Zinky Boys (4 page)

We vets are called Afgantsi. I hate the name. It's like being branded — it marks us out as different from everyone else. But different in what way? Am I a hero, or some kind of an idiot to be stared at? Or even a criminal? People are already saying the whole thing was a political mistake; they may be whispering at the moment but soon they'll be shouting it from the rooftops. I left my blood over there, and the blood of my friends too. We were given medals we don't wear and will probably return, medals honestly earned in a dishonest war. We're invited to speak in schools, but what can we tell them? Not what war is really like, that's for sure. Should I tell them that I'm still scared of the dark and that when something falls down with a bang I jump out of my skin? How the prisoners we took somehow never got as far as regimental HQ? I saw them literally stamped and ground into the earth. In a year and a half I didn't see a single live
dukh
in captivity, only dead ones. I can't very well tell the school kids about the collections of dried ears and other trophies of war, can I? Or the villages that looked like ploughed fields after we'd finished bombarding them?

No, the schools need heroes, but all I can remember is what we destroyed and how we killed. And yet, we
did
build things for the locals, and give them presents. It was all mixed up together
and I still can't separate the good from the bad. I'm scared of such memories, I run away from them.

I don't know anyone who's come back from Afghanistan who doesn't smoke and drink. Weak cigarettes don't help either — I buy the
Okhotnichy
brand we smoked over there if I can find them. We called them ‘Death in the Swamp'.

Whatever you do, don't write about the so-called spirit of brotherhood among us Afgantsi. I never saw it and I don't believe in it. The only thing we had in common was fear. We were all lied to in the same way, we all wanted to survive and we all wanted to get home. And what we've got in common now that we're back home is that we haven't got a thing to call our own. We all have the same problems — lousy pensions, the difficulty of getting a flat and a bit of furniture together, no decent medicines or prostheses … If ever all that gets sorted out our veterans' clubs will fall apart. Once I get what I need, and perhaps a fridge and washing machine and a Japanese video — however much I have to push and scratch and claw to get it — that'll be it! I won't need the club any more.

The young people ignore us. There's absolutely no mutual understanding. Officially we have the same status as the World War II vets. The only difference is, they were defenders of the Fatherland, whereas we're seen as the Germans — one young lad actually said that to me! We hate the younger generation. They spent their time listening to music, dancing with girls and reading books, while we were eating uncooked rice and getting blown up by mines. If you weren't there, if you haven't seen and lived through what I've seen and lived through, then you don't mean a thing to me.

You know, in ten years' time, when our hepatitis, shell-shock, malaria and the rest of it starts getting really bad, they'll just get rid of us — at work and at home. They'll stop putting us on their committees. We'll have become a burden …

What's the point of this book of yours? What good will it do? It won't appeal to us vets. You'll never be able to tell it like it really was over there. The dead camels and dead humans lying in the same pool of blood. And who else needs it? We're strangers to everyone else. All I've got left is my home, my wife and our
baby on the way, and a few friends from over there. I don't trust anyone else.

Private, Motorised Infantry Unit

The local newspapers calmly announced that our regiment had completed its training and firing practice. We were pretty bitter when we read that, because our ‘training' was escorting trucks you could pierce with a screwdriver — the perfect target for snipers. We were shot at every day and lost a lot of men. The lad next to me was killed. He was the first man I actually saw die although we hardly knew each other. He was killed by a mortar and had a lot of shrapnel in him. He died slowly and although he recognised us, he shouted out the names of people we didn't know.

The night before we left for Kabul I almost had a fight with one guy, but his friend dragged him away from me: ‘What's the point of fighting? He's flying to Afghan tomorrow.'

They were so short of things over there we didn't even have a bowl or spoon each. There was one big bowl and eight of us would attack it.

Afghan was no adventure story. My image of it is a dead peasant, all skinny with big hands …

During action you pray (I don't know who to, God probably): please let the earth, or this rock, open up and swallow me. At night the mine-detecting dogs whined pathetically in their sleep. They got killed and wounded too. You'd see them lying there next to the men, dead and with their legs blown off. You couldn't tell their blood apart, in the snow.

