One Soldier's War In Chechnya

by Arkady Babchenko

  Dagestani sniper who crawled fifteen metres one night to the enemy trenches and fired on them at point-blank range. He killed thirteen and came out unscathed, earning himself a commendation for ‘Hero of Russia’ from the Kombat. Or maybe one of the mortar men - they heaped up more dead than all of us.

  After he reads the order, the colonel takes two steps back and allows the Kombat forward to the table to hand out the decorations. He takes the first box, opens up the medal certificate and draws a deep breath. We freeze in anticipation. Who will it be?

  ‘Private Kotov, step forward!’ he announces loudly and solemnly.

  At first I don’t have a clue who this Private Kotov is. Only when he passes through the ranks and trots up to the table with an embarrassed smile, raising a clumsy salute, do I realize it’s Kot, the cook from the officers’ mess. He cooks for the Kombat, lays the table and serves up the dishes.

  The Kombat probably just happened upon his medal first by chance. He might have shown a bit more care; the first person in the battalion to get decorated should be the best soldier or officer.

  The medals go next to the staff clerk, then the transport chief, and then to someone from the repair company. We lose all interest and ignore the ceremony - it’s clear enough what this is all about.

  ‘Everyone who was in this stinking war should get a medal,’ says Lyokha. ‘Cooks, drivers, clerks, everyone, just for being here. Every last one of us has earned that much.’

  ‘Right enough,’ says Arkasha. ‘And Kot above all.’

  Standing beneath the gibbet, the Kombat awards a medal to the next ‘outstanding’ soldier. It suddenly strikes me that he perfectly embodies our state, a gibbet behind his back and medals in his hand for lackeys. For he is the highest authority on this strip of land inside the fence. For us he is judge, jury, prosecutor and parliament rolled into one. Here and now, he is the state. And so it turns out that the state has screwed us over yet again, heaping favours on those who are closest to it and who sucked up to it best.

  Khodakovsky and Kot now both wear the same ‘For Bravery’ medal, although the first could have been killed a hundred times in the mountains and the second only risked death by overeating.

  The only one in our platoon to get even a second-class ‘Merit in Battle’ is Garik, and then only because he worked for a month as a clerk at headquarters. After he is decorated he resumes his place beside us, shifting with embarrassment. He wants to take off the medal but we don’t let him - he earned his gong.

  We no longer believe in these decorations; to us they are now just worthless metal. We are far more likely to receive a smack in the mouth from our country than an award that actually means something.

  ‘Hey, Fixa,’ I say, elbowing him. ‘It’s a right shitty country we live in, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yep, it’s shitty all right,’ he answers, picking a blister on his palm.

  After the decoration ceremony we are addressed by a representative of the Soldiers’ Mothers Committee. A feisty, cigarette-puffing woman of about forty, she is bubbly, bigboned and still pretty. She has a commanding, chain-smoker’s voice and can hold her own with us in her swearing.

  We take to her at once and smile as she tells us simple things, like how this war has ravaged all of us and how peace is not far away, how we must hold on just a little longer, and how folk back home are thinking of us and waiting. And as proof of this, she says, she’s brought us presents. She then distributes to every one of us a cardboard box with lemonade, biscuits sweets and socks. It’s a grand haul.

  Later they prepare a sauna for the regimental commander, the officers and the female guest. They steam away a long time before the procession finally troops out and the half-naked officers sit in the shade beneath the tarpaulin and start on the vodka. A towel periodically falls from the representative of the mothers’ committee, giving us a flash of her ample white body. She’s not in the least bit shy and soon we forget our own shyness.

  Even Arkasha refrains from joking. We like her and no-one dares to cast judgement on this woman who came to war bearing gifts for the boys. She is the only person in months who has spoken to us as though we’re people and we forgive her unconditionally for the things we’d never forgive the regimental commander: the half-naked fraternization with the officers; the drunkenness; the box with aid intended for us that stands on their table. After all, she could sit tight in Moscow and not risk taking a bullet here. Yet she has chosen to rattle her way down here in a convoy from Mozdok without expecting anything from us in return.

