One Soldier's War In Chechnya

by Arkady Babchenko

  Then I remember the photo we found near Shatoi of the little Chechen boy. He’s only about seven, but he’s showing off with a rifle in his hands while mum stands alongside, beaming at her grown-up little son. How proud she is of him, so full of joy for the holy warrior who already knows how to hold a rifle.

  There will be even greater pride in her eyes when he severs the head of his first Russian prisoner at the age of seventeen. At twenty he’ll attack a column and kill more people, and at twenty-two he’ll run his own slave camp. Then at twenty-five they will hunt him down from a helicopter like a wolf, flush him into the open and fire rockets at him as he darts between shell craters, splattering his guts all over the place. Then he’ll lie in a puddle and stare at the sky with half-open, lifeless eyes, now nothing more than an object of disgust as lice crawl in his beard.

  We’ve seen warriors like this, grown up from such boys, from cubs into wolves. And to think my mother would have flayed the skin from my back with a belt if I’d ever thought to pose with a weapon when I was a kid.

  Enough, no sense in dwelling on this now. Later. Everything later.

  Fixa and I lie in the grass in silence, neither of us feels like talking. The sun has tired us out and we daydream, maybe doze off for a while, it’s hard to say - our hearing stays as sharp in sleep as when we’re awake and registers every sound, from the twittering of the birds to soldiers’ voices, stray gunshots and the chugging of the generator. All harmless noises.

  We don’t rise until the sun sinks beneath the horizon. It gets chilly and the ground is still damp. I’m covered in goosebumps and I want to cover up. My cold stomach aches. I get up and pee where I stand. The stream of urine quickly wanes but I get no relief, my belly still hurts. I’ll have to go to the medic.

  The Chechen kids never showed up. We wait another half an hour but they still don’t come. Evidently our signal flares went to the fighters’ beneficiary fund free of charge.

  ‘Some businessmen we are, Fixa,’ I say. ‘We should have got the grass first and then paid. We’ve been had. Come on, let’s go.’

  ‘We should have brought our rifles, that’s what, and held one of them at gunpoint while the others went for the weed,’ he says.

  ‘They still wouldn’t have showed up! They’re not fools; they know we won't do anything to them. Would you shoot a boy over a box of grass?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  We follow the fence back towards our tent, brick debris and shrapnel scrunching under our boots. There has been fighting here at some time, probably in the 1994-96 war. Since then no-one has worked at the factory or tried to rebuild it. These ruined buildings have only been used for keeping slaves.

  I suddenly remember Dima Lebedev, another guy I transported coffins with in Moscow. His armoured car ran over a mine near Bamut and the whole unit except Dima died instantly. He said he saw his platoon commander fly up like a cannon ball as the shock wave tore off his arms and legs, and dumped his trunk on the ground, still in its flak jacket.

  Dima was heavily concussed and lay there for almost a day.

  The Chechens that emerged from the undergrowth after the blast thought he was dead and didn’t bother to put a bullet in him. He came round at night and ran straight into another group of fighters who took him with them into the mountains and kept him at a cottage with six other conscripts.

  Their captors would beat them, cut off their fingers and starve them to get them to convert to Islam. Some did, others like Dima refused. Then they stopped feeding him altogether and he had to eat grass and worms for two weeks.

  Each day the prisoners were taken into the mountains to dig defensive positions and finally Dima was able to escape. An old Chechen took him in and hid him in his home, where Dima lived with the family like a servant, tending the cattle, cutting the grass and doing chores. They treated him well, and when Dima wanted to go home they gave him money and a ticket and took him out of Chechnya to the garrison town of Mozdok, moving him at night in the boot of a car so the rebels wouldn’t get him.

  He made it home alive and later corresponded with his old master, who even came and stayed with him a couple of times. That’s what Dima called him - master - just like a slave. He was scarred forever by captivity. He had submissive, fearful eyes and was always ready to cover his head with his hands and squat down, shielding his stomach. He spoke quietly and never rose to an insult.

  Later his master’s nephew came to his home, knocked his mother around, abducted his sister and demanded a ransom for her release. I wonder, maybe he even kept her here in the basement of this factory with dozens of other prisoners.

