The next night our side brings up a bulldozer and pushes all the bodies into a crater. No-one bothers them and they bury them all during one night.
Then the Chechens start killing our guys they took prisoner. They shout from the end of the street to get our attention and show a few soldiers, badly beaten and with their hands tied behind their backs. The Chechens laugh and shout something at us in their language and then quickly put one of the prisoners on his side on the asphalt, pin his head with a foot and stab him twice in the throat with a knife. The boy jerks his tied hands and whimpers, and a black trickle spreads from his slashed throat onto the road.
The Chechens go back round the corner, leaving him to die on the asphalt.
He lies a long time on his side without moving, and then he starts to twitch. He jerks his bound hands and tries to turn over as if he is uncomfortable, then he falls quiet again. It is painful for him to move and he obediently lies on his side, with a gaping throat that keeps pumping a black trickle. When we think he is already dead he starts to twitch again and tries to crawl, then goes still again. This goes on a long time. Blood Pours from his throat and smears across his face. His jacket has slipped down to his elbows and when he jerks his arms, blood spurts from an artery onto his bare shoulder.
‘Bastards!’ says Murky, unable to bear it any longer. He jumps up and shouts over the blocks, ‘Just kill him you fuckers! Shoot him you bastards. Bastards!’
He unslings his rifle but Osipov and Loop manage to grab the barrel. They grip his arms and press him to the ground.
Murky squats, holding his head in his hands and moaning.
‘Bastards, bastards, bastards,’ he whispers.
The boy soon starts to choke; he can’t breathe and blood sprays from his mouth as he coughs. Sometimes he loses consciousness for while and lies motionless, then he comes round and once again tries to crawl.
When he stops moving altogether the Chechens shoot him in the back with tracer rounds. The bullets pass through his body and ricochet into the sky.
They also kill the rest of the prisoners. This time they don’t appear from round the corner, all we hear are screams. Before they cut each boy’s throat, they shout ‘Allahu akbar.’ We hear this several times, and an hour later they throw the bodies out onto the street.
Pan gets wounded. A bullet goes through his cheek, knocking out his front teeth and exiting on the other side.
‘Pretty good, Pan, a nice flesh wound that’ll heal in time for your wedding, you’ll see,’ Andy says.
‘Teeth are no big deal,’ agrees Zyuzik. ‘They can make such great dentures now that you can’t tell them from the real thing, isn’t that right?’
‘Oh yes,’ I say, backing him up.
We are standing in front of the helicopter pad, smoking and looking at Pan as he lies on a stretcher, looking up at us.
‘You’re lucky, Pan,’ says Andy. ‘You’re going home.’
He doesn’t answer. Without thinking Andy had stuck three shots of promedol into him, and Pan is under so deep that he seems not to take in what’s happening to him.
His wound really isn’t serious, considering the damage a bullet in the face could do: rip your jaw out or take off the whole lower part of your head. But Pan just got holes in his cheeks and front teeth knocked out. A helicopter will come for him and off he’ll go to hospital.
We don’t say anything to each other but I know what my pals are thinking: every one of us would like to be in Pan’s place. Every time they take a wounded guy to hospital - even the most serious cases that have lost legs or arms - we all want to be in his place.
Authors of lousy war books say that it’s better to be dead than a legless cripple, but that’s bullshit, of course. We know that the main thing is to live, and we are willing to live in whatever form that may be, even as a bluish trunk with no arms or legs on a beggar’s trolley. We just want to live. To live, not die. That’s all there is to it.
We give Pan water and he gulps a few times, leaking water from the holes in his cheeks. He finds this funny and deliberately squirts us. Clots of blood clog up the holes, and he pokes them free with his dirty fingers and sprays the grass. We swear at him; there isn’t much water to go around and we gave him our last.
At last the chopper arrives. The blades whip up clouds of dust from the ground and we crouch down, shielding our faces with our hands. The medics cover Pan’s head with a blanket, and without waiting for the rotors to stop, they run him over to the aircraft.
‘Pan! Pan!’ shouts Andy, but Pan doesn’t hear.