  Before she leaves she gathers phone numbers and addresses, offering to call home or write for us and tell everyone we’re alive and well.

  She calls us all boys and even ‘sonny’. Arkasha’s pockmarked face creases in a smile and he gives her his phone number, telling her they might even meet after the war.

  I come up to her and give her my home number too. When she hears I’m from Moscow she snaps a quick photo of me, hugs a dozen of the nearest soldiers and then leaps nimbly into an armoured vehicle as the convoy pulls out.

  A cloud of dust swirls for a while beyond the fence and settles and we stand like orphaned children by the gates as they close. It really does feel like our mother has left, our common mother, and we soldiers, her children, have been left behind.

  ‘Fine woman,’ says Arkasha. ‘Marina’s her name. Her son is somewhere here and she’s driving round different units looking for him. I feel sorry for her.’

  The regimental commander is still here and they put us on the roofs on reinforced guard - the brass have to see that we are carrying out our duty properly.

  We clamber up onto the meat-packing shop, kick away rusty shell fragments that have lain here since some barrage and seat ourselves on black-tarred roofing sheets that are baking hot from the sun. We have four of the aid boxes with us and spread the grub out on jackets.

  ‘In the name of the Russian Federation the flesh of Private Fixa is hereby decorated with the “Order of the Stoop - Second Class”, with lifelong entitlement to dig near electricity lines, stand under crane booms and cross the road when the light is red,’ Arkasha announces ceremonially, and presses a biscuit onto Fixa’s chest.

  Lyokha sings a fanfare, wipes a tear from his eye and gives the grinning Fixa a fatherly clap on the back as we salute in unison. Then we get stuck in to the food, scooping condensed milk into our mouths with biscuits and washing it down with lemonade. Our fingers get sticky and we wipe them on our sweaty bellies, munching away with smiles on our faces. Emaciated, unwashed soldiers in huge boots and ragged trousers, we sit on the roof and gorge ourselves. We’ve never had it so good.

  ‘Enjoying that?’ Fixa asks me.

  ‘Not half. Are you?’

  ‘Couldn’t be better.’

  Two tins of condensed milk, a bag of biscuits, a dozen caramel sweets and a bottle of lemonade. That’s our total reward for the mountains, for Grozny, for four months of war and sixty-eight of our guys killed. And it didn’t even come from the state but from mothers like our own, who scrimp and save the kopeks from their miserable village pensions that the state still whittles away at to raise funds for the war.

  Well, to hell with the state. We’re contract soldiers, mercenaries who fight for money, and we need nothing more from it. We’ll go into battle right now if need be, and they can pin their medals onto their backsides to jangle like baubles on a Christmas tree.

  Fixa wipes his milk-smeared hand on Pincha’s trousers and daintily takes a postcard from one of the boxes. It bears the Russian tricolour and the gold-printed words: ‘Glory to the Defenders of the Motherland!’ Afraid to smudge it, he holds it in two fingers and reads aloud:

  ‘Dear Defenders of the Motherland! Dear Boys! We, the pupils and teachers of sixth class B of school 411, Moscow Eastern District, extend our heartiest congratulations to you on the Defenders of the Motherland holiday. Your noble feat fills our hearts with pain and pride. Pain, because you are exposed to danger every minute. Pride,
because Russia has such courageous and strong people. Thanks to you we may study in peace and our parents may work in peace. Look after yourselves and be vigilant. May God protect you. Come home soon, we await your victorious return. Glory be yours!’

  ‘Are we supposed to be the strong ones here?’ Pincha asks, spraying crumbs from his mouth.

  Tes pal, it’s about you,’ answers Garik.

  ‘Good postcard,’ says Fixa.

  ‘Bad one, it’s on glossy paper,’ I disagree.

  ‘I mean it’s well written, you fool.’

  There is a slight tremble in Fixa’s voice and his eyes are misty. What’s up with him, surely he’s not touched with emotion? Can it be that this tough guy from Voronezh, who usually has no time for frilly sentiment and understands only the most basic things like bread, cigarettes and sleep, things that are as simple as he is, has been moved by a postcard from a bunch of kids? Well, I’ll be damned.