  ‘Tell me, would you really have finished off that wounded guy back in the mountains?’ Fixa suddenly asks. We stop walking. Fixa looks me in the eyes and waits for an answer.

  I know why this is so important to him. He doesn’t say so, but he’s thinking: So would you finish me off then, if it came to it?

  ‘I don’t know. You remember what it was like, it was snowing, the transport couldn’t get through for the wounded and he was going to die anyway. Remember how he screamed, how awful it was? I just don’t know...’

  We stand facing one another. I suddenly feel like hugging this skinny, unshaven man with the big Adam’s apple and bony legs sticking out of his boots.

  ‘I wouldn’t have shot anyone, Fixa, you know that, and you knew it then in the mountains. Life is too precious and we would have fought for it to the very last, even if that lad had puked up all his intestines. We still had bandages and painkillers, and maybe by morning we could have evacuated him. You know I wouldn’t have killed him, even if we had known then for sure that he would die anyway.’

  I want to tell him all of this but don’t manage to. Suddenly there’s a single shot and a short burst of rifle fire immediately followed by a powerful explosion. A cloud of smoke and dust envelops the road by the gatehouse, right where our tents are pitched.

  My first thought is that the Chechens have blown up the gate.

  ‘Get down!’ I shout, and we dive face down onto the asphalt. We freeze for a moment and then hurl ourselves over to the wall of the transformer box where we lie motionless.

  Damn it, no rifle: idiot that I am I left it in the tent, now of all times. I’m never without my weapon! Fixa is also unarmed. We’ve completely dropped our guard at the factory; we thought we could take it easy and go a hundred metres from our position without rifles.

  Fixa’s eyes dart around, his face is pale and his mouth agape. I can’t look much better myself.

  ‘What do we do now, eh, what do we do?’ he whispers in my ear, clutching my arm.

  ‘The flares, give them here,’ I whisper back, petrified with fear. Without a weapon I am no longer a soldier but a helpless animal, a herbivore with no fangs or claws. Now they’ll pour through the breach, take us right here in nothing but our shorts and butcher us, pin our heads down with a boot and slit our throats. And there’s no-one else around - we are alone on this road by the fence. They’ll get us first and kill us before the battalion comes to its senses and returns fire. We are dumb holiday-makers.

  I look round. We’ll have to make a run for the warehouses where the vehicles are parked, and where there are people.

  Fixa pulls the flares from his boots and hands me one. I tear open the protective membrane and free the pin. We hold them out in front us, ready to fire them at the first thing that appears on the road and we freeze, holding the pull-strings.

  It’s quiet. The shooting has stopped. Then we hear voices and laughter from the direction of the gatehouse. They are speaking in Russian, with no accent. We wait a little longer and then get up, dust ourselves off and go round to find the battalion commander, supply officer, chief of staff and some other officers milling around, all half drunk. They’ve dragged a safe out of the admin block, fixed a stick of dynamite to the door and blown it in half. It’s empty. One officer suggests blowing up a second safe in the building in case there’s anything in it, but the batta
lion commander is against the idea.

  ‘Morons,’ Fixa growls as we pass by. ‘Haven’t they had enough shooting yet?’

  Our own injuries are minor. I tore up my knee slightly on a piece of brick when I threw myself down and Fixa has a long scratch on his cheek. What bothers us more is that we are filthy again and the steam bath has been a waste of time. We go into our tent and bed down.

  That night we come under fire. A grenade flies over the fence near the transformer box where Fixa and I had prepared to defend ourselves. A second grenade explodes, then tracer rounds illuminate the sky. A few bursts pass over our heads and the bullets whine in the air. It’s not heavy fire, maybe two or three weapons. The sentries on the roofs open up in reply and a small exchange ensues.

  Three signal rockets rise from the other side of the fence, one red and two green. In the flickering light we see the figures of soldiers running from tents and clambering up to the tops of the buildings. While the flares hang in the air, the fire in our direction intensifies and we hear a couple of rifle grenades being launched.

