One Soldier's War In Chechnya

by Arkady Babchenko

  I don’t run away. I have already got settled in here, used to this regiment, and this airstrip is my fate. That’s just the way things turned out and I no longer have the strength to change anything. In fact, running away would be the easiest thing right now: no-one needs me here, no-one knows about me apart from the commander, but he’s in Chechnya.

  I don’t go to the airstrip any more. They have some team of new recruits working there now, maybe infantry or some special unit. I live in the army car, sleep under a blanket I stole from the company, and in the mornings after breakfast I go into the steppe or into town. The recon catch me in the canteen and send me to the barracks to wash the floors, but I let it ride. Sometimes they manage to force open the door to the car and drag me outside for a beating: other times I lock myself in securely, and after hammering on the outside a while they leave empty-handed. On those days I go into the steppe without having breakfast.

  All I have is loneliness. I am completely alone, left to my own devices. I don’t figure in any lists any more - our company roll book met its end in the latrines a long time ago and they never entered me in the regimental roll book, no-one bothered.

  I could just simply run away from here, but I don’t.

  I go into town more and more often and just wander round the streets, observing civilian life. It’s chilly, and people hurry to work. There are cars at the level crossing, townsfolk waiting at the bus stop. It’s strange seeing people leading a normal life in this town so close to the front line, strange seeing them go about their business. It had seemed to me that the world got turned topsy-turvy at the start of this war, everyone had gone crazy, and that all that was left now was death, corpses, brutal beatings and fear. But apparently the world is the same as it ever was.

  As they go to work people pass mangled personnel carriers standing at the goods platforms. Our men burnt to death in them. Fighter bombers loaded with more death fly overhead, and these awful refrigerator cars stand at the station with the charred remains of soldiers. A hundred metres away, on the square in front of the station, men drink beer and taxi drivers haggle over fares with their passengers.

  It’s a peculiar town. Life and death exist side by side here, routine work by day, robberies and shootings by night. After nightfall you can’t set foot outside because of the risk of being abducted into slavery or gunned down. Being killed here is as natural as being late for work. But still people leave their homes every morning and go about their business, as if the worst that can happen to them is that they miss the bus.

  No-one pays any attention to me. They’ve already seen

  I live at her home for five days.

  Her name is Aunt Lusya.

  There were many soldiers who lived with the Chechens and Ossetians, who found temporary shelter in their homes from the horrors of war. There were plenty of good people among the Chechens. Auntie Lusya is Russian. She used to live in Grozny, but when they started to slaughter the Russians she moved to Mozdok to stay with her daughter-in-law. If it weren’t for this flat she probably would have got killed, just like they killed her youngest son - Chechens broke into her flat and stabbed him to death right in front of her, then they cut off his head and dumped it in the dustbin.

  Her eldest son died in an air raid when he was taking his mother out of town in the winter of 1995. All Aunt Lusya has left of him is the bundle of bloody clothes they had given her at the morgue. She shows it to me a few times, an ordinary sheet stamped with a number, and wrapped inside it a shirt, a jacket, a pair of tracksuit bottoms, a T-shirt and underpants. All covered in dried blood, big brown stains. She fishes through the things her son died in, and shows me the entry and exit holes made by the piece of shrapnel, first through the jacket, then the shirt followed by the T-shirt. And she tells the story, almost oblivious to my presence, each time reliving his death: the shard pierced him from top downwards, entering his chest and exiting at the base of his spine. Then she bundles up his clothes and puts them back in the wardrobe, where she keeps them together with her own things. The bundle lies on a pile of neatly folded clean sheets - a bundle of dead man’s clothes.

  ‘I survived the Second World War. I was five,’ says Aunt Lusya. A German gave me a loaf of bread. And a Russian killed my son.’

  I leave her on a Sunday. Before I left regimental headquarters a sanatorium to breathe fresh air - the air here is just amazing. Say hi to everyone for me. I love you both.

