One Soldier's War In Chechnya

by Arkady Babchenko

  We are strange boys - we have grown-up eyes and grown-up conversations; many of us already have grey hair and our eyes no longer light up with glee, even when we smile. Yet we are still boys.

  But as soon as the fighting starts the tomfoolery vanishes in an instant and all that remains is the need to survive. We cease being human and become killing machines. Boys? We have the same arms and muscles as adults, and although we are weaker than fully-grown men, we are just as good at placing the crosshairs on a moving figure and pulling the trigger. Pincha and Murky aren’t even nineteen but they have already killed people. We don’t have an age any more. We have no hobbies or interests. We are turning into animals, honing our hearing like a cat’s while our eyes detect the slightest movement. We know when to freeze and lie still, when to run across open ground, we can find our bearings at night and gauge the distance to a machine-gun from the sound of it firing. Each of us can drop to the ground a split second before a shell explodes and there’s no way of explaining how we know. All we can do is survive: you may be sitting by a fire or running across a yard, and before you know it you are lying face-down on the ground with bits of soil showering onto your back and head, and you realize that a bombardment has started. You didn’t even hear the whistle of the shell or the report of the gun but you feel the projectile as it flies through the air, sense it with every cell in your body, which suddenly crumbles into a billion molecules and becomes as big as the universe. And you feel every cell inside you crying out to live - just live! And an unbelievable fear consumes your entire body and there you are, lying on the ground, with pieces of shrapnel flying over your head and not one of them even touches you. If we were to rely on our sense and judgement we’d have been dead long ago. Instinct works faster.

  This is life itself talking inside us, making us fall and look for a deep enough hollow in the ground while it turns over inside us like a slippery cold worm. It’s the only thing that saves us.

  We sometimes surpass adults in our cruelty, simply because we are young. Children are cruel by nature, and this cruelty is the only bit of our true age that remains. And it helps us to live and to kill others.

  In war a person is basically not himself at all but some other kind of creature. We don’t have just five senses; there is a sixth, seventh, tenth even, growing from our bodies like tentacles and grafting themselves onto the war. And through them we feel the war. You can’t talk about war with someone who has never been there, not because they are stupid or slow-witted, but because they don’t have the senses to feel it with.

  A heavy, red sun descends slowly on the horizon. We are dying together with the sun. We have no age - our life is but one day. We are born as babies at dawn, reach maturity by midday and die in the evening. We hustle and bustle as we live out our lives. Now we are already old men. We are twenty-two hours and fifteen minutes old.

  The next regiment lost fifteen men in one go. They were driving in an armoured Ural when a Fly rocket tore into them. The truck had windows, so they didn’t all die. The survivors got out clutching their heads, vomiting, blood running from their noses and ears. They crouched down and lit cigarettes, their hands trembling, while other soldiers looked at them and thought: The lucky buggers survived a rocket hit on a Ural and now they’ll be loaded into helicopters and flown to hospital. Yes, they’re in a bad way; they’re vomiting, they probably have ruptured kidneys and lungs, they can’t hear a thing and might not be able to speak for a long while, but they survived and that’s all that matters.

  All these people did die in the end. The impact was so powerful that they succumbed to the after-effects within a day, so in fact no-one survived the explosion inside the truck.

  They call another ceasefire. This time the truce is for a month and we are under strict orders not to rise to provocation. Those who disobey are given to the Chechens for investigation, and a worse fate you couldn’t think of. No-one returns from that kind of investigation.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, what’s going on at headquarters? Have they got straw for brains or something?’ grumbles Loop.

  ‘Frigging war,’ says Osipov. ‘Everything’s been sold off, bought up by the highest bidder, I’m telling you.’

  In Grozny they set up joint commandant’s offices. Now the Chechen block posts stand next to ours and to pass along a road you have to stop twice, like at customs.

  ‘How can there be a joint commandant’s office?’ Murky wonders. ‘Are we all friends now or something? What about January ’95? What did we fight for? This is treason! Listen, what’s happening now is treason through and through, there’s no two ways about it. So all those deaths were for nothing?’

  So the Chechens set up their block posts next to ours. Their commander is a young guy, a rocket man. There are seven notches on the shaft of his RPG launcher, which he tells us means he’s knocked out seven of our vehicles and killed at least twenty-one guys. He laughs, talks loudly and is perfectly good-humoured.

  We are not allowed into town. Soldiers get killed there at the drop of a hat; youths will immediately surround a lone soldier, drag him into a corner and slit his throat.

  We pull out of Grozny, surrender the city, and the Chechens are jubilant; they openly drive through the streets in cars, waving their green flags and carrying weapons. We can do nothing, our orders are explicit: Do not open fire. The rebels are now declared Chechen freedom fighters rather than bandits, and we are to treat them with respect.

  We leave through streets that we took in combat only yesterday and try not to look to the side. The Chechens laugh behind us and make throat-slitting motions.

  The war has hardly touched the village of Achkhoi-Martan and only a few houses have bullet holes in their gates as we wind our way through the streets. Hate-filled eyes watch us from behind the gates, windows and courtyards. No young men are visible, only old ones, women and children who stop and watch us driving past. God forbid that we break down here.

