‘Loop, have you ever been with a girl?’ Osipov asks.
‘Of course I have,’ mumbles Loop, offended. ‘Natasha, who I was at school with,’
I don’t really believe Loop; it seems he is making it up. Mind you, he did receive some letters from someone but he never read them out loud.
‘What about you?’ Andy asks me.
‘I dunno.’
‘How come?’
‘It was at a party, I was pissed out of my head and I don’t remember anything. Maybe that counts?’
‘Sure that counts,’ says Osipov. He is the only one of us who had been with a woman properly, and his authority in such matters is unshakeable.
‘What about you, Zyuzik, have you been with a girl?’
‘Yes,’ he answers, digging at the ground with a twig.
Osipov looks at him closely.
‘Like hell you did, liar,’ he says eventually.
‘So what if I didn’t, what about it then?’ Zyuzik retorts. ‘That’s all ahead of me, get it? Why are you bothering us with your stupid questions! Maybe I don’t want to do it like Loop, with some cook. I want a real love, understand?’
‘What if you never have time?’ Andy asks him.
‘Piss off!’ Zyuzik replies and falls silent.
‘All right, all right, I’m joking, take it easy. It’s all still to come for you.’
‘Spit for luck then, idiot,’ I remind him.
Andy spits over his shoulder three times and knocks on wood.
We light up another cigarette each and say nothing for a while.
‘Shit, I wish we’d just go to Chechnya. What is this anyway? It’s not the army, but some kind of never-ending humiliation,’ Loop lisps through his swollen lips.
‘What, do you reckon there’s no recon in Chechnya?’ objects Osipov.
‘Yes, but they won’t beat us there.’
‘Why won’t they?’
‘Why does a cow have udders between her legs?’ snaps Loop. ‘What don’t you understand? No bastard will hit me if I’ve got a rifle in my hands.’
‘Sure, Loop,’ I say. ‘But they’ll have weapons too, and unlike you they know how to use them.’
‘You can say that again,’ Osipov backs me up. ‘When I heard they were taking us to Chechnya I thought that at least they’d teach us to shoot properly. But no-one teaches us anything here, they just knock us about.’
‘How are we supposed to fight, lads?’ Zyuzik asks.
It’s a rhetorical question and no-one is about to answer.
We don’t know how to dig trenches, or take cover from machine-gun fire, and we don’t know how to set a tripwired grenade without it blowing up in our hands. No-one teaches us any of this stuff. We don’t even know how to shoot; the guys in our company have only ever handled weapons twice. If we landed in a combat situation right now, after we come out from under this apricot tree, we would be lucky to last a few hours.
‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ says Zyuzik.
‘You reckon? And just how do you intend to do that?’ asks Osipov. ‘Have you got money? Clothes?’
‘We’ve got car stereos we can sell. We’d probably get enough to travel.’
‘And what about a passport? No-one will sell you a ticket without a passport,’ Osipov continues.
‘They can send you a passport in the post. You just have to write to your parents,’ I say.
‘Right!’ exclaims Zyuzik, taken with the idea. Now he really does think he is ready to do a runner. He has initiated this sort of discussion pretty often in recent days.
‘Well, boys? Let’s write home and get them to send us passports and we’ll get the hell out of here.’
It turns out that he left his passport with the military draft board, and Osipov too.
‘We won’t have enough money for everyone,’ says Loop. ‘And what’s the point of getting out now anyway, there’s no recon here at the moment. When they get back, that’s when we should go.’
‘I hope they all get killed there,’ says Andy.
‘No, not all of them, Vitalik’s all right.’
‘Vitalik yes, but the rest can go to hell.’
‘What do you have to do to get into hospital,’ says Zyuzik, resuming his favourite tune. He can’t shake off the idea of deserting the regiment.
It seems nothing could be simpler. The camp isn’t guarded, you just leave and go wherever you want. The great shame of it all is that there is nowhere to go. Run off home? All that awaits us there is prison, since we’ll be branded deserters. And we’d still have to get home. Plenty of soldiers have been murdered or kidnapped on the way, getting whisked straight off to slavery from the station. And there are patrols everywhere. So it’s safest of all in the regiment.