  On the envelope I draw a banner and write on it ‘Greetings to Civvies!!’ And underneath, ‘Get a move on, postman.’ Then I decorate it with various military stars and insignia and take it to headquarters.

  There’s a light on there. Some drunken officers are smoking by the Butterfly but they don’t bother me. I give the letter to the regimental duty officer, who is completely hammered. He takes the envelope and tosses it carelessly onto a pile of similar letters that have been brought to him this evening. Mine is the last.

  I didn’t have time to write it sooner as they were beating me.

  I’m loathe to send it - it’s as if I am sending a little piece of myself. Everything that happens here should stay here. My fear, my sadness, my beatings and groaning, they belong only to this world and should not leave the steppe. My fear and sadness will be lost in the brightly lit city with its discotheques and bars, they will be lost and become meaningless. My death is only terrible to me and only here - back there it bothers hardly anyone.

  I suddenly get an overwhelming desire to go home.

  I am flooded by a wave of sadness that only soldiers and prisoners feel as I look up at the dark southern sky, listen to the rumble of bombers and cry. For God’s sake, what’s wrong with me? Am I really still a little boy? Kisel, where are you? And you, Vovka, where are you lads, what happened to you? I feel lousy without you around.

  On the way back I duck into the pilots’ canteen. It’s already eleven p.m. and it is shut, but I know one little window I can knock at. A fat cook appears in the darkness and looks questioningly at me. I ask her for bread; I tell her I am going on leave and that my commanding officer is drinking vodka and told me to fetch him a snack. If I don’t bring him food he won’t let me go home. The cook sighs and goes to the kitchen.

  She brings me a loaf, a few eggs and two cold cutlets. She knows perfectly what it’s all about; all she has to do is look at my busted face to realize that a guy like me is not going on leave anywhere. She gives me the food and closes the window without a word. There are hundreds of us like this; every night we knock on the window and ask for bread. And every night she gives us some.

  Somewhere there is music playing, and dogs bark in Mozdok.

  I go to the barracks and up to my floor and stand a while at the door listening to what’s going on inside. All is quiet, so I carefully pull on the door. It isn’t locked. I open it sharply and quickly go through to the storeroom, clutching the bread to my chest and fearing that I’ll drop the cutlets. I slouch my head down to my shoulders, imagining that this way the recon won’t notice me and stop me.

  I lock myself into the storeroom and have my supper on the pile of jackets.

  The cutlets are pork. Delicious.

  They keep on sending columns to Chechnya. They leave every week. Combat operations have resumed and now there are far more bodies than when it was ‘truce’.

  They are no longer placed in a line along the runway but immediately loaded into Ural trucks and taken to the station.

  There’s hardly anyone left now. Our guys got hemmed in near Achkhoi-Martan and the regiment took a lot of casualties. Now they are urgently forming columns here and sending them off over the ridge. Before long the commander doles out

  dog tags. I get the number 629600, Zyuzik has 599 for his last three digits and Osipov 601.

  The tags are made of aluminium. If you roast in a carrier they 11 just melt and no-one will be able to identify you.

  The soldiers go to Mozdok and buy their own dog tags made of galvanized metal. You can buy them all ov
er the place -selling dog tags in a frontline area is a profitable business.

  At the engravers you can get all the necessary information put on the tags: your surname, date of birth, address and blood group. The main thing is your home address. No-one wants to lie around as a lump of unidentified meat in one of the refrigerators at the station.

  Those who have no money make their own tags. They break up ladles and teaspoons and use a nail or pin to inscribe their name and blood group. The canteen is permanently short of spoons as a result, and soon they’ll get replaced with aluminium ones.

  The whole regiment gets ready to move out; everyone writes letters, makes dog tags and tattoos their blood group with a needle and ink onto their chest.

  ‘I wonder, do you think my number - 629601 - is in sequence?’ says Osipov, examining his tag.

  Hardly, doubts Zyuzik. ‘That would mean they’ve already sent more than half a million people to Chechnya.’

  So what? The war’s been going on for two years.’

