Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War

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.

Well, I admit it. I had the greatest respect for the Afghan people, even while I was shooting and killing them. I still do. You could even say I love them. I like their songs and prayers, as peaceful and timeless as their mountains.

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.

Life was full of adventure: I learnt the smell of danger — I’ve got a sixth sense for it now. We’re homesick for it, some of us; it’s called the ‘Afghan syndrome’.

A soldier must be like a bullet, constantly ready to be fired.’ I learnt that by heart. You go to war in order to kill. Killing is my profession — that’s what I was trained to do.

We don’t need anything. Just listen to us and try to understand. Society is good at doing things, ‘giving’ medical help, pensions, flats. But all this so-called giving has been paid for in very expensive currency. Our blood.

Dreptul omului de a nu ucide. De a nu învața să ucidă. Neînscris în nicio constituție.

still remember the way a twenty-year-old shouted, ‘I don’t want to hear about any political mistakes! I just don’t want to! Give me my two legs back if it was all a mistake.

I accepted the official line so completely that even now, after all I’ve read and heard, I still have a minute hope that our lives weren’t entirely wasted. It’s the self-preservation instinct at work.

Yur Karyakin once wrote: ‘We should not judge a man’s life by his perception of himself. Such a perception may be tragically inadequate.’ And I read something in Kafka to the effect that man was irretrievably lost within himself.

There’s not much humanity in a human being — that’s what war taught me.

I spend most of my time crying and praying for that bookish Moscow girl who doesn't exist any more.

They were told they were on a holy mission and that their country would remember them. Now people turn away and try to forget the war, especially those who sent us there in the first place.

Coming home was terribly difficult and very strange. I felt I’d had my skin ripped off. I couldn’t stop crying, I could bear to be only with people who’d been there themselves.

It's three years since my son died and I haven't dreamt about him once. I go to sleep with with his vest and trousers under my pillow. 'Come to me in my dreams, Sasha. Come and see me!' But he never does. I wonder what I've done to offend him.

All of us who were there have a graveyard full of memories.

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, thousands of miles 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.

A te gândi la moarte e ca și cum te-ai gândi la viitor. Atunci când te gândești la ea și când o vezi, se petrece ceva cu timpul. Pe lângă teama de moarte există și atracția ei...

We’re all suffering from a wasting disease, you know. Over there it showed itself as a mismatch between our weight and our height, but here, back home, it’s a mismatch between our feelings and our ability to express them in what we say and do.

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.

We put up the stone, a good one, of expensive marble, and spent all the money we’d been saving for his wedding on the memorial. We adorned the grave with red tiles and planted red flowers.

At the hospital I watched a Russian girl put a teddy bear on an Afghan boy’s bed. He picked up the toy with his teeth and played with it, smiling. He had no arms. ‘Your Russians shot him,’ his mother told me through the interpreter. ‘Do you have kids? A boy or a girl?’ I couldn’t make out whether her words expressed more horror or forgiveness.

The Afghans weren’t people to us, and vice versa. We couldn’t afford to see each other as human beings.

There was a general shortage of medication. Even the iodine ran out. Either the supply system failed, or else we’d used up our allowance — another triumph of our planned economy. We used equipment captured from the enemy. In my bag I always had twenty Japanese disposable syringes. They were sealed in a light polyethylene packing which could be removed quickly, ready for use. Our Soviet ‘Rekord’ brand, wrapped in paper which always got torn, were frequently not sterile. Half of them didn’t work, anyhow — the plungers got stuck. They were crap. Our homeproduced plasma was supplied in half-litre glass bottles. A seriously wounded casualty needs two litres — i.e. four bottles. How are you meant to hold them up, arm-high, for nearly an hour in battlefield conditions? It’s practically impossible. And how many bottles can you carry? We captured Italian-made polyethylene packages containing one litre each, so strong you could jump on them with your army boots and they wouldn’t burst. Our ordinary Soviet-made sterile dressings were also bad. The packaging was as heavy as oak and weighed more than the dressing itself. Foreign equivalents, from Thailand or Australia, for example, were lighter, even whiter somehow … We had absolutely no elastic dressings, except what we captured — French and German products. And as for our splints! They were more like skis than medical equipment! How many can you carry with you? I carried English splints of different lengths for specific limbs, upper arm, calf, thigh, etc. They were inflatable, with zips. You inserted the arm or whatever, zipped up and the bone was protected from movement or jarring during transportation to hospital. In the last nine years our country has made no progress and produced nothing new…

I guess that's how you experience your own death, from a distance

What colour is a scream? What does it taste like? What is the colour of blood? Red in hospital, grey on dry sand and bright blue on stone, in the evening when it's all dried out. Blood spills as quickly from a seriously injured person as liquid from a broken jar . . . his life flickers out, only the eyes shine bright and stare past you, stubbornly until the very end. Everything's been paid for. By us. And in full.