. My wife cooks it just how I like it. First, she fries the crackling until the edges curl upwards and the fat oozes out. It has to be well fried or the fat will stew like snot and won’t be tasty. And when the fat starts to sizzle in the pan she adds thinly sliced potato and fries it lightly on one side, and then the first time she stirs it she adds salt and onion. The onion has to go in after the potato or else it burns. And then...’

  ‘Shut up, Fixa.’ I suddenly have a craving for fried pork and potatoes and I can’t listen to any more gastronomic revelations. ‘There’s no pork here, they’re Muslims and they don’t eat it.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve just noticed, have you? You won’t find pork here in a month of Sundays. How are they supposed to have pork fat if they can’t even wipe their backsides with paper like human beings, I ask you?’

  This aspect of local Chechen culture engenders particular hostility in Fixa, and in the rest of us too. Quite apart from anything else, our soldiers resent the Chechens because they wash themselves after doing their business, rather than using paper.

  In each house there are special jugs with long spouts made from some silvery metal, and inscribed with ornate Arabic script. At first our boys couldn’t figure out their purpose and used them for making tea. When someone finally told them, they freaked out. The first thing they do now when they occupy a house is kick these jugs outside or fish them out with sticks.

  Actual faith doesn’t matter one bit to us, be it Allah, Jesus or whoever, since we ourselves are a godless lot from birth. But these jugs embody the difference between our cultures. It seems to me that the political officer could distribute them instead of propaganda leaflets, and we’d rip Chechnya to shreds in a couple of days.

  ‘My cousin served in Tajikistan and told me the Tajiks use flat stones after the toilet,’ I say as I inspect the dog rib in my hand. ‘It’s still the Stone Age there, they don’t know about toilet paper or even newspaper. They gather pebbles from the river and use those. Each outdoor bog has a pile of stones beside it like a grave.’

  ‘So what’s it like in Tajikistan then? Bound to be better than here. What else does your cousin say about it?’ asks Fixa.

  ‘Nothing. He’s dead.’

  My cousin died just two days before he was due to be demobilized. He volunteered for a raid at the border. The patrol was made up of green conscripts who still didn’t know anything and so my cousin stood in for some young kid. He was a machine-gunner and when the shooting started he covered the group as they pulled back.

  A sniper put a round into his temple, a rose shot, as we call it: when the bullet hits the head at close range the skull opens up like a flower and there’s no putting it together again. They had to bind up my cousin’s head for the funeral or it would have fallen apart right there in the coffin.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Fixa. ‘It’s all just one war, that’s what I think. And you know what else, Chechnya is just for starters - the big war is still to come, you’ll see.’

  “You think so?’

  ‘Yes. And I also think I’m going to make it through this one.’

  ‘Me too,’ I say. ‘Maybe since my cousin was killed I believe I’m going to survive. Two Babchenkos can’t die in battle.’

  We finish the ribs. We’ve gnawed off all the gristle and soft tissue and all that’s left in our fingers is five centimetres of hard bone that we can’t chew down any further. We put the stumps in our cheeks like lollipops and, lying on our backs, suck out the last traces of fat. Our sucking is the only noise for the next fifteen minutes. Finally even this pleasure ends; the ribs are bare.

  Fixa wipes his hands on his shorts and gets out a notebook and pen that he brought along specially.

  ‘Right, tell me where we’ve been then. I just can’t remember the names of these villages.’

  ‘OK. You joined us at Gikalovsky, right? So, Gikalovsky, then Khalkiloi, Sanoi, Aslambek, Sheripovo, Shatoi, and...’ I pause for a moment, trying to get my tongue round the next one, ‘... Sharo-Argun.’

  ‘That’s right, Sharo-Argun. I remember that all right,’ Fixa mutters.

  ‘You don’t forget something like that in a hurry.’

  ‘I’ll draw a gallows beside Sharo-Argun,’ he says, sketching
awkwardly in the notebook. His fingers are not comfortable with a pen; he’s more used to handling steel. Before the war he wielded a trowel and spade as a builder, and now a rifle and grenade launcher.

  I lean over and look at the crooked gibbet and the figure hanging from it. Sharo-Argun. What a terrible name. We lost twenty men there - Igor, Pashka, Four-Eyes the platoon commander, Vaseline, the list goes on.

  There are lots of places like that in Chechnya: Shali, Vedeno, Duba-Yurt, Itum-Kale, all names of death. There’s something shamanistic about them, strange names, strange villages. Some of my comrades died in each one and the earth is drenched in our blood. All we have left now are these odd, un-Russian words; we live within them, in the past, and these combinations of sounds that mean nothing to anyone else signify an entire lifetime to us.

  We take our bearings from them as if from a map. Bamut is an open plain, a place of unsuccessful winter assaults, a place of cold, of frozen earth and a crust of bloodstained ice. Samashki - foothills, burning armoured cars, heat, dust and bloated corpses heaped up by the hundred in three days. And Achkhoi-Martan, where I had my baptism of fire, where the first tracer rounds flew at me and where I first tasted fear.

  And not forgetting Grozny, where we lost Fly, Koksharov, Yakovlev, and Kisel before them. This land is steeped in our blood; they drove us to our deaths here, as they will continue to do for a long time yet.

  You should draw an ass instead of a gallows,’ I tell Fixa. ‘If you imagine the Earth as an ass, then we are right in the hole.’ I shut my eyes, lie on my back and put my hands behind my

  head. The sun shines through my eyelids. Hell, I don’t even want to think about it, the mountains, the snow, Igor’s body. I’ll get to it later, but for now everything has stopped - for a while at least. Right now we are alive, our stomachs are filled with dog meat, and nothing else matters. I can lie in the sun without fearing a bullet in the head and it’s wonderful. I suddenly recall the face of the sniper who was gunning for me in Goity. For some reason I wasn’t afraid then.