Zinky Boys (18 page)

Why did it all happen? Why? Why? Why?

Recendy in Moscow I went to the toilet at one of the railway stations. I saw a sign saying ‘Cooperative toilet' [i.e. private enterprise]. A young lad sat there, taking money. Another sign behind him read: ‘Children up to 7 years, invalids, veterans of World War II and wars of liberation — free.'

I was amazed: ‘Did you think that up yourself? ' I asked him.

‘Yes!' he said proudly. ‘Just show your ID and in you go.' ‘So my father went through the whole war, and I spent two years with my mouth full of Afghan sand, just so we could piss for nothing in your toilet?' I said. I hated that boy more than I hated anyone all the time I was in Afghan.
He
had decided to pay
me.

Civilian Employee

I flew home to Russia on leave. When I went to the baths [the Russian equivalent of a sauna or Turkish bath] I heard people groaning with pleasure, but their groans reminded me of the agonised moaning of wounded soldiers.

At home I missed my friends in Afghanistan, but after a few
days back in Kabul I was homesick. I come from Simferopol in the Crimea and have a diploma in music. People who are contented with their lives don't come over here. All us women are lonely and frustrated in some way. Try and live on 120 roubles a month, as I do, especially if you want to dress decently and have an interesting holiday once a year. ‘They only go over there to find themselves a husband,' people often say. Well, what's wrong with that? Why deny it? I'm thirty-two years old and I'm alone.

The worst kind of mine was the one we called the ‘Italianka\ You have to collect a person's remains in a bucket after an Italianka. I learnt about it when one of the boys came up to me and just talked and talked about seeing his friend being turned into mincemeat. I thought he'd never stop. When he noticed me getting frightened he said, ‘I'm sorry, I wanted … ' A boy I'd never met, but he'd found a woman and needed to talk. I thought he'd never stop.

We have two women's hostels here: one's called the ‘Cathouse', that's for women who've been in Afghanistan for two or three years; the other's known as ‘Daisy', the idea being that it's full of innocent girls plucking petals and sighing ‘he loves me, he loves me not'! Soldiers go to the baths on Saturdays; Sunday is for the women, but they're not allowed in the officers' bath-house. This is because women are ‘dirty', yet those same officers want us for sex. They show us photos of their wives and children stuck up on the walls above their beds …

When a bombardment starts and those RS rockets whistle over your head you just shake with fear. Two young soldiers went on patrol with a dog, but the dog came back without them …

Everyone's at war here. Some are sick, in mind or body, others are wounded, but everyone's damaged in some way, no one escapes intact. When the bombardment starts we run to the shelters while the Afghan kids dance on the roofs for joy. As I say, everyone's damaged. Those kids even dance and sing when they see our casualties being carried out. We take presents to their villages, flour, or mattresses, or cuddly toys — sweet little rabbits and mice — but none of that makes any difference. Everyone's corrupted by war.

The first two questions I get asked back home are, ‘Did you
get married out there?' and ‘Do you get any concessions?' The only concession for us civilian employees is that our families get 1000 roubles if we're killed. When you go to the army store out there the men always push in first. ‘Who the hell are you? We've got to get presents for our wives,' they say. And at night they expect us to go to bed with them …

You ‘fulfil your international duty' and make money on the side. Everyone does it. You buy sweets, biscuits or canned food at the army store and sell it to the local shops. There's a tariff: a tin of dried milk goes for 50 afoshki, a service cap 400; a carmirror fetches 1000, a wheel from a KamaZ truck 20,000. You can get up to 18,000–20,000 for a Makarov pistol; 100,000 for a Kalashnikov; and the going rate for a truck-load of rubbish from the garrison is 70,000–200,000 (depending on the number of cans). The women who do best here are those who sleep with the quartermasters, who live it up while the boys up at the front go down with scurvy and have to eat rotten cabbage.

In the amputee wards the men'll talk about anything except the future, according to some girls I know. In fact no one likes to think of the future here. Perhaps it's more frightening to die if you're happy, but it's my mother I'd be sorry for.

I've seen cats creeping between bodies, looking for something to eat, but still wary, as though the boys were lying there alive.