‘You can mess up your kidneys,’ says Andy. ‘Dissolve half a cup of salt in water, drink it and jump off the windowsill. That’s a sure demobilization. Or you can inhale broken glass. Then you’re guaranteed to cough up blood and spend at least half a year in hospital. Or if you’re lucky they’ll decommission you.’ ‘You can also cut your veins,’ I say. ‘One bloke at our training camp cut himself. You just tauten the skin on your arm and slash it a few times with a razor blade. Very effective, blood everywhere, and most importantly, it’s absolutely safe.’
‘You’re best off asking Timokha - he’ll smash your jaw and bingo!’ says Loop. ‘You don’t even have to ask him, he’ll do it some day anyway.’
‘Yeah, your jaw, that’s not bad,’ says Zyuzik, warming to the theme. ‘That’s at least two months in the sick bay. Or smash the jaw out of joint altogether, that’s even better. Then it’ll start to come right out, all you have to do is open your mouth wide. That’s a demob for sure. You just have to find someone who will knock it right out for you without breaking it. There’s bound to be someone who can do that in hospital. Aw, I’d love to get into hospital.’
‘Right, and if grandma had a you-know-what she’d be a grandpa,’ Loop says.
‘Listen, you’re from Moscow, you know everything. So tell us, who started this war?’ Osipov asks me.
For some reason he seems to think that Muscovites know everything there is to know.
‘I haven’t the foggiest idea, ask me something easier.’
‘No, come on, why do you think?’ he says, not letting go. ‘Well, the president, I suppose.’
‘What, him personally?’
‘No, he consulted me first.’
I don’t feel like talking. My belly is full, my lunch is turning over lazily in my guts and I fancy a sleep. We laze around in the shade, no-one is beating us, and our lungs are warmed with tobacco smoke. What more could we ask for?
‘What I want to know is whether the defence minister can start a war on his own without consulting with the president.’
‘No he can’t,’ says Zyuzik. ‘Our president is the supreme commander of the armed forces and he is the only one who can start a war.’
‘So how did this one start?’ asks Osipov, trying to think it through. ‘Why do wars happen at all?’
And we all wonder.
‘Because of power,’ says Zyuzik, in one of his occasional moments of incisiveness. ‘Why else would they happen?’
‘So what’s it all about, having power? How can you kill so many people because of it? Yeltsin was already president - what more power could he need? Or was the Chechen president, Dudayev, trying to overthrow him?’ Osipov asks.
‘God knows who wanted to overthrow who. Maybe someone didn’t share out the pickings evenly. What does it matter to you now anyway?’ I say.
‘It doesn’t, I just wondered. Look at you all, lying under the tree having had a good beating all night, and with more in store today. And if you don’t get smacked round the head ten times in a day, then you regard it as a day wasted. And then they’ll stick you on a carrier and take you to Chechnya. That’s of course if you haven’t managed to get your jaw broken by then. Have you lot not thought that some of us are bound to get
killed in this war?’ Osipov asks, propping up his head on his elbow. ‘How many boys have they got killed already and how many more are to die? I don’t want to die, I’ve only got four months left til demob. Someone should answer for all of this. Do you reckon the president knows?’
‘About what?’
‘About all of this,’ says Osipov, waving his hand towards the regiment. ‘How they kill us like flies here, how they beat us, about this whole lawless mess.’
‘I doubt it, how could he? The regimental commander is one of us, and not even he knows.’
‘No way, he knows all right,’ says Loop. ‘You think he’s blind or something? It’s enough to look at your face to know what’s going on. He knows full well, he just can’t do anything about it. You can’t put the entire recon against the wall and you can’t demobilize all the older conscripts before their time. Soldiers always got beaten in the past and they always will get beaten.’ ‘So that means the president knows too. Then I say he is the biggest criminal of the lot,’ Osipov concludes, looking at us triumphantly, as if he has uncovered the greatest truth of all.