  I take the card from him and look at it. It’s nothing like those despicable cards they sent us before the presidential elections in 1996. For a while they stopped calling us bastards and sons of bitches and started to refer to us as ‘dear Russian soldier’ and ‘respected voter’. These were our first elections, and for three of us in my unit they were also the last. They didn’t get to cast their ballots and died in the first Chechen war before they could fulfil their civic duty.

  ‘This school is in the east of the city, not far from where I live. If you like, after the war I’ll drop by there and thank them,’ I tell Fixa to make him happy.

  ‘We’ll go there together,’ he says. ‘We’ll go to the school together. We have to, don’t you see? They remembered us, collected money, sent us aid packages. What for? Who are we to them?’ He pauses. ‘It’s a shame Khariton is gone - I shouldn’t have driven him on at the hill, shouted at him. Nor should you,’ he tells Arkasha. ‘What did you hit him for? He was just a kid. Why did you hit him, eh?’

  Arkasha doesn’t reply. We sit in silence. Fixa is crying. I fold the postcard in half and put it in my inside pocket. At that moment I really believe I will visit that school after the war.

  After the glut of sweet food we suffer a fresh epidemic of dysentery in the battalion. Our stomachs are unaccustomed to normal food and we are stricken twice as badly as the previous time. The inspection pits in the garage are full to brimming and black clouds of flies circle above them.

  Oleg says this outbreak is our bodies reacting now that the danger has passed; we’ve relaxed and now sickness is kicking in.

  ‘The same thing awaits us at home,’ he says. ‘You’ll see, we’ll come home from the war decrepit wrecks with an A to Z of illnesses.’

  I think there’s another reason. The battalion is squeezed into a small area and those same flies buzzing over the pit settle on our mess tins when we eat.

  We crouch half naked in the meat-packing shop, the only place left we can still use. We sit this like half the day; there’s no point in putting on our trousers since dysentery sends you running continuously. Sometimes you can’t force anything out, other times you jet blood.

  ‘False alarms are a symptom of acute infectious dysentery,’ says Murky, flipping through a medical encyclopaedia he found in Grozny and has carried with him across Chechnya, establishing erroneously that we have symptoms of typhoid, foot-and-mouth disease, cholera and plague. Now the encyclopaedia itself befalls a terrible fate, being made of soft pages like newspaper, and within two days only the binding is left. Dysentery is the last disease that this fine medical reference book diagnosed in its time.

  ‘Remember how they made us crap on paper?’ Garik asks with a grin.

  ‘Oh God, yes,’ Oleg laughs back.

  Before we were sent to Chechnya, the regiment would file out of the barracks twice a week and, company by company, drop its pants after placing a piece of paper on the ground.

  While a pretty young woman medic walked through the ranks they made us defecate and hand her our excrement to be analysed for dysentery. The cattle must go to the slaughter in good health, and our shame at this act bothered nobody.

  Now no-one shows us such concern. All they do is give us some kind of yellow tablets, one pill between three of us. We take them in turns but this treatment has no effect whatsoever.

  ‘Heavy calibre, take cover!’ warns Fixa before loosing off a deafening burst in the pit. Arkasha responds with a smaller calibre, Murky fires single shots. But Pincha outguns us all, straining long and hard before producing a report that would shatter all the windowpanes in the area if any had still been intact.

  ‘Tactical nuclear warhead with enriched uranium, explosive power equivalent to five tons of TNT,’ he says, smirking.

  ‘That’s prohibited weaponry, Pincha,’ protests Arkasha with a belly laugh.

  At night the battalion resounds with deep rumbling and moaning. The sentries do their business straight off the rooftops; it’s too exhausting to run down twenty times a night. The night sky is illuminated by bright stars and gleaming white soldiers’ backsides. Walking under the roofs is hazardous.

