The scene in the city is indescribable. In fact, there is no city: all that’s visible is the road and the first row of houses in the private sector. Beyond that it’s an inferno, a maelstrom of explosions and smoke, total hell. The gunners are laying down a carpet of fire and the shells land just over the road, about a hundred metres from our positions, sending a mass of shrapnel flying in our direction. Beams and boards hurtle through the air together with sections of wall and whole roofs.
I’ve never seen a bombardment like this. As if there could be any snipers here now; there’s probably nothing left but a wasteland. Of course, on the one hand that’s good. Let the artillery flatten the hell out of everything, and then we’ll march into the city, whistling as we go, easy as you like, cigarettes in our mouths, lazily kicking aside the bearded bodies. Then again, if no roofs are left intact, where are we going to sleep tonight?
The commander of the 8th company summons Yurka and me with shouts from headquarters. I’m sent for the radio and go with them as their operator. The operation officer, who’s sitting by a bricked-up window, tells us the 506th regiment is moving in. The 506th will advance first, followed by us and then by the interior ministry troops who’ll do the final mop-up. I look over the officer’s shoulder through the firing slit expecting to see something fantastic, a thousand soldiers with faces contorted with fury, running like they do in the films and shouting ‘For Stalin! For the Motherland!’ But it’s all a lot simpler than that, ordinary even. An infantry battalion of the 506th regiment lies in a single line on the embankment. There aren’t many of them, maybe a hundred men prostrated along the slope, waiting for the shelling to shift right into the city, so they can get up and follow the shell bursts. The bombardment duly moves, they get to their feet and run over the brow of the embankment, disappearing one after the other down the other side. They run awkwardly, stooped down, each one carrying more than thirty kilos of kit: cartridges, grenades, rocket launchers, flame throwers, weapon mounts, ammo belts machine-guns. No-one shouts ‘Hurrah!’, instead they labour their way forward silently, indifferent and accustomed to death, once again dragging their bodies from the ground and hurling themselves at flying metal, knowing that not all of them will survive. And yet still they launch the attack.
The operation officer points out of the window, greatly amused by the sight of one lad trying to clamber up the embankment, impossibly weighed down with gear and bent beneath a grenade launcher. Protected behind the brick wall, the officer is laughing for all he’s worth and I feel an instant and intense hatred well up inside me. Those are your men going to their deaths and here you are laughing at them, you piece of shit!
I watch the frail little figures stand and run over the embankment to where they will be killed, torn apart, crippled, and I am suddenly terrified, racked with an unbelievable fear that makes my knees tremble. I am scared for them, for human life as a whole. How can I watch the infantry attack while I stay behind? It’s enough to drive you crazy. I feel like a deserter who has betrayed his brothers. How can they run to their deaths while I’m safe here? I must go with them, run over the embankment too. I know I won’t be scared over on the other side, all thoughts will just vanish leaving just flashing pictures in my brain: A rut. Get down. Run. Shoot. There he is. Give a burst of fire. Another. Another. Got him. Run. Fall. There, over the embankment, everyone’s equal - all of the soldiers have the same chance, and fate will decide who is to live or die. Back here, though, all I can do is clench my fists until they are white and repeat to myself like a clockwork toy, ‘Just don’t die lads, don’t you dare die!’
Within twenty minutes we get our first dead guy, a ‘200’ case, as we call those destined for the zinc coffins. They’ve wrapped him in a cape, and they bring him out on a BMP tracked carrier. It appears under the bridge, drives through a hole in the fence and pulls up in the yard of the command house. Twenty minutes later there are already ten wounded lying by the carrier, their snow-white bandages contrasting with their black, haggard faces and crazed eyes. The injured smoke agitatedly and lean on each other as they climb into the vehicle. It turns round and sets off for the hospital. The dead guy shakes about on the top, his feet bouncing in time with the vehicle’s motion.
