Zinky Boys (15 page)

When we landed back in the Soviet Union we were taken by bus from the airport to a hotel. We were all silent, overwhelmed by the first few hours in our own country. All of a sudden, though, our collective nerve broke. ‘Drive in the ruts!' we shouted at the driver. ‘Keep to the ruts!' Then we burst into hysterical laughter — we were home and didn't need to worry about mines. We could drive on the side of the road, in the ruts or out of them, wherever we wanted — we were drunk with happiness.

A few days later we noticed we were all walking about round-shouldered. We'd lost the habit of walking upright. I used to tie myself to the bed at night to train myself to straighten up.

I gave a talk at the officers' club. ‘Tell us about the romantic side of service life in Afghanistan,' I was asked. ‘Did you personally kill anyone?' Young girls were especially keen on bloodthirsty questions. Ordinary life is a bit dull, I grant you, but can you imagine anyone asking about the romantic side of World War II? Three generations fought side by side against the Germans — grandfathers, fathers and sons. This war was fought by naïve boys looking for adventure. I saw how keen they were to try everything. They wanted to know what it felt like to kill, to be scared, to take hashish. Some got high on it, others got into the state we called
shubnyak
, where a bush turned into a tree, or a rock became a hill, so that when they marched they had to lift their feet twice as high as the rest of us. That made the world even more frightening for them.

Another question I got asked was this: ‘Could you have refused to go to Afghanistan?' Me personally? Only one of our group of professional army officers, Major Bondarenko, a battery commander, refused. The first thing that happened was, he had to face a ‘court of honour', which convicted him of cowardice. Can you imagine what that does to a man's self-esteem? Suicide might be the easiest way out. Then he was demoted to captain and posted to a building battalion as punishment. Then he was expelled from the party and eventually discharged with dishonour. How many men could go through all that? And he was a military man to the bone — he'd spent thirty years in the army.

When I went through customs they wiped my Rosenbaum [a mildly ‘dissident' singer] tape. ‘Hey, lads, what are you doing?' I asked.

‘We've got this list of what's allowed and what isn't.'

When I got home to Smolensk I heard Rosenbaum blaring out of all the student hostel windows!

Nowadays, if the police need to frighten the local mafia they come to us Afgantsi. ‘Come on boys!' they say, ‘give us a hand!' Or if they want to harass or break up some unofficial political group, ‘Call the Afgantsi in!' they say. An Afganets, in other words, is a killing-machine, with big fists, a weak head and no conscience. No wonder we're feared and disliked by everyone.

But if you've got a bad arm you don't amputate it, do you? You nurse it until it's better.

Shall I tell you why we go on meeting, we veterans? To save ourselves by staying together. All the same, once you're home you're on your own.

1st Lieutenant i/c Mortar Platoon

I have the same dream every night. It's like watching a film over and over again. Everyone's running and firing, including me. I
fall down and wake up and I'm on a hospital bed. I start to get up to go and have a smoke in the corridor. Then I realise my legs have gone and I'm back in the real world …

I don't want to hear any talk about a ‘political mistake', OK? Give me my legs back if it was really a mistake.

Have you taken unfinished letters from soldiers' pockets … ‘Dear Mama … ', ‘My Darling … '? Have you seen soldiers shot to pieces by old blunderbusses and modem Chinese machine guns at the same time?

We were sent to Afghanistan to obey orders. In the army you obey orders first and then, if you like, discuss their merits — when it's all over. ‘Go!' means exacdy that. If you refuse you get thrown out of the party. You took the military oath, didn't you? And back home, when you ask the local party committee for something you need, they tell you, ‘It wasn't us that sent you!' Well, who did send us?

I had a friend out there. When I went into action he always said goodbye to me and hugged me when I came back alive. I'll never find a friend like that here at home.

I hardly ever go out now. I'm ashamed …

Have you ever tried our Soviet-manufactured prostheses? I've heard that abroad people with artificial limbs go skiing, play tennis and dance. Why don't the authorities use foreign currency to buy decent arms and legs instead of wasting it on French cosmetics, subsidised Cuban sugar or Moroccan oranges?