  We crouch by our tents and watch the sky. No-one panics as it’s clear that the only danger from this chaotic night shooting is a random hit. The fence shelters us and there are no tall buildings near the factory; since our attackers can only fire from ground level the bullets just go overhead. Our tents are in a safe place so we don’t run anywhere. We can only be hit by shrapnel from the rifle grenades, but they explode far away.

  The fighters could inflict far more damage if they fired through the gates, but they either didn’t think of this or they don’t want to risk it. Our lookout post is in the admin block where the two grenade launchers and a machine-gun are set up, and it would be hard to get close on that side.

  We sit watching the light show as green streams of tracer fire course across the sky. Then the guns fall quiet as suddenly as they started up. Our machine-guns on the roofs pour down fire in all directions for another five minutes and then they also cease. It is now silent apart from the background chugging of the generator.

  We have a smoke. It’s great outside and no-one wants to go back inside the stuffy tents where kerosene lamps are burnings We are almost grateful to the Chechens for getting us out. The moon is full, it’s night-time, quiet. Garik comes down sleepy-eyed from the roof of the meat-packing shop where our grenade launcher is mounted. He slept right through the shooting, the daft sod. Pincha was on duty with him but he stays up top, afraid that Arkasha will give him a thrashing.

  ‘Why weren’t you shooting?’ I ask Garik.

  ‘What was I supposed to shoot at - you can’t see anything beyond the fence. And we didn’t want to drop any grenades; we might have hit you.’

  He knows it sounds unconvincing but he also knows we won’t do anything about it. None of us was wounded so there’s nothing to get worked up about.

  ‘Enough of your stories,’ says Arkasha, the oldest and most authoritative among the privates in our platoon. ‘Do you want to spend two whole days up there? I can arrange that for you, no sweat.’

  Garik says nothing, knowing he can land himself in hot water. Arkasha can indeed see to it that they spend two more days on the roof.

  Fixa nudges me. ‘Those were our flares, did you notice? One red and two green, just like the ones I gave the boy. Definitely ours. Return to sender, you could say.’

  ‘I’d have preferred it if they’d just tossed the matchbox to us,’ I mope.

  The commanders step up the guard for the rest of the night and we sit like cats up on the roof. Fixa, Oleg and I join Garik and Pincha, while Arkasha, Lyokha and Murky head over to the admin block.

  I know they’ll just crash out to sleep as soon as they get there. Nor do we have any intention of peering into the steppe all night, and we take our sleeping bags up to the roof and bed down between two ventilation shafts.

  The generator chugs away below us. In Argun lights glimmer at a few windows; it seems they’ve already hooked the place up to the electricity. All is quiet out in the steppe, not a single person is to be seen, no movement. Chechnya dies at night; everyone locks themselves into their homes and prays that no-one comes for them, that no-one kills or robs them or drags them off to the Russian military detention centre at Chernorechye. Death rules the night-time here.

  On the horizon the mountains stand out as a dark mass. We only just came from there. That’s where Igor was killed. I fall asleep.

  Replacements arrive, about a hundred and fifty crumpled-looking guys who are trucked in to our battalion from Gudermes. They stand bunched together in a crowd in front of the gatehouse, on the square that we have dubbed the parade ground. They carry half-empty kitbags: all the things they had with them have been bartered for drink on the way.

  This lot are no use as soldiers; there isn’t a single bold or cocky one among them, and not even one who is physically strong. Each new batch of replacements is worse than the last. Russia has clearly run out of romantics and adventurers, and all that’s left is this worthless scum who have nowhere to go apart from the army or prison. These guys on the parade ground have darting, lost eyes set into swollen, unshaven faces, and seem to blend into a monotonous, grey mass. And they stink.

  We stand by the tents and bluntly survey the new recruits It’s a dismal sight.

  ‘Where the hell do they get them from,’ says Arkasha. ‘We’ve no bloody use for this sort here - all they can do is guzzle vodka and pee in their pants. We have to talk to the commander so he doesn’t take any of them on - warriors like these we can do without.’