Twenty more minutes pass and the 506th return. On the other side of the road the artillery has not done its job properly; the Chechen fire is too concentrated and the infantry can’t take the houses. Their commander withdraws the company and the little figures run back across the road and lay down on the embankment again. The artillery fire resumes and we wait.
The shelling shifts once more and the infantry renew the attack and vanish over the embankment. They seem to have better luck this time. I run to the 8th company, which is clustered in platoons along the fence, smoking during the wait, and find the company commander. He’s repeating the task to the platoon commanders and they’re nodding back. Then the order comes over the radio to move out.
We go with the 2nd platoon, seven of us altogether: the Platoon commander, Yurka, me, Mikhailych the machine-gunner, Arkasha the sniper, Denis and Pashka. We gather at the hole in the fence, ready to rush through at the order.
‘Let’s go!’
We run through the gap and cover the hundred metres or so to the bridge without trouble - it’s dead ground, and no-one can see us. We get held up at the bridge where a sniper’s nest sits on the embankment beside one of the supports, a pit built up with sandbags. It’s the perfect spot; he’s in the shadows and his field of vision couldn’t be better. Mikhailych fires a burst towards him and spits: ‘That’s where he was sitting, the bastard. I must have let five clips off at him and I still couldn’t flush him out. He’s gone now, bearded scum. Too bad!’
A long straight road leads off immediately after the bridge. The 506th and the Chechens are about four hundred metres from us. Not even the devil knows what’s going on down there - either the Chechens are counter-attacking or they’re just blindly firing away in rage. Either way, you can’t get down the road; tracer rounds are flying past the houses and smacking into the fence, whizzing in clusters under the bridge and whining around as they strike the supports, showering us with plaster. One burst flies right over our heads, and we duck down. ‘Bloody hell! Forward, go, go, go!’ We run out from underneath the bridge and turn left off the road behind the houses. The bullets don’t reach us here and we can stand up again.
In front of us lies a small irrigation canal, and just beyond it is the first line of housing blocks in the private residential sector. There aren’t many, the row stretches about two hundred metres left and right, and our job today is to take them.
The worst place is on the left by the 1st platoon, a huge open area with a school in the middle. The best place is on the right, by the 3rd platoon, with the embankment behind you, more embankment to the right and then the 7th company further down. The company commander tells me to radio for the situation with the platoons. Likhach, the commander of the 1st platoon, says they are in real trouble: it’s three hundred metres to the school and the Chechens are holding it. He is pinned down in a ditch beside the road, with snipers firing at the slightest movement. The 3rd platoon commander reports that his area is quiet; the houses are empty and can be occupied right now.
There’s no answer from Pioneer, the reconnaissance platoon. We have a bad feeling about this and I keep trying. Eventually they answer and tell us we are pissing them off, that they have no idea where they are, although they think they can’t be far from Minutka Square. The place is teeming with Chechens who are roving around in groups, but keep missing Pioneer; the 506th is now way behind them and they are still advancing. Without a word, the company commander gets out the map and looks at it, cursing. It’s God knows how far to Minutka, half-way across the city. It’s way behind the enemy front line and how they ended up there is a total mystery. The company commander takes the headphones from me, calls up Pioneer and with a stream of abuse tells them to get back here. Meanwhile, we send Mikhailych and Yurk
a off to scout and wait for them to come back. Ten minutes later they tell us we can advance; it’s all clear.
We cross the irrigation canal, walking along a thin plank that bows beneath our feet. On the other side there are some fences and one has a hole in it. The platoon files that way with Malakhanov on point. He’s a big lanky half-wit who is forever losing his rifle and getting hauled up before the special panel and slapped with a charge of selling weapons. He reaches the hole and flips aside a piece of slate with his foot. There’s a loud bang as a tripwired grenade explodes. We run over to Malakhanov who is just standing there, wiping his muck-spattered face and blinking in disbelief.