We'd throw captured weapons in a great pile: American, Pakistani, Soviet, English, all intended to be used to kill us. Fear is more human than bravery, you're scared and you're sorry, at least for yourself, but you force your fear back into your subconscious. And you try not to think that you may end up lying here, small and insignificant, thousands of kilometres from home. There are men flying around in space but down here we go on killing each other as we have done for a thousand years, with bullets, knives
and stones. In the villages they killed our soldiers with pitchforks …

I came home in 1981. The atmosphere was one big hurrah. We'd done our ‘international duty', hadn't we? I got to Moscow very early one morning, by train. I couldn't wait to get home so I didn't use my army travel warrant for the evening train. I got to Mozhaisk by local train, from there to Gagarin by long-distance bus, hitch-hiked to Smolensk, then got a truck-ride to Vitebsk. Six hundred kilometres altogether and no one asked me to pay a kopeck when they realised I was back from Afghan. I walked the last two kilometres.

Home was the smell of poplars, the tram-driver sounding his bell, a little girl eating ice-cream. God, the smell of those poplars! There's so much green there. In Afghanistan green spells danger from snipers. I was longing to see our birch-trees and tom-tits. Still now, when I approach a corner my insides tighten — who's round it?

For a whole year I was frightened to go out — no flak-jacket or helmet, no gun, I felt naked. I have nightmares. There's a gun pressed against my brow, big enough to blow my brains out. I used to scream at night, throw myself at the walls. When the phone crackles sweat breaks out on my brow, it sounds like gunfire …

The newspapers went on announcing that helicopter-pilot X had completed his training etc, etc, had been awarded the Red Star etc, etc. That's what really opened my eyes. Afghan cured me of the illusion that everything's OK here, and that the press and television tell the truth. ‘What should I do?' I wondered. I wanted to do something specific — go somewhere, speak out, tell the truth, but my mother stopped me. ‘We've lived like this all our lives,' she said.

Nurse

‘You're a fool, an utter fool to have come here,' I told myself every day, or rather, every night: in the daytime I was just too busy working.

I was so shocked by the injuries, by the bullets, by the realisation that such weapons had actually been invented. The entry wound would be small but the intestines, liver and spleen a terrible twisted mess. Apparently it wasn't enough to kill or wound, there had to be torture, too. ‘Mum!' they screamed, ‘Mum!' when they were frightened and in pain. Always, always for their mothers.

I'd just wanted to get away from Leningrad for a year or two, I didn't care where. My child had died, and then my husband. There was nothing to keep me there — on the contrary everything just reminded me horribly of the past. It was where we'd met, had our first kiss, had the baby …

‘Do you want to go to Afghanistan?' the consultant asked me.

‘OK,' I said. To be honest, I wanted to see people worse off than I was. I certainly did that.

We were told that this was a just war, that we were helping the Afghan people to put an end to feudalism and build a wonderful socialist society. There was a conspiracy of silence about our casualties; it was somehow implied that there were an awful lot of infectious diseases over there — malaria, typhus, hepatitis, etc.

We flew to Kabul in early 1980. The hospital was the former English stables. There was no equipment: one syringe for all the patients, and the officers drank the surgical spirit so we had to use petrol to clean the wounds. They healed badly for lack of oxygen, but the hot sun helped to kill microbes. I saw my first wounded patients in their underwear and boots. For a long time there were no pyjamas, or slippers, or even blankets.

That first March a pile grew up behind the hospital — a pile of amputated arms, legs and other bits of our men. Dead bodies with gouged-out eyes, and stars carved into the skin of their backs and stomachs by the mujahedin.