I couldn’t agree with him more. I think this entire band of bureaucrats and officials exists solely for the purpose of breaking us down in these barracks, taking us to the airstrip and putting us in helicopters to be finished off on the other side of the ridge. Somehow they are making money from this, and although I can’t fathom how they can turn a buck from my smashed-out teeth, they have worked out a way. Apart from this, they are of no use whatsoever. The war has been going for more than a year and there appears to be no end in sight. Andy is right: some of us could easily die in this war.
‘Listen, are the Chechens our enemies or not?’ Osipov presses on with his questions. With his curiosity he should work in the army intelligence.
‘No, we aren’t fighting the Chechens but rather the so-called illegal armed formations,’ Zyuzik answers.
‘But what are they then, Chechens or not?’
‘Chechens.’
‘So we’re fighting the Chechens,’ Andy concludes. ‘And what do they want?’
‘Independence.’
‘So why can’t we give them independence?’
‘Because it says in the Constitution that no-one can just go and break away from Russia just for the asking,’ all-knowing Zyuzik explains.
‘What I don’t get is this: are Chechens citizens of Russia or enemies of Russia? If they are enemies then we should stop messing around and just kill the lot of them. But if they are citizens, then how can we fight against them?’
He gives us another triumphant look and no-one challenges him. This sort of conversation is typical for the army. No-one, from the regimental commander to the rank and file soldier, understands why he is here. No-one sees any sense in this war; all they see is that this war has been bought off from start to finish. It has been waged incompetently from the very beginning, and all those mistakes by the general staff, the defence minister and the supreme command have to be paid for with the lives of soldiers. For what purpose are these lives being laid down? The ‘restoration of constitutional order’, the ‘counterterrorist operation’ are nothing but meaningless words that are cited to justify the murder of thousands of people.
‘Zyuzik, are you prepared to kill children for the constitution of your country?’
‘Get stuffed.’
‘If the war isn’t going to end, then what are we fighting for? Why kill so that there is even more killing? Who can explain that to me?’ Osipov demands.
‘Amen,’ says Loop.
‘No-one can explain the whys and wherefores to you,’ Zyuzik tells Osipov, ‘so I’ll tell you what, why don’t you piss off with your questions.’
‘What I want to know is whether Yeltsin knocks our defence minister about?’ Loop asks. ‘He outranks him after all, just like Chuk knocks the warrant officers about. Imagine, General Grachyov briefs him incorrectly and wham, he gets a smack in the gob. Well?’
‘It would be really cool if they led Yeltsin and Dudayev out onto the landing strip and let them get stuck into each other. The one who cripples the other wins. What do you reckon? Who would get the other down, Yeltsin or Dudayev?’ says Zyuzik.
‘My money’s on Dudayev. He’s short, nimble, and looks like he’d have a pretty good uppercut.’
‘Yeltsin’s got longer arms,’ points out Osipov. ‘And he’s much taller and stronger.’
‘So what? He’s also lumbering and not too agile. No, my money’s on Dudayev,’ I say.
‘Mine too,’ agrees Loop.
‘I’ll go with Yeltsin any day,’ says Zyuzik. ‘And may they smack the crap out of each other for as long as possible until they both get what’s coming to them.’
We burst out laughing. I picture this scene in my mind, two presidents beating the pulp out of each other on the runway like two sergeant-majors. The sleeves on their expensive suits rip and their elegant tailored trousers split open. And we stand around and cheer them on: we cheer our guy and the Chechens cheer theirs. And no war, no corpses.
‘All right, that’ll do,’ says Osipov, still quaking. ‘No-one is going to have a punch-up with anyone. Why would they bother when they’ve got us?’
‘That’s right, it’s down to us to do the fighting. Let’s go.’
We get up and return to the barracks. It’s already deserted by the canteen and we line up in single file, with Osipov commanding our little group.
‘Left right, left right, left!’ he yells as if there is at least a reinforced army corps standing in front of him.