  ‘What do you want then, for them to send us linguists and lawyers?’ replies Oleg. ‘That sort is not very keen to come here. All the clever, good-looking ones have managed to wriggle out of this war, but since the draft board has to meet its quotas they just shunt whatever’s left in our direction.’

  We’re short of people in the platoon but Arkasha is right, there’s no place for this rabble; we’ll manage somehow without them.

  Two are assigned to us anyway, slovenly specimens of an indeterminable age, rat-like, unreliable. They immediately dump their kitbags in the tent and make themselves scarce, mumbling something about vodka. We don’t hold them up.

  ‘Maybe they’ll get chopped to bits at the market - it’ll be less hassle for all of us,’ says Pincha, digging dirt from between his fingers with his bayonet.

  Arkasha has come up with the idea of breaking into the trailer wagon that the supply officer tows behind a Ural truck all round Chechnya. It’s constantly guarded by cooks; what they keep in it is anyone’s guess, but you can be sure it’s not state bank-bonds.

  To effect the burglary we plan a full-scale military operation. Arkasha’s plan is simple. It came to him the night we were being bombarded, and in this instance the arrival of the replacements will only be to our advantage.

  When it gets dark we emerge from our tents, turn left along the fence, make our way to the fence opposite the vehicle park and jump into one of the useless sentry trenches the cooks have dug for themselves there.

  In front of each trench a firing slit has been cut in the fence and the embrasure lined with turf. Judging from the fortifications they are preparing to defend the stocks of tinned meat to the bitter end.

  Lyokha and I get two hand grenades and pull the pins, while Arkasha wraps his rifle in three ground sheets and aims it into the bottom corner of the trench.

  ‘Ready?’ he whispers.

  ‘Ready.’

  ‘Now!’

  We toss the grenades over the fence and they explode with a deafening clap in the night silence, or maybe it just seems that loud, such is the tension. Arkasha looses a few bursts into the ground.

  The muzzle flash is invisible inside the ground sheets and the sound seems to come from the earth. It’s impossible to tell where the firing is from - it seems like it’s coming from all sides at once.

  Lyokha and I throw two more grenades and I fire a signal flare.

  The overall effect is ext
remely realistic.

  ‘That’ll do!’ says Arkasha. ‘Let’s get out of here before they wake up!’

  We manage to run about ten metres before the machine-gun on the roof comes to life. I’m suddenly afraid that in his stupor the gunner will take us for attacking Chechens and cut us down in the wink of an eye.

  Meanwhile, cooks emerge from every nook and cranny and lay down a withering barrage of fire. We also fire a few bursts in

  the air, our faces hidden in the crooks of our arms and averted from the illuminating muzzle flashes.

  No-one pays us any attention. The whole battalion is now dashing round in disarray and within a minute, gunfire issues from all corners of the factory grounds.

  The new recruits stoke the confusion, shouting ‘Chechens, Chechens!’ as they run towards the fence with their rifles, indiscriminately spraying bullets from the waist and generally behaving like children. To make matters worse they’re firing tracer rounds, which ricochet and whiz all over the place, perfectly creating the impression that we are being attacked.

  We freeze for a moment, dumbstruck. Little did we suspect that four grenades and a couple of rifle bursts could stir up such pandemonium. It must be said, a battalion is a force to be reckoned with.

  We make our way amid the chaos to the wagon. There’s no guard. Arkasha breaks the lock.

  It’s pitch black inside and we hastily grope around the shelves, chancing upon tins and small sacks and packages that we sweep into an open ground sheet. I come across a heavy, bulky object wrapped in paper. I stuff it inside my tunic and fill my pockets with more tins, spilling something in my haste, sugar maybe. Speed is of the essence.

  ‘Give me a hand lads, I’ve got something here,’ says Arkasha. I feel my way over to him. He is holding something by two handles, big and heavy, covered with a tarpaulin.

  ‘It’s butter,’ exclaims Lyokha. ‘Just look how much that bastard has stolen.’

  ‘Right, let’s get out of here,’ Arkasha orders. It’s almost as dark outside and the only light is from the muzzle flashes up on the roof. There’s still a fair bit of shooting but the commotion is gradually dying down.