‘Where are you hit?’ Dumbstruck, he swivels his head round to inspect himself and shrugs. We examine him from top to bottom - not a single hole, not even a scratch. Unable to believe our eyes we check him out again. Nothing, he’s in one piece. The guy was born lucky, and as they say, the Lord must indeed protect children and idiots. And Malakhanov is an idiot for sure; no-one has any doubts about that. Only a total cretin would kick stuff around like he did. Malakhanov keeps blinking, like he still hasn’t understood what happened. We swear at him, he nods and turns round, goes through the hole and runs straight into a second tripwire - Boom! Smoke engulfs his body and billows out of the hole in layers. Bloody hell, how about that for a turn-up? Pity, he got away with it once but this time he’ll have lost his legs for sure, at the very least. You don’t get two miracles in a row. When the smoke clears our jaws drop: Malakhanov is standing in exactly the same pose, wiping his face, his eyes still batting in disbelief. On his right palm at the meaty base of his thumb a shard of shrapnel has nicked him and slightly torn the tissue. And that’s all! Other than that there’s not a scratch.
We bandage him in silence. The platoon commander is the first to shake off his stupor and unleashes a barrage of abuse at Malakhanov; he takes his rifle from him and tells him to piss off back to the rear, to the medical post, the hospital, the special department, wherever the hell he likes. The commander doesn’t want any trace of this idiot here any longer and tells him he has no wish to have to write to his mother informing her of the death of her moron son.
Carefully, scouring the ground beneath our feet, we climb through the hole into the yard. There are no more tripwires -Malakhanov has taken care of them all. The yard has an apple orchard, a barn and a house, which despite six hours of shelling is oddly more or less intact apart from a few broken windows. We go inside and find two rooms, a large working oven and a load of beds with pillows and blankets. Yes, today we will sleep like people, in the warm and on beds.
The company commander says we’ll set up the command post here and orders us to comb the remaining houses, just in case, although it’s clear they are also empty. We split up in the yard, half of us to the left and half to the right. We only take a few steps before mortar shells start raining down with a vile whistle and hammer the back yards. We scatter into the ditches and curse our mortar men and their useless firing. I call up the Kombat. ‘Our guys are mortaring us - get them to cease fire!’
‘Our mortars aren’t firing.’
“Yes, they are! And pretty accurately too; they are coming right down on us,’ I yell.
‘If you’ve got mortars landing on you, it’s the Chechens,’ he shouts back.
He’s right, damn him, it is the enemy. Now I feel ashamed -what was I panicking for? It’s probably better to be killed by enemy shrapnel than to get nailed because of some thickheaded gun-layer from your own side. But it seems the Chechens can’t see us and are just firing randomly, their shells dropping from a fair distance. We regain our senses and crawl through the adjacent yards to poke around in the cellars and pantries and inspect the houses.
I get the cottage across the street. Before I run over I peek out from between the doors of the gate and gauge the situation. Projectiles of all sizes are whistling, whizzing and crackling overhead, and much as I don’t fancy walking around right now I have no choice. Ducking down, I race across the street in one go and into the yard of the cottage, which is surrounded by a tall brick wall. The yard is large and has a wealthy air about it.
To the left I see a dark entrance down to the cellar, to the right another wall that divides the yard in two.
I hear someone poking around on the other side, moving some bits of glass. I take a grenade from my pocket, prime it and get ready to throw it over the wall. ‘Who’s there?’ It’s one of the guys from Likhach’s platoon, looting some jam. I should check out the cellar myself, scavenge some vitamins. By now we are all sick to death of that empty, half-cooked porridge they give us.
In the cellar I find shelves of different glass jars full of all kinds of unusual jams made from melon, watermelon, grapes, nuts, plus a three-litre jar of honey and four ten-litre canisters of pickles. Not a bad haul, I say to myself, and decide to carry this booty straight back to our guys. There are plenty of opportunists like me who would scarper with all this free stuff in a flash.