‘Company!’ he shouts, and we take three paces forward. ‘Quick march!’
I stamp my heels on the asphalt with all my might as we punch out the steps, and Loop and Zyuzik keep up with me. We hammer the parade ground so hard that the presidential guard could learn a thing or two from us.
‘Lift those feet, tighten up the pace!’ Osipov orders with a smile.
Zyuzik, Zhikh and I march along in quickstep in the middle of the empty square, laughing like maniacs.
They send some young recruits to join our company. Three country boys who all got called up from round here somewhere. After we hear this we lose interest in them; what they do is their own business and vice versa. So they keep sending us new faces, what of it? They’ll scarper from the camp anyway. Everyone who lives around here runs away. We are the ones who have nowhere to run to. I live closest to Mozdok and my home is fifteen hundred kilometres away.
That night the recon get them up and set them sparring.
‘OK radiomen, let’s see what sort of young’uns you’ve been sent,’ says Boxer.
We lay in our beds as if in theatre stalls and watch. They won’t beat us today; it’s not our turn.
The recon form a circle and shove one of the new recruits into the middle, a strong, thickset lad with round shoulders. One of the recon emerges from the other side of the ring.
They start to dance around each other and exchange a couple of body blows. The conscript is doing OK and even manages to connect a good one to the recon’s liver and then dodges two powerful jabs. Then the recon hits the young kid in the nose. His head snaps back and blood flows down his chin. He presses his palms to his face and tries to leave the ring, but gets shoved back.
‘No, that’s not what we agreed,’ he says naively. ‘If you’re going for the face I won’t fight.’
They start kicking him and make him fight. He goes into the ring again and the recon knocks him to the ground with two punches.
The fight is over.
We fall asleep.
The next morning there is no sign of the boys - all three have done a runner. Once again we are the first in line for beatings.
We are sitting in the storeroom, sorting out the company’s junk: jackets, body armour, helmets, all heaped in a big pile in the corner, and the sergeant has decided to sort the lot out.
The flak jackets are in a terrible condition, unbelievably filthy, covered in oil and petro
l, with kilos of earth in the pockets, missing half of the armoured plates, and some with bloodstains. But we’re still able to use two or three of them to piece together a whole one.
Loop shows us a breast plate with a bullet hole drilled through it. It has a big stain on the inside.
‘Private Ignatov, radio company, blood group A (II) Rhesus positive,’ he reads from the collar.
We continue the work in silence.
Holed and dented helmets, shredded flak jackets, holed uniform jackets, name plates with pieces of shrapnel lodged in them, brown stains of dried blood that we try not to touch. These signs of people’s deaths are just lying around on the storeroom floor. Our soldiers died in these things, soldiers of the radio company of the 429th regiment. They went off to Chechnya in January 1995 and then later some sergeant-major brought the flak jackets taken from their cold bodies and threw them in the corner of the storeroom. And then he went on a drinking binge for a few months. And then he got killed, someone told us later. Now we are sitting here piecing together flak jackets for ourselves from this pile of bloody rags. Savchenko will take us to war just the same way and will come back a few months later with a pile of bloody flak jackets, throw them in the corner and go on a bender for a few months. Then they will send more new recruits from training, probably from the same camp as us, Elan. They will also sit here on the floor waiting to be sent to Chechnya, reading our names on the flak jackets, showing each other bullet-holed plates and helmets, and then another officer will take them to war and come back half crazy.
The recon get back from another mission and soon we’re at the end of our tether from the increasing torment at their hands.
‘Sergeant-Major, when do we go to Chechnya?’ Loop pesters the warrant officer.
‘You’ll get there all right.’
‘Please tell us, Sergeant-Major.’
Despite all the horrors we see every day on the runway we all want to go to Chechnya. We don’t care any more, just as long as we get away from the recon. There’s no getting out of this war for us anyway; sooner or later we’ll go, so what difference does it make? No-one really believes that they could get killed there.
One Soldier's War In Chechnya Page 9
