Free Fall (35 page)

But I knew I couldn't keep my eyes closed; I kept looking at the corpses that were by the window, right in front of me. There were two Arabs and a Chechen, well armed, with two Kalashnikovs and a machine gun, some American vests and a load of other valuable stuff. So far nobody had touched anything, but I was sure that as soon as Moscow and Shoe finished eating they would pillage them . . .

Suddenly Nosov arrived, and threw a pair of shoes at me.

‘Here, take these. Yours are rotten . . .' he said, sitting down at the table with my comrades.

It was a pair of trainers, practically new, with barely a few drops of blood. Without getting up off the sofa I took the old ones off, which were filthy, and put on the new ones. My feet felt nice and comfortable; I was content.

‘So, how are they?' Nosov was eating some meat and had a glass of vodka in his hand.

‘Thank you, Captain, they're perfect.'

‘Well then, don't forget how generous I am . . .'

The others broke out into laughter.

The siege on the village was over. Our assistance was no longer needed, and in two light tanks we headed for our positions.

The tanks went along, shaking, shooting black smoke into the air, and we shook too, from the pounding of the tracks. We passed by the burned-out cars and the bodies of the fallen, moving down the streets where a moment earlier we were about to die.

Once we were outside the town we looked at what we had left behind: collapsed houses, smoke rising into the air . . . total destruction, as if every inch of the town no longer existed.

Nosov observed everything, a strange look on his face, neither satisfied nor dissatisfied; if anything, he seemed lost in a strong nostalgia, like when you see something for the last time.

Our captain stood firm, still, holding on to the turret
of the tank. At some point he said, under his breath, to himself:

‘Anyone who doesn't want to be under us will end up underground . . .'

_______________

*
A tank or other armoured vehicle in radio code.

 

Do evil and evil will come back to you.

Old Russian proverb

Can't get used to the stillness

in war, in the war, in the war.

Stillness is only a trick, just a trick.

On the steep path

in a strange land

we head for the caravan.
*

Caravan – the high of triumph, the pain of defeat

Caravan, I wait to meet you again

Caravan, red with the blood of Afghanistan,

Caravan, caravan, caravan . . .

‘Civil' life will never grow on me,

war is so clear, it's friend or enemy.

Here you can't see anyone's soul

through all the fog.

It's a shame that friend is gone,

another one

taken for good by the caravan.

Caravan – a flask of water

without which means death.

Caravan – it means we can.

Caravan – kill the infidels, says the Koran.

Caravan, caravan, caravan.

Can't quite get used to

no AK on my back

no mines in roadside bushes

no lurking Muslim packs.

I just know that somewhere

following in my tracks

someone's after the caravan.

Caravan, hundreds of missiles

that will not reach their goal.

Caravan, salt in our faces

Caravan, at the third drink a moment of silence

for who is lost and who hung on.

Caravan, caravan, caravan . . .

‘Caravan' by Alexander Rozenbaum

Here during the war I once met a really interesting person. Too bad that by the time we started to become friends, he was dead.

Surgeon R. Krasnov, a medical service officer I met in military hospital

The Jew knows it, the Chinaman too

the Red Army's the best.

Berlin remembers how in '45

it took the red star in the arse.

The boots stomp hard,

subs swim under the ice.

Fuck the guns and the gas,

we'll take the enemy fast.

Planes roar and tanks smoke—

combat father, father combat.

From north mountains to south seas

we'll take and break the enemies.

Combat father, father combat

from north mountains to south seas

the Red Army's the best.

To scare off our faggot enemies,

our destroyers shoot through the skies.

Screw America, screw NATO too

even with our worst shot they're through.

But if the enemy really steps up to us

the spetsnaz will take on the cause.

Say goodbye to your planes and your tanks

nothing will be left but their shit and socks.

Planes roar and tanks smoke—

combat father, father combat.

From north mountains to south seas

we'll take and break the enemies.

Combat father, father combat

from north mountains to south seas.

the Red Army's the best.

In thirty seconds our missiles can hit

anywhere on the planet.

We'll show all those pieces of shit:

Glory to Russia, our homeland!

‘Red Army' by the pro-nationalist punk group Krasnaya Plesen
*

Surely only the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky know who is right,

but we know the important things aren't in the papers,

we'll never hear the truth on the radio . . .

The name of the town doesn't matter

but out of all those people who went there,

none of them ever came back.

So we have no reason to cry, to have sad thoughts,

now only the heart can save us, because reason fell short.

But the heart needs sky and roots, it can't live in nothing,

and as once said a boy who was there by chance,

‘From this moment on we'll be different . . .'

From Boris Grebenshikov's ‘Captain Voronin'

On my shoes the dust of hundreds of streets,

on my shoes the ash of hundreds of wars,

my hands have turned to dirt . . .

I'm coming home.

From ‘I'm Coming Home' by Russian singer-songwriter O. Balan

_______________

*
The saboteurs of the Russian army, during the war in Afghanistan, used the word ‘caravan' to indicate an enemy group transporting arms or drugs.

*
Russian for ‘red mould'.

At the end of my second year of military service the saboteur unit transferred to the mountains. Along with some of the Ministry of Internal Affairs' special units (called the OMON), we went through the villages to conduct what in our operation order was called ‘clean-up of residential areas'. Obviously this had nothing to do with maintaining sanitation in the mountain territories; it was a very specific and sensitive phase of the counter-terrorist operation intended to ‘re-establish respect for the laws of the Russian Federation'.

We went through the areas controlled by federal forces in order to ‘ensure the presence of the necessary conditions to enable the recuperation of the Chechen community'. It was May, and it was very hot.