The helicopter flies off. We sit on the grass and light up. Andy spits and throws a long cigarette butt onto the ground. He’s stressed out. I pick the end up and finish it. Nerves or no nerves, it’s a crime to throw away such a big dog-end. I take a few more puffs until the cinders start to singe my fingers and I stamp it out.
The battalion is seized by TNT fever. Everybody is busy searching for shells, trading cigarettes for them, getting them from friends, begging or stealing them. Then they melt the TNT from them. No-one knows what it’s for. They say you can get a good price for it in Grozny’s central market, but this seems very doubtful to me. Why would the Chechens need to buy explosives when Grozny is already overflowing with unexploded shells that are littering the streets, waiting to be collected? Once I even saw an unexploded five-tonner, an enormous bomb like a hot air balloon. It lay in the middle of a crater like a fat pig in a puddle of mud, its tail dug into the ground. You could get five tons of TNT in one go from that, so why waste time on small-fry shells. And even if they are buying explosives at the market, we can’t get there.
This doesn’t deter anyone and the soldiers keep on melting the stuff out. It’s very simple to do, you just have to unscrew the detonator and put the shell into a fire, and that’s all. A while later the stuff leaks out in the form of liquid plasticine. The heat doesn’t trigger it and it only blows from a fuse or an electronic impulse, so it’s perfectly safe.
Loop extracted enough to fill a whole backpack and now carries it with him as if it contains the currency reserves of a superpower.
In the day he keeps his backpack in the commander’s carrier, right under Major Bondar’s seat. If anyone else had tried to stash a sack full of explosives under a commander’s seat they’d have found it immediately. Just imagine what would have ensued if the company commander had found out that one of his own soldiers had stuck a couple of dozen kilos of TNT under his backside! But Loop always gets away with it.
We smelt explosives until a shell goes off in someone’s hands. How this happened, no-one knows. The blast throws him a few dozen metres, straight over headquarters and onto the battalion commander’s carrier. The poor guy had his chest blown out, leaving a big gaping hole in the middle of his body.
But Loop doesn’t empty his backpack and continues to use it as a pillow.
‘It doesn’t hurt to have some stock,’ he says, plumping it with his fist before settling down for the night.
He’s right. The explosives are already extracted, so there’s no sense in throwing them out.
It won’t help the dead guy, will it?
‘So why did we learn this stupid Morse code then?’ grumbles Loop, rinsing the bathtub before he goes on the next water run to the kitchen. ‘What’s the point of it? No-one uses it in the army any more. All we do is steal water and get knocked about, and that’s about the sum total of our military learning. They’d do better to give me the money they spent on my training. I’d find a use for it all right.’
He’s right. Morse has been redundant for twenty years and no-one has any use for it here. I can’t imagine a radio operator in combat will start tapping out dots and dashes and send a coded message. At moments like that you shout and swear down the line, forgetting all about codes and call signs, and just blurt everything straight out.
‘That’s right,’ says Andy. ‘It would make more sense to teach us how to shoot.’
‘Wankers, the whole lot o
f them,’ says Loop. ‘I’m telling you, we’re nothing but cannon fodder. Replaceable cannon fodder, and cheap with it, just 18,500 roubles a month for seventy-five kilos live weight.’
‘Private Zhikh! You are panic-mongering! Or do you regard the constitutional order of our Motherland as just so many words? For such faint-heartedness you deserve to go into the first wave of the attack without body armour,’ I say, dressing him down so convincingly that I have him fooled.
Loop crumples like he just took a blow in the gills, and his eyes are suddenly fearful.
‘No, no, not that,’ he whispers. ‘Let me at least wear a helmet.’ ‘Stand to attention Private when a senior rank is talking to you,’ I say menacingly. ‘Remember I’m a sergeant.’
Andy and I are indeed already sergeants while Loop is still a corporal. I got the rank for nothing after Savchenko stole a stamp from headquarters and used it to bump me up in my service book, almost up to lieutenant. Andy got his third stripe back in training for exemplary service. But none of it means anything: we still get beaten up the same as the privates, or maybe worse. To be higher in rank having served less time is an unforgivable transgression. ‘So, you’re a sergeant are you?’ the dembels say before they give you a couple of extra smacks. That’s why I never wear the stripes. No-one does. All that counts is how long you have served.