  No, that s still too many,’ I say. ‘This probably includes all the conflicts in the past few years: Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transdnestria, maybe even Afghanistan.’

  Bloody hell,’ exclaims Zyuzik. ‘If we’ve sent more than half a million soldiers off to these wars, then how many of them died?’

  13/ The Summer of 1996

  'Your orders are to cover the route Mozdok-Malgobek-Karabulak and the combat area by Achkhoi-Martan. The engineer company will keep watch to the left and ahead, the communications company to the right and behind. To your vehicles! commands Colonel Kotenochkin, jumping up onto his carrier.

  The gravel road we are driving along was built by German prisoners after the Second World War. A road from an old war built for a new one. People like killing one another.

  Our column is made up of two armoured carriers and three Ural trucks. We are carrying humanitarian aid.

  I sit on the armour and look in the direction I have been instructed. On the other side sits Zyuzik, looking behind and to the left. Osipov sits at the front.

  There are a few boxes with aid supplies between us; we chew sweets and wash them down with lemonade. The wind catches the blue wrappers and carries them off behind us. Sometimes they snag in the radiator of the Ural that follows us. The truck has steering trouble and the driver can’t make the curve at first try, so I prod Kotenochkin in the back with my rifle barrel and say: ‘Comrade Colonel, the trucks are lagging behind.’

  We stop and wait, watching the driver spinning the steering wheel, and then we set off again slowly.

  Low hills hide the road. I don’t know if this is already Chechnya or not yet, and I am scared. I sit on top of the carrier eating sweets and when the Ural gets stuck again I poke Kotenochkin in the back once more.

  ‘Comrade Colonel, the trucks are lagging behind.’

  The column stops.

  We don’t speak. Only once does Zyuzik silently nudge me with his rifle and motion towards a jutting cliff edge. Written there in big letters are the words ALL LIFE IS CROWNED WITH DEATH.

  ‘Bloody philosophers,’ Zyuzik mumbles to himself.

  Our column is stopped at a block post near Karabulak for a papers check. It’s manned by police. We leave them a crate of grenades and two Fly launchers - they have been sent to fight with practically no weapons and are grateful for the contribution.

  A sergeant with a pockmarked face lifts the barrier and we cross the border into Chechnya. He eyes us from top to bottom, looking each one in the face as if he wants to remember us, all the boys he lets pass. Like Cerberus guarding the gates to Hades, he stays on this bank and the people go past him on their way to the underworld from where there is no return. He just stands there and watches us go.

  The road to war is not at all like the winding road from Mozdok. No-one has driven on it for a long time and it is covered in cut branches and clumps of earth from explosions.

  The drivers follow each other’s tracks and the trail loops along the asphalt between the craters and haphazardly dumped concrete blocks. On both sides of the road all the trees have been felled and the tree stumps gleam white. Not a single living soul or moving vehicle, a dead road on dead ground.

  From time to time we pass burnt-out vehicles at the roadside, decapitated armoured cars without turrets, shot-up and scorched anti-aircraft guns with their barrels turned up lifelessly to the sky. People have driven on this same road that we are now driving on and were killed in this very place. The asphalt still bears the stains of burnt oil and the surface is broken up. Tanks ploughed the mangled carriers and guns off to the side of the road. The wind raises little whirls of ash. Maybe it’s ash from human bodies.

  ‘Look!’ Zyuzik points to a smashed bunker. Thick beams have been thrown skywards and the ground is scattered with rags, papers and other debris. Nearby stands a carrier, apparently in one piece but scorched black. On the other side of the bunker stands a tank, also black. A whole platoon must have died here.

  We are silent. There is no need to say anything. We are all gripped by the same feeling that affects any living creature in the presence of death.

  We have suddenly become different - Zyuzik, Andy, the commander, all of us - as if our places have been taken by mannequins, while our souls remain on the other side of that barrier at the block post. It’s as if we have aged a thousand years.