By that time, the Chechen plain had been almost completely liberated of enemy forces, but many terrorist groups had survived in the mountains. They had regrouped into small units and continued to attack our military convoys and put any representative of the law to death. They terrorised civilians, too, but more often
found them to be sources of support in the fight against the Russian Army and state power. Many families had lost someone during the war and blamed the army for their losses, which is why they gave provisions to terrorists, harboured them secretly or hid arms and ammunition. To us, the Chechen mentality was incomprehensible – it seemed absurd for them to help foreigners from Africa or the former Yugoslavia but to want nothing to do with us, their neighbours, with whom, for better or worse, they had a shared history. They saw the terrorists as heroes, as people who had sacrificed themselves for the good of the Nation – Muslim Robin Hoods.

Obviously we soldiers knew that both Chechen campaigns had been tainted by political and economic interests. As Captain Nosov had often told us, practically branding it into our minds: ‘Always remember that the feared Shamil Basayev, like many other Chechen Islamic terrorist leaders, was trained by our own secret services – we Russians were the ones who taught him to defend himself.' We had learned from experience how the terrorists were linked to the corrupt officials working in our Command, but no one ever dared to bring up those stories; no one ever released the findings from the investigations conducted by the FSB. If we found out that there was a mole it was because of his comrades, who had reported him or in some cases simply eliminated him, since accidents happen in war every day anyway. These affairs, even if they didn't reach the ears of the media, circulated widely among soldiers and officers. They were shared in whispers,
during pauses between one battle and the next. Often the whispers were about an officer from Command dying in an accident: ‘He fell from a moving tank,' they would say, which meant that he had been beaten to death by his own men. These stories were always concluded with a statement full of scorn and malice, spat out with cigarette smoke: ‘He liked
shawarma
*
too much . . .'

It was very difficult to communicate with the local people. Up in the mountains they were especially aggressive; even routine operations in their villages risked ending in bloodshed. We would capture the terrorists who hadn't been able to escape before our arrival and execute them right in the streets. At that point the entire village would give voice to a single sentiment – the women hurled shouts and curses of all kinds on us, old and young alike sent us promises of Apocalypse . . . We had to be very careful, because sometimes bullets would come from the mob, where the instigators, who expected nothing less than for us to raise arms against the civilians, would hide. Then the commanders would oblige us to quickly withdraw, to avoid being caught in a fire fight with women and elderly people present. We would shoot a few bullets into the air to scare people and then be on our way.

Often, on the way back from those operations, our columns would be attacked. If we were lucky the attack would be limited to a few machine gun blasts at the men on the carriers. In the worst cases, when our attackers
were better equipped, they would torch the carriers with RPGs or scatter homemade mines made from large-calibre cannon rounds along the road.

Some strange and sad things happened too.

One time, as we were returning from a mountain village, an old man planted himself in the middle of the road in order to stop our cars. He pointed a hunting rifle at us: a real antique, all rusty. The old man was desperate; he was crying and shouting something incomprehensible.

According to military regulations, a column of armoured vehicles could not stop for any reason outside the scope of the operation. Even if we went past a person who had been wounded, we had to go on, either evading him or going around him – the important thing was never to stop the cars. It was also prohibited to slow the speed of the convoy, which had to proceed at a minimum of ten kilometres per hour; if we slowed down we could all become easy targets for potential aggressors.

So when we saw that old man, the boys signalled for him to move. But he kept standing in the middle of the road, as if his feet were glued to the ground, making his choked cries and waving his gun, which he kept pointed at us. The column slowed its pace, and one of the men sitting on the first carrier shot a burst of rounds in the air to scare him, but it didn't work – he refused to move and kept threatening us with his pathetic rifle. I was on
the third car in the convoy, and I watched as the old man's figure grew bigger and bigger.

When the first carrier approached him, the driver manoeuvred, trying to avoid him, to pass by him. But the old man gritted his teeth and placed his rifle to his shoulder, aiming at one of the boys sitting on the car, as if he were going to shoot him. At that instant a series of rounds went off – everyone sitting on that carrier opened fire on the old man, who with one insane act had suddenly turned into an aggressor. I saw scraps of his suit go flying, along with pieces of flesh as the bullets pierced his body. In a second they reduced him to tatters. He fell to the ground next to his rifle.

The column didn't pause; the cars resumed their course. When my carrier passed the corpse, I saw that on his jacket the old man had a row of medals from the Second World War. As a young man he had fought to defend the Great Soviet Nation against the Nazism of the Third Reich, and here's how the Nation repaid him for his sacrifices, years later.

This is how, in the complete chaos of post-Soviet history, the power of the Russian Federation was restored in the mountain areas of Chechnya. And we couldn't do anything to oppose it – our personal stories were worth nothing in that great river of time and fate that mixed wars and men, innocent people and criminals. But the current has always stayed the same. It hasn't changed in the least . . .

*

In late May we received an order that was very unusual: to search a mosque in a mountain village. Apparently, after a mission had been carried out by our artillery, several weapons and the bodies of some wanted terrorists had been found in the ruins of a mosque. The army never set foot in places of worship, but now, suddenly, the operational units were changing their strategy and ordering us to search them. None of us, however, believed the stories anymore.

‘And so, all of a sudden they discover terrorists hiding in mosques,' Shoe commented sarcastically.

‘It's obvious,' Zenith chimed in. ‘The Russian secret service has decided to sacrifice one of their “bridges” with the Islamic world, breaking some old pact that called for the protection of the mosques . . . And it's up to us to do the dirty work!'