‘Now, tell me pronto,’ says Andy, joining in the game, ‘what is task number 41 for using special equipment? In doing so you will render the Motherland a great service.’
‘Comrade Sergeants! Get stuffed!’ comes Loop’s clipped reply as he stands to attention. His eyes are ablaze with zeal to sacrifice his insignificant life for the good of Russia’s constitutional order.
‘Bad, Corporal Zhikh, very bad,’ says Andy, imitating the commander of our training company, Major Remez. ‘Perhaps you don’t know the tactical and technical characteristics of the P-111 radio unit? Let’s hear them!’
Loop rattles off the characteristics from the manual by heart. Andy and I stand there gawping at him. I’ve pretty much forgotten all of it but now it stirs in my memory. It’s hard to forget the Morse code if you have it beaten into your head with a heavy army stool every day for six months. We would learn it parrot-like, lying on our fronts. A blow in the kidneys is the best way to stimulate a thirst for knowledge.
‘God, we learnt this rubbish for almost six months!’ Andy says with astonishment.
‘Who needs it anyway?’
‘Yes, indeed,’ I say. ‘We learned all this bollocks as if our lives depended on it. But no-one explained to us how to staunch blood, or pinpoint a sniper in night fighting, or steal water from the kitchen.’
‘Wankers,’ says Andy. ‘The whole lot of them, one big band of wankers.’
You could say a soldier is the simplest creature in the universe. When we are terrified we are afraid, when we are sad we mope, when something’s funny we laugh. No, we never forget; each day of war weighs down heavily on our souls, and someday we’ll be left to face our memories. But today this is the furthest thing from our thoughts. We are alive, what else do we need? After all, we are still just boys, with imaginations to match.
‘If I were in government, I’d propose setting up a special firing range to be set up where countries would send troops to sort out their differences,’ says Oleg. ‘Like here, in Chechnya. No really, where Russia could lease out Grozny. If, say, Israel and Palestine wanted to go a few rounds with each other, they could send their armies here and go for it. Whoever wins gets to run the show in Jerusalem. And the money from the leasing could be given to our wounded who’ve lost arms and legs. Then at least they wouldn’t beg in the underground.’
‘Even better, let the foreign intelligence services in here. Let them learn how to fight terrorism in real-life conditions.’
‘Not a damn thing would come of that,’ says Murky. ‘You’d have to put the Chechens on allowances and pay them a wage. They wouldn’t last long anyway: the Germans or even the Israelis would make short work of the rebels. They’d drive the lot of them into the mountains and blow them to bits with self-propelled guns. What kind of war is this anyway? First we fight, then we don’t, then we advance, then we pull back?!’ Meanwhile, stories of horrors elsewhere in Chechnya kept filtering back to us.
A friend of mine told me how their battalion entered some village or other. It didn’t get shelled much and was almost intact, but round the main square were large crosses upon which Russian soldiers had been crucified. They’d been nailed up by their hands and each had a few bullet holes in his chest. They had all been castrated.
The commander ordered them to do a sweep through the village. All the men who could be found were herded into the square. They were thrown down in piles and then our soldiers started to hack them up. One guy pinned a Chechen to the ground with his foot while another pulled off his trousers and with two or three hefty slashes severed his scrotum. The serrated blade of the bayonet snagged the skin and pulled the blood vessels from his body.
In half a day the whole village was castrated, then the battalion moved out. Our dead men remained on the crosses - special units removed them later.
One day we get sent to the command centre in Kurchaloi, this time accompanying an engineer reconnaissance group. Every morning while it is still dark we set off with the sappers along the same route, down Dzhokhar Dudayev Street to the crossroads, then right into the private residential sector and then a few kilometres on down the road. We pass two signs over the gates: ‘Soldier, don’t touch anything - it’s dangerous!’ and ‘Soldier, careless talk costs lives!’ They put up the second sign after a wizened old man went up to one of our boys and asked him the way to headquarters. As the boy turned away the old guy pulled out a pistol and shot him in the back of the head.