  We sit there, the barrels of our weapons bristling. One movement and we will open fire; a single stone or bottle thrown at us and we’ll tear this village to shreds.

  Chechen kids are playing on the streets. When they see our column they raise a fist and shout ‘Allahu akbar!’ The older ones also draw a finger across their throats.

  In Achkhoi-Martan we pass a block post manned by Chechen militia officers who had fought on our side. As usual there is a site hut, but this one has been so riddled with bullets that not a single bit of it is unscathed. It’s impossible to live inside, but that’s their home now.

  Two officers stand in front of the block post, one of them wounded, his arm hanging in a dirty bandage. They watch our column in silence. Their entire arsenal amounts to two rifles.

  We know that they will probably be killed this very night, and they know it too. We have betrayed them.

  ‘Don’t leave us behind,’ one of them says finally.

  We turn away.

  The column drives past and the dust settles on their hair and eyelashes.

  I see them before my eyes for a long time after, these ghosts on the roadside at Achkhoi-Martan.

  Forgive us, lads.

  We stop before the bridge. The Chechens have set up their block post here and don’t let us go any further. One with a green band round his head is unhappy about something and an argument starts between him and Kotenochkin.

  ‘Shoot the bastard, what are you talking to him for?!’ says Osipov indignantly. ‘Are they out of their minds, not letting the column through?’

  I sit up top and watch to the right. Our column stands on the central square. Today is Saturday, market day, and it’s busy. The Chechens have laid out confectionery, tinned food and water by the window of a destroyed department store and a brisk trade is underway.

  A young Chechen is sitting on a foldable chair right in front of me, selling cigarettes. He looks me in the eye, then says something to his neighbour and looks at me again. They laugh.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ He mouths
at me, drawing his finger across his throat.

  His wares are arrayed on a big table covered with a plastic sheet; he could easily have a rifle underneath it. All of the men on this square are armed, we know this, and we feel their superiority over us as we sit stuck here in this trap. One move from us and tracers will fly into the column - there are eyes and barrels at every window.

  The Chechen is still looking at me and laughing. He’s laughing as if he’s killed me and I’m his trophy. He doesn’t see me as a living person, all he sees is my severed head. I raise my rifle and aim it at his head. He also feels fear but the smile doesn’t leave his face. Why doesn’t he turn away? Why is he looking at me? I slip off the safety catch and put my finger on the trigger. He doesn’t turn away, and his eyes are full of fear and defiance.

  The column sets off and we pass over the bridge. There is a box of grenades at the feet of one of the Chechens standing on it: the bribe we gave to be let across.

  If we had stood there for a few more seconds, I would have killed that Chechen. Then they would have burnt our column.

  ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’ - John 15:13.

  We don’t know what we are fighting for. We have no goal, no morals or internal justification for what we do. We are sent off to kill and to meet our deaths but why we don’t know. We just drew the short straw, happened to be born eighteen years ago and grow up just in time for this war. And there our blame ends.

  The only thing we have is hope, the hope that we will survive and preserve our sense of self, and be able to remain human beings.

  We feel the injustice of it all so acutely with our eighteen years. Each one of us that survives this war will truly believe that such evil should never happen again.

  We weren’t fighting the Chechens; our real enemies were the lies and treachery that created this monstrous conflict. And every shell that was fired at us was fired at all the young men of this world who might so easily meet the same fate.

  Every shell that hit us tore apart both the flesh and the soul Our whole outlook on life crumbled and collapsed beneath this demonic fire, and there was nothing to fill the emptiness it left. The only thing we have left is ourselves and our brothers in arms. ‘All we know of life is death,’ as the song has it, all that we love is our past, a phantom mirage in this turbulent world. We were left with just one virtue - the will to look after those who stood beside us in combat. If anyone ever asks me, ‘What were you fighting for?’ I will reply, ‘For those who clung to the ground next to me.’ We fought only for each other. Our entire generation may have died in Chechnya, a whole generation of Russians. Even those of us who stayed alive - can they really be those same eighteen-year-old laughing boys who once got seen off to the army by their loved ones? No, we died. We all died in that war.

  14/ Special Cargo

  This is what happens to soldiers who die in Chechnya. First they get hit by a bullet or shrapnel and then they fall and die. A day or two later someone might manage to slip a belt around the leg of the stiffened bodies and drag them out at a crawl under sniper fire. They wrap them up in the special silvery bags, load them onto a helicopter and take them to Rostov. In Rostov they are identified, welded into zinc coffins and shipped to Moscow.

  In Moscow they are met by soldiers at the airport or railway station, loaded into trucks and taken to another station or airport. Then they are loaded into plane holds or goods wagons and the boys go home.

  The soldiers get back into the truck and return to the barracks at the first command regiment in Lefortovo. It’s the same one that mounts the ceremonial guard at the airports to welcome visiting presidents of other countries. A show unit.