I'm twenty-two, with my whole life in front of me. I need to find a wife. I had a girlfriend. ‘I hate you,' I told her, to make her leave me. She pitied me, when what I wanted was her love.

‘I dreamt of home, of nights

I lay Listening to the rowans sigh.

“Cuckoo, cuckoo, tell me pray

How many years before I die … ?” '

That was my favourite song. I used to go into the forest, and ask the cuckoo, and count his calls, but now — sometimes I don't want to go on living one day longer.

I still long to see that landscape again, that biblical desert. We
all have that yearning, it's like standing at the edge of a precipice, or high over water, and looking down until your head spins.

Now the war's over they're trying to forget all about us, or else hide us out of sight. They treated the veterans of the war with Finland the same way
*
. Thousands of books have been published about World War II but not one about the Finnish war. Our people are too easy on their rulers — and I'll have accepted it myself in ten years or so.

Did I kill anybody in Afghanistan? Yes. You didn't send us over there to be angels — so how can you expect us to come back as angels?

It took me six days by train to get to Moscow from Khabarovsk. We crossed the whole of Russia via the Siberian rivers and Lake Baikal. The railway attendant in charge of the tea-urn ran out of tea on the very first day; the water-boiler broke down the day after that. My family met me in Moscow, there were tears all round, but duty came first.

I got off the plane and saw the kind of blue sky that in our country you find only over rivers. There was a lot of noise and shouting — but all of it from our own people. There were new recruits being met, old friends seen off, and packages from home picked up. Everyone looked tanned and cheerful. Hard to believe that somewhere out there it was 30° Celsius below freezing and armour-plating was cracking from cold. I saw my first Afghan through the barbed wire of the clearing-compound. I remember having no particular feelings (apart from a mild curiosity) towards this ‘foreigner'.

I was posted to Bagram to take command of the road-engineers' platoon in a sapper battalion.

We lived a regular routine of getting up early and reporting for work. We had a mine-sweeper tank, a sniper unit, a mine-detecting dog, and two APCs to provide protection. We covered the first few miles in the armoured vehicles, just as long as the tracks of previous vehicles were clearly visible on the road. Dust covered everything like a fine powdery snow. If a bird landed on it you
could see the traces. If a tank had passed that way the day before, though, special care was needed, because the caterpillar tracks could be concealing a mine. After planting the device the mujahedin would recreate the tracks with their fingers and clear their own footprints using a bag or an unrolled turban.

The road wound past two abandoned villages of smouldering mud huts — perfect cover for enemy snipers, so we needed to be extra-vigilant. Once we were past the villages we'd get out of the vehicles. This was the procedure: the dog ran zigzagging in front of us, followed by the sappers with their probing rods poking the soil as they went. All you had going for you was God, your sixth sense, experience and flair. You might notice a broken branch, or a bit of rusty iron, or a rock, which hadn't been there the day before. The muj would leave little markers like that to avoid getting blown up themselves.

That bit of iron, now, was it there by chance or was there a battery under the sand, connected to a bomb or a crate of TNT? A man's weight won't trigger an anti-tank mine — it needs a 250–300 kilo load to set it off.

After my first explosion I was the only man left sitting on our tank. All the others got blown off. My place was by the barrel so I was protected from the full force of the blast by the gun turret. I quickly checked my arms, legs and head were all where they should be. We picked ourselves up and carried on.

We set off another blast a little further on. The lightly armed trailer-tractor was blown up and split in two by a powerful
fougasse
, or land mine, which left a crater three metres long and as deep as a tall man. The tractor was transporting mines, about 200 mortars — they were thrown into the branches and on to the side of the road like a giant fan. We lost all five soldiers and the lieutenant on the tractor. I'd spent the past few evenings with them, talking and smoking and now they were literally blown to pieces. We went and collected them up, including a dust-covered head, so completely squashed it looked as though there wasn't any bone.