No sooner do I come out of the cellar than I hear the familiar whistle of a mortar shell overhead. I throw myself face down on the ground, although I know it’s too late to do anything; they’ve got me and I’m already dead. It’s not easy to drop. Fear has rendered my body empty and light. The shell hits the ground before I do (‘Look at him, he didn’t get down in time -now he’s got shrapnel in his legs and belly,’ they’ll say later) and explodes with a short, sharp burst, battering my ears with the shock wave and then... nothing. No shrapnel, no earth raining down, no smoke. But it did blow up in the yard, of that there’s no doubt. I raise my head, look around and realize what’s happened. The shell landed two or three metres from me, but on the other side of the wall dividing the yard. Lucky.
I run round to the other side to see what’s happened to the guy over the wall. They are already helping him out; his sweater hangs in tatters around his shoulder blade, and a streak of blood is seeping through the field dressing from his shoulder to his spine. His face is pale, he looks weak and he’s clearly in a bad way - it’s a serious wound. I radio the tracked carrier to evacuate the ‘300’, as we call the wounded guys, and it arrives a couple of minutes later. I watch them put him inside and find myself thinking that it was a pity the shell didn’t blow up on my half of the yard. I would happily go to hospital now, to all those nurses and clean sheets. It’s only a fleeting thought and a second later I shake it from my head, shoulder my rifle and go back to our house.
Everyone is assembled and the place is a hive of activity. The lads are making shooting slits with bricks, hanging drapes over the windows, firing up the stove and unloading all their booty onto the table. When everything is done we sit down to eat. And our supper today is unprecedented: tomatoes and cucumbers, bread and tinned stewed meat, buckwheat, butter, honey, different jams and tea. It’s a staggering fortune and our stomachs turn over with anticipation at the sight of it. We last ate in the morning at the command house, and not even a crumb has passed our lips since then. It’s now almost evening and dusk is falling. Our spoons glimmer as we dive into the spread.
At the height of supper Likhach enters the room, stands in the doorway and watches us eat with strange, feverish eyes. We invite him to join us at the table but he just stands there motionlessly and says, ‘I’ve been wounded.’ It doesn’t need bandaging, they already did that, he tells us. He took a piece of shrapnel in the thigh during the day but refuses to go to hospital, says there’s no-one to turn the platoon over to. The company commander tells him to go to the medical point and report his wound. Likhach says he’s just been there, and he stands at the door in silence for another minute, turns and goes out. We watch him leave; he’s acting oddly, as if he’s got shell shock too.
Although, if we’d been hit in the thigh, we’d probably be acting oddly too. When he’s gone we get back to the food, and to finish, the six of us polish off three litres of honey with our tea.
While we eat it gets completely dark outside. We divide up watch dutie
s for the night; two of us at a time will do three-hour stints. Yurka and I get from one to four o'clock, the worst, as we’ll have to break our night’s sleep into two halves.
Mikhailych and Arkasha take first watch while we get undressed and lay down on clean, crisp sheets. My God, how long it’s been since I slept like a human being! I’ve grown so unaccustomed to it, and it’s kind of hot under the blanket, the pillow seems useless and the bed is too soft. Altogether rather uncomfortable, nothing like a sleeping bag under a bush. Uncomfortable, but nice nonetheless, clean and fresh.
Mikhailych barely touches my sleeve and I wake. It’s ten to one. I rouse Yurka and we get dressed and go to the lookout point in the hall. The windows are blocked solid with bricks although two have gaps left for small firing slits where machine-guns have been set up. In front of each stands a rather plush armchair and a bedside table made of Karelian birch, with boxes of bullet belts on top. The lads have done well; they’ve set the place up nicely, and you could easily spend six hours in a lookout like this. We sit down in the armchairs and put our feet up on the windowsills, with one hand on the butt of the machine-gun and a cigarette in the other. Just like the Germans in war films - the only thing missing is a harmonica. We joke about this, pretending to be Wehrmacht soldiers; ‘Ja, ja, natürlich.’
When we tire of this we look out through the firing slits. The picture on the outside is much worse and we see that the position has been set up very unprofessionally. We’re locked in by a thirty-metre strip of the yard and we can’t see beyond that.
One Soldier's War In Chechnya Page 25