  But in this ceremonial regiment there is one barracks, right over to the right from the gatehouse. This is the ‘diesel stop’ as they call it, where they gather deserters, those waiting to be sent to disciplinary battalions, soldiers who left their units for whatever reason, who got sidelined with a wound, or those who didn’t return from leave on time or just went AWOL when they couldn’t stand the bullying any more. Nearly all of them come here from Chechnya.

  They live for a while at the diesel stop, waiting to see if they'll be sentenced or have their case closed and be sent to finish their service in a normal unit. They are the ones who go for the ‘special cargo’, carting the zinc coffins around. Some smart commander with sadistic inclinations decided that the diesel boys were fit to deal with the special cargo. Probably so that they see their dead comrades and realize how wrong they had been to flee from Chechnya and stay alive.

  The coffin was very heavy. Covered in rough, yellow planks, it was more than two metres long and a metre wide and tall. The plaque nailed onto the head end was covered in snow. Wiping it clean with his hand, Dachsie read it. ‘A colonel. From Chechnya,’ he said. ‘Blimey, he’s a heavy one. They must have eaten their fill of government grub down there. Come on then.’ Puffing, we grabbed the handles nailed along the side, braced ourselves and shoved the coffin up into the truck.

  Our boots slipped on the smoothly trampled crust of snow as we tugged and pushed it, a centimetre at a time, into the back. With a grunt we finally shoved it right into place, nearly crushing the foot of a porter who was helping. ‘Well, let’s go then.’ The commander of the group, a swarthy major with mean eyes and bushy eyebrows, stood alongside the vehicle, stamping his feet to keep warm. The frosty morning had chilled him to the bone and he was irritated at how long we’d taken with the coffin. Not that it occurred to the major to help - it was written all over his arrogant face that to work side by side with his subordinates was beneath his dignity as an officer.

  ‘Where to now, Comrade Major?’

  ‘Domodedovo airport. Come on then, let’s go!’ he barked, jumping into the warm cab.

  It was unbelievably cold. The wind whipped through the tattered canopy as the truck raced round the Moscow ring road.

  The sharp winter air mixed with prickly ice-cold grit which rushed in past the flap and went under our hats, froze on our eyelashes and blocked our nostrils.

  I wasn’t thinking about anything as I huddled on the bench seat. I was intensely cold and overcome by total apathy. Since the morning we had hauled our way through traffic jams for two hours to collect the colonel’s body from the customs terminal at Vnukovo airport and then hung around there with the load, only to have to take it to Domodedovo now.

  ‘Four more hours at least,’ I calculated. ‘We have to get there, then the major needs time to sort things out, unload and drive back... yes, four hours... I may lose my toes like this.’

  Two pairs of woollen socks and newspapers wrapped round my feet didn’t help; my perpetually sodden boots were cold as hell and didn’t retain any warmth. I had stopped feeling my toes long ago.

  I tried to push my feet under the coffin to shield them from the wind. Sitting on the bench opposite me, Dachsie asked: ‘Cold?’

  ‘You can say that again.’

  He moved over and sat on the coffin, bracing himself with one foot on the tailgate, got out a cigarette and handed it to me.

  ‘Light up, it’ll warm you up.’

  Banging his foot on the side of the coffin, Dachsie said, ‘I can’t believe how bloody heavy this colonel is. And big too -look at this size of the coffin they knocked up for him.’

  He took a drag on his cigarette and exhaled the smoke thoughtfully. ‘Maybe there’s no colonel in there? Maybe they filled it with earth for the weight, and then here you are, relatives, go ahead and bury him. You can’t open the zinc up anyway. Yesterday we moved a lad from Tambov and the coffin was as light as anything - Whale and I lifted it on our own. The guys from his company who were coming home with him said there was just a leg inside. But it definitely belonged to him, so they said.’

  I looked at Dachsie, who had been so nicknamed because of his lively character and long dachshund nose that he tends to stick in everything going on around him, like a dachshund digging at a bu
rrow. A crude, simple villager’s face but cunning nonetheless. And although he was only nineteen like the rest of us, his fast-receding hairline and the terminal weariness in his eyes indicated that he had had his share of tough times in his short life. As luck would have it Dachsie, like me, managed to wind up in the last draft that got sent to Chechnya and he got his taste of the war.

  We were friends all right, but now, looking at his impudent face, I suddenly felt a sharp disdain for him, almost disgust. As he smoked, Dachsie had spread out on top of the coffin and lay there dangling his leg in the air. I looked at the plaque. Yes, just as I thought, we’d loaded the coffin bottom end and feet first, an unlucky portent with the dead, although I had never paid much attention to such superstitions. Feet or head first, so what, it didn’t matter much to the colonel either way. But now the coffin lay there bottom end first, and it occurred to me that Dachsie was sitting with his backside right over the colonel’s face, that is, if the colonel still had a face. And it wasn’t a nice

  thought.

  ‘Get off the coffin.’

  ‘What?’ Dachsie asked, not hearing properly and leaning casually over to me.

  ‘Get off the coffin, you prick!’ I yelled. My disdain instantly turned to rage and I thought that if he starts his usual tomfoolery I’d throw him out of the truck. He evidently sensed this too.

  ‘Dickhead,’ he replied, and without a trace of hurt he moved back onto the bench.