  My bleeding starts again and my long johns are permanently encrusted with blood. We all have it. Your rectum swells up and protrudes several centimetres. Half your backside hangs out and you sit resplendent like a scarlet flower. Where are we supposed to find wiping material? We strip the remaining scraps of wallpaper from the storerooms and rasp at our poor backsides, inflicting further harm on ourselves and sending blood gushing from our trousers.

  War is not just attacks, trenches, fire fights and grenades. It’s also blood and faeces running down your rotting legs. It’s starvation, lice and drunken madness. It’s swearing and human debasement. It’s an inhuman stench and clouds of flies circling over our battalion. Some of the guys try to heal themselves with herbal folk remedies that end up making many of them even sicker.

  ‘This is our reward from the Almighty,’ Arkasha says. ‘The whole battalion has flowers springing from their asses - that’s our springtime!’

  ‘What did we do to deserve this?’ moans Pincha.

  I find a roll of kitchen towel in the admin block and hide it in a pile of rubbish, using it only when there’s no-one else around. It wouldn’t last the platoon even half a day, but now I’m OK for a while at least.

  In a bid to fight the dysentery the battalion commander imposes a strict regime of mess-tin cleaning. Now after each meal a duty soldier washes the platoon’s mess tins. There’s no water here and we wash them in the same water we use for washing ourselves each morning. Flakes of soap and grease float in the green water with mosquito grubs, and we have to scoop away the flora and fauna with our hands to gather enough water for tea.

  Because of the shortage people start pilfering water again, and our position by the gates gives us a strategic advantage. As soon as the water-truck drives in we block its path until we have filled every container we have.

  Arkasha and Fixa have found an old bathtub somewhere and we also use that. The supply officer threatens to have us shot, but we still carry out the tub every morning to go water collecting.

  In the recesses of the unfinished meat-packing shop we find more concrete support piers with hollows full of murky water. We keep our find a secret, but people cotton on and we have to mount a guard. It comes to blows as we jealously protect our source.

  ‘We’d be better off fighting again,’ says Fixa. ‘At least then there’s no problem with supplies.’

  That’s true enough. The commanders only think about us soldiers when we are being killed by the hundred. After each storming operation they fall us in and tell us what heroes we are and give us normal food and water rations for two or three days. Then once again we get half-cooked gruel for breakfast and a smack in the mouth for lunch.

  ‘But these lulls are still good,’ says the platoon commander, washing his feet with a kind of dried-fruit water they call ‘compote’ that we are supposed to drink. ‘Warm, dry and nowhere to go. Not even for washing water. Look a
t this brew: it isn’t even sticky because it’s peacetime.’

  Peacetime compote is indeed different from the stuff they serve during the fighting. What they give us now in this slack period can be used for anything. You can drink it, wash in it or use it for soaking your underwear because it doesn’t contain a single gram of sugar or dried fruit; the supply officer traded both commodities for vodka. He does the same during times of combat, just not so often, the conscientious fellow.

  One day a jeep carrying police officers is shot up near the village of Mesker-Yurt. We are alerted and set off in two carriers, a platoon of infantry and our three gun teams.

  The first vehicle churns up great clouds of dust, making it impossible for those of us following behind to breathe or open our eyes. The dust grates on our teeth, blocks our noses and coats our eyelashes, eyebrows and hair in a grey film. We cover our faces with bandanas but they don’t help and still we can hardly breathe. Bloody weather: impenetrable mud in winter and vile summer dust that turns into dough when it rains.

  The jeep stands on a road between fields and has been almost completely destroyed. The fighters waited in the undergrowth and hit it with a rocket launcher. One side has been blown apart; mangled metal and a seat hang out with a pair of dangling legs and some other lumps of flesh. The four guys inside were torn to pieces. The attackers evidently raked the jeep with several rifles after the explosion and the other side is peppered with holes where bullets and shrapnel exited.

  The local police arrive and there is nothing for us to do except guard the investigators. We leave after a couple of hours.

  That evening we are sent again in the direction of Mesker-Yurt. A paramilitary police unit has located the same rebel group that killed the officers earlier. They’ve holed up in the village after the attack and were waiting to ambush us, but we never came.