Gradually we began to ask ourselves what we were all here for. Such questions were unpopular with the authorities, of course. There were no slippers or pyjamas, but plenty of banners and posters with political slogans, all brought from back home. Behind the slogans were our boys' skinny, miserable faces. I'll never forget them …

Twice a week we attended a political ‘seminar', where we were continually told that we were doing our sacred duty to help make
the border totally secure. The nastiest thing about army life was the informing: our boss actually ordered us to inform. Every detail, about every sick and wounded patient, had to be reported … It was called ‘knowing the mood'. The army must keep healthy and we must banish pity from our minds. But we didn't, it was only pity which kept the whole show going.

We went to save lives, to help, to show our love, but after a while I realised that it was hatred I was feeling. Hate for that soft, light sand which burnt like fire, hate for the village huts from which we might be fired on at any moment. I hated the locals, walking with their baskets of melons or just standing by their doors. What had they been doing the night before? They killed one young officer I knew from hospital, carved up two tents full of soldiers and poisoned the water supply. One guy picked up a smart cigarette-lighter and it exploded in his hands.

These were our boys they were killing, do you realise, our own boys. You've never seen someone badly burnt, have you? Face gone, eyes gone, body gone, just a kind of wrinkled something covered with the yellow crust of the lymphatic liquid, and a growling coming from under the crust …

We probably survived by hating, but I felt full of guilt when I got back home and looked back on it all. Sometimes we massacred a whole village in revenge for one of our boys. Over there it seemed right, here it horrifies me. I remember one little girl lying in the dust like a broken doll with no arms or legs …

And yet we went on being surprised that they didn't love us. They'd come to our hospitals. We'd give a woman some medicine but she wouldn't look at us, and certainly never give us a smile. Over there, that hurt, but now I'm home I understand exactly what she was feeling.

My profession is a good one, it means saving others but it saved me too, and made sense of my life. We were needed over there. But we didn't save everyone we could have. That was the worst thing of all. We lost so many because we didn't have the right drugs, the wounded were often brought in too late because the field medics were badly trained soldiers who could just about put bandages on; the surgeon was often drunk. We weren't allowed to tell the truth in the next-of-kin letters. A boy might be blown
up by a mine and there'd be nothing left except half a bucket of flesh, but we wrote that he'd died of food poisoning, or in a car accident, or he'd fallen into a ravine. It wasn't until the fatalities were in their thousands that they began to tell families the truth. I got used to the bodies, but I could never, never reconcile myself to the fact that they were ours, our kids.

Once they brought in a boy while I was on duty. He opened his eyes, said ‘Thank God … ' and died. They'd searched the mountains for him for three days and nights. He was delirious, raving ‘I want a doctor, I want a doctor.' He saw my white gown and thought he was safe. But he'd been fatally wounded …

I saw skulls shot to pieces. All of us who were there have a graveyard full of memories.

Even in death there was a hierarchy. For some reason dying in battle was more tragic than dying in hospital. Even though they cried and cried … I remember how one major died in the reanimation unit. He was a military adviser. His wife came to his bedside. He died looking at her and afterwards she started screaming horribly, like an animal. We wanted to shut the doors so no one would hear, because there were soldiers dying alone next door, boys with no one to weep for them. ‘Mum! Mum!' they'd shout, and I'd lie to them, ‘I'm here.' We became their mothers and sisters, and we wanted to be worthy of their trust.

Once, two soldiers brought in a wounded man, handed him over but wouldn't leave. ‘We don't need anything, girls, can we just sit by you for a bit?' Here, back home, they've got their mums and sisters and wives. They don't need us now — but over there they told us things you wouldn't normally tell anybody. For example, if you stole a sweet from a friend — well that's meaningless here, but over there it was a dreadful act — something that created an intense disillusion
with yourself.

In that kind of situation you find out what kind of a person you really are. If you're a coward, or a grass, or woman-crazy, it soon comes out. They might not admit it back home but over there I often heard men say that killing could be a pleasure. One junior lieutenant I know went back home and admitted it. ‘Life's not the same now, I actually want to go on killing,' he said. They spoke
about it quite coolly, some of those boys, proud of how they'd burnt down a village and kicked the inhabitants to death.