I can’t mount my grenade launcher on the personnel carrier; my hands don’t respond and the bedplate won’t go onto the bolts. My body is like cotton wool, my fingers can hardly feel the nuts and I fumble to tighten them. I look at them and can’t focus properly. I sense that I should not go to Mesker-Yurt today. I’m scared.
Fear fills me gradually, rising in my body like a wave and leaving an empty space behind it. This is not the hot, rushing fear you feel when you suddenly come under fire, this is different, a cold, slow-moving fear that just doesn’t recede. Today, near Mesker-Yurt, I will be killed.
‘Go and get two cases of grenades,’ the platoon commander orders.
I nod and go to the tent. The cases weigh fifteen kilos each and I can’t carry two at once; they are slippery and there’s nothing to hold them by. I empty my backpack and stuff one case inside and put the second under my arm and run out of the tent to see the column already driving out of the gate. The platoon commander motions me to stay behind.
I watch them disappear towards Mesker-Yurt and suddenly I am seized by a powerful trembling. I feel chilled to the bone, my arms are weak, my knees give way and I sit down sharply on the ground. Blackness clouds my sight, I see and hear nothing and I sit uncomprehendingly, on the verge of vomiting. I haven’t felt such terror in ages.
Fixa is standing near the gate.
‘How come you didn’t go?’ I ask.
‘I got scared, you know?’ he replies.
‘Yes, I know.’
He gets his cigarettes out. My hand is trembling so hard I can’t even strike a match. What the hell is the matter with me - nothing like this ever happened before? I have to get a grip. The column left while Fixa and I stayed behind and are out of danger.
Our guys come back at night. Mesker-Yurt was taken but our battalion was deployed in the second security-cordon around the village and didn’t take part in the fighting. The police paramilitaries did all the work and lost ten men.
We didn’t take any casualties that night, but I still feel that it would have been my last. I want to go home.
I live with fear constantly now. It began that day and doesn’t abate. I am scared all the time. The fear alternately turns slowly like a worm somewhere below my stomach or floods through me with a hot flush of sweat. This is not the tension I experienced in the mountains but pure, animal fear.
One night I beat up Pincha for leaving the lookout post before he was relieved, and then did the same to two new guys. They didn’t hit it off with our platoon and sleep separately in the cook’s armoured car. Then the pricks go and brew tea right on the windowsill of the lookout post. Their fire flickers away for all to see and is visible for several kilometres, giving away our position and maybe drawing the attention of snipers. And I’m the one who has to relieve them.
I can no longer sleep. I don’t trust the sentries and spend most nights in the admin block or on the parade ground. I keep the pouches on my webbing stuffed with loaded magazines that I’ve traded for food and cigarettes. I have about twenty-five magazines and it still seems too few. I also empty a few clips of bullets into my pockets and hang about a dozen grenades from my belt. It’s still not enough. If they storm us I want to be fully armed.
One night I relieve the guys on the lookout. I stay away from the window and stand motionless in the room round the corner for four hours, freezing at the slightest sound outside.
It seems I am alone and that while I am skulking in the admin block the Chechens have silently butchered the whole battalion and are coming up the stairs for me. I hate the generator as it drowns out every other sound. I try not to breathe and strain to hear what’s going on in the building.
Sure enough, they’re already inside. Chunks of brick grate underfoot as someone makes his way up the stairs. The Chechen turns on the stairwell and puts his foot on the last flight. Nine more steps and he’ll reach my floor. My heart stops beating. I don’t want to shoot because I’ll give away my position. I may take out one of them, but the rest will know I’m here and they’ll get me with grenades. I won’t be able to run away or hide anywhere; they’re all around.
‘I want to go home,’ I say out loud and draw my bayonet from the top of my boot. The blade gives off a dull gleam in the moonlight. I clutch the weapon with both hands in front of my face and tiptoe slowly to the stairs, keeping my back close to the wall, trying to step in time with the Chechen.