We exit through the gate and split up into groups. Ahead goes a sapper with a mine detector - today it’s Pashka - and behind him two guys with prodders, Slav and Tom. Two more move along the roadside and check the undergrowth and the milestones. One is called Vasily, the other I don’t know, some small, fair-headed kid, easy-going and with a ready laugh. More often than not these are the ones who get the ‘Christmas presents’ left by the rebels.
Loop, Andy and I and a few others follow behind the sappers, and behind us crawls our covering carrier like a lazy brontosaurus. We have to go about ten kilometres and then turn back. We know this road back to front by now, down to the last dent and stone. The sappers remove about three or four land mines a month here. Generally they are simple things, made from a length of pipe or an artillery shell, but sometimes there are some nasty surprises. Once we found a football containing a light-sensitive trigger. Another time, in Grozny, the Chechens slaughtered a whole block post of our guys, laid them in a row on the road and cut their throats. We didn’t see this ourselves though. When we got there, there was no-one in the bunker, just a tin of condensed milk in the middle of the road, and underneath it what we call a ‘petal’, a mean little mine that doesn’t kill but only cripples you, tearing off half your foot or your toes. Pincha threw a loop of wire round it, jumped in the ditch and tipped the tin over. After the blast, we scooped the sticky-sweet stuff with our dirty fingers right there at the block post where they killed our boys.
It wasn’t sacrilege; they were already dead and beyond caring. Every one of us could have been in their place. And if they had still been alive, we would have done all we could to get them out. But they were dead.
We walk slowly. Pashka sweeps from side to side with the detector, Slav and Tom dig at the ground with their prodders. I keep an eye on the roadsides. Finally the fair-headed sapper raises his hand: Caution! We crouch down and the carrier stops behind us. The boy goes to the edge of the road, kneels down and gingerly parts the grass with his hands. This is the most dangerous moment. If a land mine has been planted there, then there can be a bearded bastard lurking nearby ready to detonate it. The rebel will kill the boy and then nail us all from the undergrowth with bursts of
rifle fire.
I lie down on the ground and press my cheek to the dust. Loop does the same on the other side of the road. Through the parted grass I see a long object. The boy reaches out and touches the shell. Then he picks it up.
‘It’s just an empty case,’ he says.
The next time our find is a piece of pipe from a drilling rig that they use to bore into the ground when they look for water.
Next to it there is a coil of wire and a box of nails hidden in the grass. We put the drill onto the carrier, intending to blow it up later, in case the Chechens are still tempted to pack it with TNT and nails, and we proceed.
We stop where Igor was killed. He got blown up two weeks ago. The plaster on the sides of the houses still bears the marks of the shrapnel that killed him. The mine was attached to a tree at the height of a person and there wasn’t even a crater to remind us of him.
‘Well, come on,’ says Pashka.
We remove from the carrier a home-made cross that Pashka has fashioned from some water pipes. There is a plaque on it that says ‘Igor Ivanchenko 1977-1996’. We dig it into the ground and stand there silently for a while. We haven’t got any vodka and we pay our respects just as we are. I hardly remember him, he died the day after we arrived and all I recall is that he was tall and thickset.
There’s another cross on the next street. That’s Hamster. He got blown up three days after Igor. We’ll stop there next.
‘Come on then,’ says Pashka, taking a last puff on a cigarette end and picking up the mine detector.
‘Watch out!’ Slav says on the bend, raising his hand.
We crouch down.
There are no rear positions here, nowhere to withdraw to for a rest, but we still get some days of peace. On these days we stop being soldiers and become normal boys; we may have a laugh or we’re just tired, and more often than not we’re pissed off and irritated, but we’re boys all the same. On those days we throw off our uniforms and the war with them. We stop talking about death and killing, we shed any thoughts of all the terrible things that happened to us the day before and we simply live. And for this reason every minute seems sharp and fresh. We strut around in our cut-off long johns and play, having been short-changed in play when it was peacetime. The urge to fool about is still very strong in us. We catch tarantulas and put them in glass jars, or gorge sweets, washing them down with condensed milk, or we fire off bullets. Not even heavy bombardments could kill our boyish fascination for weapons, and when it’s quiet we shoot tracer rounds into the sky or fire at jars.
One Soldier's War In Chechnya Page 14