Stop me. I could go on talking for ever. But I've never killed anyone …

Private, Gunlayer

Sometimes I wonder how things would have turned out if I hadn't gone to the war. I'd be happy, I think, and wouldn't have found out things about myself which I'd rather not have known. Thus spake Zarathustra: Not only have I looked into the abyss but the abyss has looked into my soul …

I was in my second year at the radio-technical institute here in Minsk, but my main interest was in music and art. I was vacillating between those two worlds when I got my call-up papers. I have no will-power — by which I mean I'm not the sort of person who
tries to meddle with his fate. If you do try to influence it you lose anyhow. My way, whatever happens you're not responsible — or guilty. I didn't want to go into the army, of course. The first thing I learnt about army life was that you're a slave. I felt the army took my personality away from me.

They didn't say it straight out but it was obvious we were going to Afghanistan. I didn't try to influence my fate. We were lined up on the parade-ground and they read out this order that we were ‘fighters in the international struggle'. We listened very quietly — well, we couldn't very well shout out, ‘I'm frightened! I don't want to go!' We were off to fulfil our international duty — it was all cut and dried.

It really started at the Gardez clearing-centre, when the
dembels
took everything of any value off us, including our boots, paratroop vests and berets.
And
we had to pay: an old beret cost us 10 foreign currency vouchers, a set of badges 25. A para's meant to have a set of five — one to show you're a member of a guards' regiment, the others are the insignia for the airborne forces and your para battalion, your class-number and your army-sportsman badge. They also stole our parade shirts, which they traded with Afghans for drugs. A gang of
dembels
came up to me. ‘Where's your kit-bag?' They poked around in it, took what they wanted and there was nothing I could do about it. All of us in our company had our uniforms taken and had to buy old ones in return. The Quartermaster's department said simply, ‘You won't be needing your new togs — they will, they're going home.' I wrote a letter home describing the beautiful Mongolian sky, the good food and the sunshine. But my war had already started.

The first time we drove out to a village the battalion commander taught us how to behave towards the local populace: ‘You call all Afghans, regardless of age, “
batcha
”, which means “boy', roughly. Got that? I'll show you the rest later.' On the way we came across an old man. ‘Halt! Watch this!' The commander jumped down from the vehicle, went up to the old man, pushed his turban off his head, poked his fingers in his beard. ‘Right, on your way,
batcha!
' Not quite what we'd been expecting. In the village we threw briquettes of pearl barley to the kids, but they ran away thinking they were grenades.

My first taste of action was escorting a convoy. This is exciting and interesting — this is war! I thought, I'm holding a gun and carrying grenades, just like in the posters! As we approach the socalled ‘green' zone (scrub and bush) I, as gun layer, look carefully through the gunsight. I see some kind of turban.

‘Seryozha!' I shout to the chap sitting by the barrel. ‘I can see a turban! What do I do?'

‘Fire!'

‘What d'you mean — fire?'

‘What d'you think I mean?' He shoots.

‘The turban's still there. It's white. What do I do?'

‘Fire!!!'

We use up half the carrier's ammunition supply firing the 30mm gun and the machine-gun.

‘Where's this white turban? It's a mound of snow.' Then: ‘Seryozha! Your mound of snow's moving! Your little snowman's got a gun!'

We jump down and let him have it with our automatics.

It wasn't a question of, ‘do I kill him or don't I?' Never. All you wanted was to eat and sleep and get it all over and done with, so you could stop shooting and go home. We'd be driving over that burning sand, breathing it in, bullets whistling round our heads — and we'd sleep through the lot. To kill or not kill? That's a post-war question. The psychology of war itself is a lot more urgent. The Afghans weren't people to us, and vice versa. We couldn't afford to see each other as human beings. You blockade a village, wait 24 hours, then another 24, with the heat and tiredness driving you crazy. You end up even more brutal than the ‘greens', as we called our allies, the Afghan National Army. At least these were their people, they were born in these villages, whereas we did what we did without thinking, to people quite unlike us, people we didn't understand. It was easier for us to fire our guns and throw our grenades.