He’s now on the second step. I also take a step. We move our feet simultaneously. Third step, fourth, fifth. He has four more steps to go, three, two... I leap forward and lash out wildly round the corner with the bayonet, striking a deep gash in the wall and scattering crumbs to the floor. A chip bounces down the stairs and hits an empty tin with a clink. There’s no-one there. I take several deep breaths.
The stairwell is deserted. The Chechens are already in the room, of course. While I was fighting ghosts in the stairwell they’ve occupied my position, climbing up the heap of rubbish outside and swinging themselves stealthily through the window. Now they are fanning out to the corners. I can’t hide any more, so I unsling my rifle, slip off the safety catch and tramp my way noisily towards the room. I kick a brick and it flies off to one side with a deafening crash. My footsteps are probably audible from the street. I give a sharp shout.
My plan is simple. They will hear me coming along the corridor and run out of the room one by one, only to be picked off by me. But then I beat them to it, burst in, squat down and circle round like a wolf, training my rifle ahead of me. No-one. I’m still alive, thank God!
I stand in the corner again and listen into the night. I can’t see anything from here but snipers can’t see me either. And in this comer I have a better chance of surviving if a grenade comes through the window. I crouch down, cover my head with my jacket and switch on the light on my watch. Thirteen minutes of my shift have passed. Another three hours and forty-seven minutes at the lookout.
I hear footsteps on the stairs and freeze. Five more steps. I draw the bayonet from my boot.
*
I stop talking to people altogether. I don’t laugh or smile any more. I am afraid. The desire to go home has become an obsession. That’s all I want and I can think of nothing else.
‘I want to go home,’ I say as we have supper in the tent.
‘Shut up,’ says Arkasha.
He gets more wound up than the others by the mention of home. He is not due for demobilization, he has no medals, and in any case, if he goes home they’ll probably lock him up because of an old bribery charge against him from his civilian days.
We’ve been halted in Argun for too long and the tension is now being displaced by fear. This spell of rest and recuperation can’t last forever - something has to happen. They’ll either send us home or back into the mountains.
‘I don’t want to go back into the mountains,’ I say. ‘I want to go home.’
‘They can’t send us back into the mountains,’ Fixa assures me. ‘We’ve done our stint. There are so many different units, so they just send new brigades up there. No, we won’t go into the mountains any more. And we can annul our contract any time we like, don’t forget.’
‘I want to go home,’ I repeat.
Arkasha throws an empty tin at me. I don’t react.
We wait.
I have ulcers on my thigh and pay a daily visit to the medics to get them dressed. They refuse to heal and continue to grow, having now reached the size of a baby’s palm. Smaller ones dot my arms.
There are two new nurses at the first-aid point, Rita and Olga. Rita is a red-head, well built and with a drink-toughened voice that was made for firing off her earthy barrack-room jokes. She’s one of us and the lads go crazy over her. But I like Olga more.
Olga is small, quiet and over thirty, with a good figure. She hasn’t had an easy time here - women like her have no place among drunken contract soldiers. She’s a real lady and remains one even in the midst of war. She hasn’t started smoking or swearing, and she doesn’t sle
ep with the officers. The little white socks she wears never fail to fascinate me, femininely dainty and always clean. God only knows where she manages to wash them.
I visit her every day for treatment. She removes the old bandages and inspects the wounds, bending down over my thigh. I stand naked in front of her but it doesn’t bother either of us. She’s seen countless unwashed guys encrusted in blood and I am in no condition to flirt with a woman anyway.
But it’s still pleasant when her cool fingers touch my thigh and her breath stirs my body hair, bringing me out in goosebumps. I close my eyes and listen to her tapping gently on the skin, and I will my leg to rot further so she will have to care for me a little longer. Olga’s tender touch is so much like peacetime, and her palm is so like the palm of the girl I left behind in my pre-war past.
‘Why don’t you wear underwear?’ she asks one day.
‘They don’t issue us any,’ I lie. In fact I am simply ashamed of my lice-ridden long johns and before each visit I remove them and hide them in a corner of the tent.
She sprinkles streptocide on my festering thigh ulcers and spreads pork fat on my arms to contain the others. Two weeks later they start to heal.
We hear a three-round burst of fire. Someone screams over at the infantry personnel carriers.