We filled five crates and divided them so that there would be something of each man to be sent home.

The dogs were a tremendous asset. They're just like people, some gifted with intuition, others not. A sentry might doze, but
a dog — never. I was very fond of one called Toby. He'd snuggle up to us but bark at our Afghan National Army allies! Admittedly, their khaki was a bit greener, and ours rather yellowish, but still, how could he tell the difference? He could sense a mine at several paces. He'd stop dead with his tail sticking up straight, as if to say: KEEP OFF!

No two mine-traps are the same, but the worst are the homemade devices which never repeat themselves exactly. They might be hidden in a rusty tea-kettle, or a tape-recorder, watch, or can. Units who went out without sappers were known as ‘suicide squads'. Mines were everywhere, on mountain paths, on the roads and in houses. It was always the sappers who went in first.

We were checking out a trench one day. There'd already been one explosion and we'd spent two days raking it through. I jumped down into it and — BANG!

I didn't pass out — I looked up at the sky, which seemed to be on fire. A sapper's first reaction after a blast is to look upwards to check that his eyes are intact. I kept a tourniquet on my gunbutt which they used to bandage me above the knees. But I knew that limbs are always amputated three to five centimetres above the wound.

‘Where are you tying it?' I shouted at the medic.

‘You've lost them both up to the knee, sir.'

The field hospital was fifteen kilometres away and it took them 1½ hours to get me there. There my wounds were sterilised and I was given novocaine to kill the pain. My legs were amputated the same day; I lost consciousness only when I heard the saw, it sounded like a circular saw. The following day they operated on my eyes. The flame from the blast had seared my face — the surgeons practically darned my eyes and gave me twenty-two stitches. Only two or three a day could be removed — otherwise the eyeball would have fallen to bits. They'd shine a torch into my eyes, left and right, to find out whether I reacted to light and whether the retina was intact.

I'll never forget the red beam of that torch.

I'd like to write a book about the way an officer can be reduced to a housebound wreck, earning his bread assembling lamp-sockets and wall-plugs, about a hundred a day, or putting the metal
bits on the ends of shoelaces. What colour shoelaces? Red, black, or white, he never knows, because he can't see; he's been officially declared totally blind. He ties string-bags, and glues little boxes — the sort of work he used to think only lunatics did. Thirty bags a day and I've reached my daily target, my ‘norm'.

Sappers were the least likely of all to come back intact, or even alive, particularly the specialised mine-clearing units. They were all either dead or wounded. Out of habit, we never shook hands before going into action. The day of that last explosion our new CO shook my hand, out of sheer friendliness — no one had warned him. And I got blown up … Was it just superstition? Who knows? There was another belief: if you'd volunteered for Afghanistan you'd end up dead, but if you were just posted there you might get home alive.

That was five years ago. I still have this dream. I'm in a long mine-field. I've drawn up a plan, based on the number of mines and the number of rows, and markers to find them by. But I've lost the plan. (In fact we often did lose them, or else the marker was a tree which had been destroyed, or a pile of stones which had been blown up. Nobody wanted to go and check, and risk getting blown up by our own mines.) In my dream I see children running near the mine-field, they don't know there are mines there. I want to shout: ‘Stop! Mines!' I want to warn the children. I want to warn the children … I'm running … I have both my legs back, and I can see, my eyes can see again … But that's only at night, only in my dream. Then I wake up.

Doctor, Bacteriologist

Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, especially in the context of this particular war, but I'm a romantic. I hate the pettiness and materialism of everyday life. The very day I arrived the medical director called me in. ‘What makes a woman like you come here?' he asked me, and I was obliged to tell the story of my life to a complete stranger, a military man at that, someone I might just have met in the street. For me, that was the most unpleasant and humiliating aspect of life in Afghanistan: the complete absence of privacy and
intimacy. Everything took place on a public stage. Do you know a film called
Off Limits,
about convict life in the camps? We lived life by exactly the same rules, right down to the little barbed-wire compounds we were restricted to.