Once we were going back to barracks with seven of our boys dead and two more shell-shocked. The villages along the way were silent, the inhabitants had either fled into the mountains or gone to ground. Suddenly an old woman hobbled up to us, crying, screaming, beating her fists on the APC. We'd killed her son and
she was cursing us — but our only reaction was, what's she crying and threatening us for? We ought to shoot her, too. We didn't, but the point is, we could have done. We pushed her off the road and drove on. We were carrying seven dead — what was she crying for? What did she expect?

We didn't want to know anything about anything. We were soldiers in a war. We were completely cut off from Afghan life — the locals weren't allowed to set foot in our army compound. All we knew about them was that they wanted to kill or injure us, and we were keen to stay alive. Actually I wanted to be lightly wounded, just to have a rest or at least a good night's sleep, but I didn't want to die.

One day two of our lads went to a shop, shot the shopkeeper and his family and stole everything they could lay their hands on. There was an enquiry and of course everyone denied having anything to do with it. They examined the bullets in the bodies and eventually charged three men: an officer, an NCO and a private. But when our barracks were being searched for the stolen money, etc, I remember how humiliated and insulted we felt — why all this fuss about a few dead Afghans? There was a court martial and the NCO and the private were sentenced to the firing squad. We were all on their side — the general opinion was that they were being executed for their stupidity rather than for what they'd done. The shopkeeper's dead family didn't exist for us. We were only doing our international duty. It was all quite cut and dried. It's only now, as the stereotypes begin to collapse, that I see things differently. And to think, I used not to be able to read ‘Mumu' [a sentimental story by Turgenev about the relationship between a dumb peasant and his dog] without crying my eyes out!

War affects a person in a strange way: it takes some of his — or her — humanity away. When we were growing up we were never taught ‘Thou shalt not kill'. On the contrary — all these war veterans, with rows of medals pinned to their splendid uniforms, came to our schools and colleges to describe their exploits in detail. I never once heard it said that it was wrong to kill in war. I was brought up to believe that only those who killed in peacetime were condemned as murderers. In war such actions were
known as ‘filial duty to the Motherland', ‘a man's sacred work' and ‘defence of the Fatherland'. We were told that we were reliving the achievements of the heroes of the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis, and who was I to doubt it? It was continually hammered into us that we were the best of the best, so why should I question whether what we were doing was right? Later, when I began to see things differently, my army mates said, ‘Either you've gone mad or you want to go mad.' And yet, as I said, I was too fatalistic to try to change anything. (I was brought up by my mother, who was a powerful and dominant woman.)

At training-camp veterans from the Special Forces described to us how they'd stormed villages and slaughtered all the inhabitants. It seemed romantic. We wanted to be as strong and fearless as they were. I love music and books but I also wanted to storm villages, cut throats and boast about it afterwards. I've probably got an inferiority complex.

My actual memories, though, are very different … My first attack of sheer panic, for example. We were driving in the APC when the shelling started. The APCs came to a halt. ‘Take defensive positions!' someone shouted. We started jumping off. I stood up, ready to jump, but another lad took my place and was killed by a direct hit from a grenade. I felt I was falling, slowly, horizontally, like in a cartoon … with bits of someone else's body raining down on me. It's fixed in my memory for ever, that's what's so terrible. I guess that's how you experience your own death, from a distance. Strange. I managed to crawl into an irrigation-ditch, stretched out and lifted my wounded arm. After a bit I realised I wasn't seriously injured, but I cradled my arm and didn't move.

No, I didn't turn into one of those supermen who storm villages and cut throats. Within the year I was in hospital, suffering from dystrophy. I was the only ‘new boy' in our unit, the other ten, nearing the end of their tour of duty, were known as ‘grandads'. I was forced to do all their washing, chop all the wood, and clean the whole camp — I never got more than three hours' sleep a night. One of the things I had to do was fetch water from the stream. One morning I had a strong instinct not to go — I had a strong feeling the mujahedin had been about that night, planting mines, but I was so scared I'd be beaten again, and there was no
water for washing. So off I went, and duly stepped on a mine. It was only a signal mine, thank God, so a rocket went up and illuminated the whole area. I fell, crawled on … ‘must get at least a bucket of water, for them to clean their teeth with. They won't care what's happened, they'll just beat me up again … '