‘Rifles on safety!’ I hear Oldie shout. We run over.
It turns out some drunken driver forgot to put his rifle on safety and accidentally pressed the trigger. All three rounds hit home. One ripped off a contract soldier’s jaw. He sits on the ground, blood streaming from his smashed mouth into a large, fatty pool on the earth. He doesn’t make a sound, just sits there and looks at us, arms hanging limply before him. The pain hasn’t set in yet and he doesn’t know what to do.
The staff commander tends to him, injects him with painkiller and tries to bandage what’s left of the jaw. Jagged splinters of bone tear the gauze as he binds the wound. The soldier starts to jerk so Oleg grabs him by one arm and pins him to the ground while Murky holds the other.
The other two bullets did far more damage, hitting Shepel in both kidneys. He lies on top of the armoured car while Oldie bandages him.
The soldier’s breathing is laboured and uneven but he is conscious. Even in the light of the moon his face looks deathly pale.
‘Shame,’ he gasps. ‘Shame it ended like this, I almost made it home.’
‘Nothing has ended, Shepel,’ Oldie tells his friend. ‘Do you hear me, nothing has ended! We’ll get you to hospital now and everything will be OK. Come on pal, you’ll see.’
He applies bandage after bandage, several packets, but he can’t stop the bleeding. The blood flows thickly, almost black in colour. It’s bad. Shepel no longer speaks. He lies with his eyes closed and breathes heavily.
‘I’ll kill that son of a bitch,’ Oldie screams.
The personnel carrier leaves for Khankala with the injured men and Oldie goes with them.
‘That’s the most goddamned unfair death of this whole war,’ Arkasha says as he watches the vehicle disappear into the darkness. ‘To go through so much and die here, in the rear, from a stray bullet.’
His fists clench and unclench and the muscles in his cheeks twitch.
‘What an unfair death,’ he whispers into the darkness. ‘So unfair.’
They don’t let the carrier through at the checkpoint into Khankala. Shepel lies on the top dying while some duty lieutenant demands the password, saying he can’t open the barrier without it. This rear-unit rat who’s spent the whole war in this field wants the password and couldn’t care less that our comrade is critically wounded.
He is afraid to let them through, afraid that the brass will find out and that there will be consequences for him. They are all afraid that for any screw-up they will get sent to the front line. And then they will be the ones bleeding to death on top of a carrier while someone else bars the way to the hospital.
Oldie doesn’t know the password and starts shooting in the air in fury, sending tracer rounds over safe, snug Khankala with its cable television and double-glazing. He fires and screams and begs Shepel to hold on a little longer. They get through the checkpoint and to the hospital, but Shepel dies a few hours later. We had failed to stem the bleeding.
They don’t let Oldie out of Khankala and would surely have thrown him into one of the infamous zindan pits in the ground that captives are often kept in. But there aren’t any pits in Khankala because there are plenty of journalists here and they consider it an unacceptable form of torture to keep soldiers in pits, although torture in my opinion is something quite different.
So to avoid antagonizing civilians the command has generously allocated some wheeled wagons as detention cells. There are lots of these wagons here, a few for holding our soldiers and the rest for captured Chechen fighters.
One of those housing Chechens was dubbed ‘the Messerschmidt’ after some bright spark painted a white swastika on its side. At night harrowing screams rise from the Messerschmidt as our interrogators extract confessions.
Oldie has landed himself in an unenviable situation. Shooting in Khankala is a serious blunder. The rear commanders were scared witless when he unloaded tracer rounds over their heads and now they want to avenge their embarrassing display by pinning a drunken rampage charge on him.
We manage to visit him in Khankala after talking our way onto a transport run with sick cases. While our medic delivers them to hospital we look for the wagon where Oldie is locked up.
This place is completely different from how we remember it. Khankala has grown to an incredible size. It’s no longer a military base but a town with a population of several thousand, if not tens of thousands. There are untold numbers of units here, each with its own perimeter fence, and you can get lost if you don’t know your way around. But it’s remarkably quiet, as if you are on a farm. The soldiers wander about without weapons and they stand upright, having rid themselves of the habit of stooping like they do at the front. Maybe this lot have never even heard a shot; their eyes betray neither tension nor fear, they are probably not hungry and perhaps they have no lice. This really is the rear.