  In an instant the day becomes black too - no sun, no sky, no life, just a dead road, craters and burnt-out vehicles. That barrier has separated us from the world that existed before as if with an invisible borderline.

  The road winds through some hills. On one of the bends the Ural gets stuck again. I prod Kotenochkin with my rifle, the column halts and I look at the Ural. The driver looks in his mirrors and reverses, lifts his head and for some reason stares me right in the eye. Still looking at me, he shifts the gear stick into first. At this moment a blast throws the bonnet upwards and the cab door is blown open as a plume of flame engulfs the vehicle. Between the fiery tongues I see the driver slide onto the ground from the open door. He falls into a pool of burning petrol, makes a movement with his arm and freezes. Tracer rounds smack into his body.

  I watch a person burning on the road and then shift my gaze up to the hillside. The tracer rounds are coming from up there, racing at the road in long, thin strings and then speeding up as they pass between Zyuzik and me. A few bullets strike the armour.

  ‘Chechens!’ someone screams fearfully.

  ‘Dismount!’ shouts the Colonel. ‘Defensive positions!’

  We all jump down and scatter. Everything that’s happening seems like some kind of rehearsal or a game I hadn’t been warned about, and in which I have become an unwitting participant.

  Kotenochkin starts firing upward and is joined by the sergeant-major, Zyuzik and Andy. What are they firing at? I don’t see anything, the sun is shining straight in my eyes and the top of the hill is just a blur.

  I pull Andy by the sleeve. ‘Who’s up there, where are you firing?’

  He doesn’t answer, jerks his arm free and pulls the trigger again, his face set in concentration.

  I start firing too, loosing short bursts upwards and searching with my eyes to see if there is anyone to shoot at properly.

  Bullets sing over my head, surprisingly melodically. A few hit the ground near my right foot, sending dust and stones flying into my face. I get scared and crouch down, raise my rifle above my head and blindly let off a few bursts.

  My hearing comes back as if the sound has been switched on, and the roar of the shooting batters my ears. And time seems to slow down and regain normal dimensions.

  The sound of heavy machine-guns now drowns out everything else and it seems my eardrums are about to burst. It’s the carriers firing, aiming their turrets towards the hills, and the cannons have started up. Meanwhile, the carriers are manoeuvring back and forth, ten metres forwards and ten backwards, but they can’t escape the fire. The second truck is stuck on the bend and the driver is franti
cally spinning the wheel as he tries to turn round. I catch sight of his crazed eyes and his white lips, which are pursed in a grimace. Bullets strike the sides of the vehicle, and blue sweet wrappers flutter overhead.

  The shooting dies down. Kotenochkin jumps up and runs up the hill. We run after him

  It turns out we were firing at a kind of barn at the top. The earth floor is covered in cartridge cases and there is a used Fly launcher. The Chechens have only just left, the bushes are still moving and it seems I can hear twigs crackling underfoot. But we don’t pursue them. Kotenochkin orders us to head back down.

  The blown-up Ural truck stands still at the roadside. The dead driver lies near the wheel, his back all burnt, charred ribs showing.

  The driver of the second truck managed to reverse and he survived. They put the dead driver under our carrier’s turret. As we drive he keeps slipping down onto me. At first I am afraid to touch him, but later I put my hand on his knee and press him to the armour. His knee is warm.

  The sun is now shining brightly and the heat is unbearable. The clouds are dazzling white above. I want a drink and a smoke.

  We bring two dead to the regiment and tow in the burnt-out Ural.

  ‘We’re here,’ says the sergeant-major as he jumps down. Welcome to the ass end of nowhere.’

  It’s hellish hot. Tanks and carriers are dug into the ground, surrounded by tents and trenches.

  Half-naked people wander between the tents with rifles slung round their necks. These are soldiers. There is not one Russian soldier in Chechnya who wears full uniform. White long johns cut off like shorts, slippers or trainers on bare feet -that’s what our entire army looks like. Grease-soaked tank crews change tracks, and someone squints at us from under his palm.