It’s a cosy little world, segregated from the war by a concrete wall. This is the way the army should be: ideal, astounding order. And it’s just how Lyokha had described Severny to us, although we didn’t believe him at the time: straight, tarmacked roads, green grass and white-painted kerbs, long parades of new one-storey barrack houses, a metal Western-style mess hall with a gleaming semicircular corrugated roof, clubs, toilet blocks and saunas. Everything neatly swept and sprinkled with sand, a few posters here and there, and portraits of the president gazing down at you at every other metre.
And there are streetlamps that work, casting light onto officers as they stroll with their wives. Lyokha was right - they actually bring them down here to live. Some of them even have their children with them, and they grow up here in Grozny.
We walk around Khankala, calling out Oldie’s name. People stare at us: we are superfluous here in this place in the rear, where everything is subordinate to strong army order. The neatness of it all infuriates me. We walk around like plague victims and survey these well-fed soldiers with hatred. Let just one of them say a single word or try to stop or arrest us and we’ll kill the lot of them.
‘This place is a goddamned rats’ lair,’ spits Fixa. ‘Pity we don’t have a grenade launcher - we could stroll around and take care of this lot with a few bursts. Oldieee!’
‘Oldieee!’ I follow.
Finally Oldie’s unshaven face appears at a tiny barred window in one of the wagons. Fixa gives the sentry some cigarettes and we have a few minutes to talk. We can only see half of his face. We smile at one another and light up. I climb up on the wheel and pass him a smoke and the three of us puff away in silence. We don’t know what to say; we are loathe to ask how it is in there and what they feed him. What does that matter now? It has to be better than in the mountains.
As it turns out, it’s qu
ite bearable in there. There are a few mattresses on the floor, he has a roof over his head, it’s warm and dry - what else do you need? They don’t even beat them here because of the journalists. They should have sent a few journalists into the mountains, or to us in Argun when Lisitsyn shot at the soldier on the rack - that would have been a hoot! Then they would know what real torture is. But with them it’s all zindan this and zindan that. I think they just like the word.
‘It’s like a rest home here,’ Oldie says with a grim smile as he tells us of his daily life. ‘Mountain air, three meals a day. Pincha would love it. No oat gruel here; they give us proper food from the officers’ mess hall. Today, for example, I had meatballs and pasta for lunch.’
‘Oh really? Nice set-up you have here then,’ says Fixa.
‘Can’t complain.’
I look at his face through the bars and smile. I don’t have any particular thoughts, I’m just happy to be here with him, and happy that we’re together again. I can’t imagine being demobilized without him, or how I will live later without all of them -Oldie, Fixa, poor Igor.
‘Shepel died,’ Fixa tells him.
‘I know. I’ll find the guy who did it.’
‘We’ll find out who it was, Oldie, I promise.’
‘No, I’ll find him myself. I have to do it, don’t you see? If I don’t find him, then the deaths of Shepel, Igor, Khariton, Four-Eyes, all of them, will cease to have any meaning? Then they’ve simply died for nothing, do you see? All of them could just as easily have been killed by some drunk with no retribution, no-one bearing any responsibility. If I don’t find him then all these deaths are a kind of dreadful crime, plain murder, slaughter of grey soldier-cattle, do you understand?’
He is absolutely calm as he says all of this. His expression hasn’t changed and retains the same good humour as if he were still telling us about the meatballs he had for lunch. But I know this is not just talk. He will find and kill this guy and he is fully entitled to do so.
The value of a human life is not absolute and Shepel’s life in our eyes is far more valuable than the life of some drunken driver who never had a single shot fired at him, was never pinned down by sniper fire, never used his hands to staunch flowing blood, and never saved anyone’s life. So why should he live if Shepel died? How could it be that this person who never experienced the horrors Shepel did was able to go and kill him in a drunken stupor and stay alive himself?
One Soldier's War In Chechnya Page 31