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  sad light of the unknown moon over our heads.

  Honour to the flag!

  Farewell my friend, you will be with us forever more.

  Forgive me, you were killed and I was only wounded,

  in the Afghan mountains, in Afghanistan.

  If you only knew what a friend I lost in battle…

  The damned dust filled our eyes,

  and our BTR was in flames,

  in the sky, like a dragonfly, the helicopter circled

  and like voices from the past, everywhere you could hear shouts of ‘Go!’…

  Like a nerve, he broke like a painfully stretched nerve,

  and from the slope straight towards him a bullet took flight…

  Sand and stone,

  sad light of the unknown moon over our heads.

  Honour to the flag!

  Farewell my friend, you will be with us forever more.

  Forgive me, you were killed and I was only wounded,

  in the Afghan mountains, in Afghanistan.

  Song by singer-songwriter Alexander Rozenbaum, dedicated to the veterans of the war in Afghanistan

  And even if we don’t yet know the sweet touch or allure of a woman,

  even if we’ve never experienced the pleasant torments of love,

  at the age of eighteen we’re already used

  to gun fights,

  to bloody battles that never end,

  and we know exactly what it means

  to cross the line of fire.

  Those days blazed, those nights went up in smoke,

  and death flew through the air, laughing and touching us all.

  We don’t want any honours or promotions,

  we’ve already got what we need to feel worthy.

  From the song of the Russian army veterans who were involved in the Chechen conflict

  One morning – really early, it must have been four a.m. – Moscow woke me up. My comrades and I had slept in the courtyard of a half-wrecked building in a public housing district on the outskirts of the city. We’d been embroiled in a series of bloody skirmishes with the enemy for days. My group and I had been fighting on the front lines but luckily we were all still in one piece. We hadn’t taken any losses, but we were dead tired.

  It seemed like the battle was never going to end. Every second was crucial, every action was important and required great concentration, and at the end of the day we felt like juiced oranges. During battle, we had a clear objective: to push the enemy to the other end of the city, where the armoured infantry units were waiting to eliminate all of them… It was an exhausting task, and Captain Nosov had given us permission to take a break, to go behind the line to rest amidst the rubble, in the area guarded by our infantry.

  Before falling asleep, some of us said that maybe the mission was over; we were all hoping we wouldn’t have to set foot in that godforsaken city again. Then, sleep came.

  A little while later – at four, as I said – Moscow woke me up by tapping my chest with the butt of his Kalashnikov.

  Slowly and reluctantly I opened my eyes and looked around. I struggled to remember where I was. I couldn’t put anything into focus.

  ‘What’s going on, how long did we sleep?’ I asked Moscow, my voice worn-out.

  ‘We didn’t sleep for shit, brother… And it doesn’t look like we’ll be going back to sleep any time soon.’

  The order from command called us back to the front line in the northeast area of the city, where a cluster of enemies had got through a breach in our ring of troops. They had American-made armoured cars, off-road vehicles, and they were equipped with heavy weapons: grenade launchers, 120mm cannons and a pair of multiple launch rocket systems called ‘Grad’, which is Russian for ‘hail’. That night those bastards had attacked the weakest point in the ring – the Arabs, besides being numerous and well armed, had surprise-effects of their own. Nobody had expected a move like that; usually the cities where operations took place were surrounded so that the enemy couldn’t get out. We had never seen anyone trying to come in to take part in the battle.

  This event caused an immediate scandal. Command was furious. The infantry had been given orders to contain the attack, but manpower was limited and they had no heavy artillery to back them up. They managed to retreat without too many losses, and this in itself constituted a good outcome. The helicopters came late, after the greater part of the enemies had already infiltrated the city. Firing from the sky, our men had only managed to take out the tail end of the group.

  The security service was supposed to answer to superior command about how the enemy had been able to approach without being seen… For the moment, however, the only ones paying the price for that extremely grave military error were our boys on the front line, who were losing their hides out there.

  As they entered the city, the enemy tried to split up our troops, but our men held strong, so the Arabs targeted a district in the northeast under infantry surveillance. The infantry was forced to change positions quickly because they were suffering numerous losses and had taken cover in a building, effectively trapping themselves. As a matter of fact, the enemy had managed to surround the building and then ceased fire, waiting for our men to wear themselves out and use up all their ammo.

  The troops that had fought the Arabs as they entered the city attempted another attack, yet due to the darkness and the enemy’s powerful defences, they retreated too, and had many losses. At that point they were waiting for the paratroopers and special forces, which included us saboteurs. With the infantrymen surrounded by the enemy, we kept in constant radio contact. Their situation was tough, ammo was running out – to them, every minute seemed to last an eternity…

  As Moscow explained, we were going to help out with the counterstrike, which was planned for six in the morning.

  Just two hours away.

  This whole mess had begun four days earlier. We got to the city after the operation had already started, and as we got closer to the fighting I realised that the site we were headed for was a real bloodbath. A ‘triple ring’ of our troops had closed off some areas of the city. No one could come out; everything was all ready for the artillery unit to do their job. But they couldn’t go ahead with the offensive, because according to the information from the explorers who’d gone ahead, the concentration of civilians was too high. Dropping bombs and missiles would cause a massacre.

  The situation was deadly serious – city battles are among the bloodiest and most unpredictable, but when there are civilians in the mix it turns into a big meat grinder, and everyone loses all sense of what they’re doing.

  The infantrymen had come in with two explorer groups. They were just past the first district when direct combat broke out. The infantry, detached from the main forces, handled the first skirmishes, neutralising the nerve centres where troops were concentrated. We came in after the motorised infantry platoon (even if there was nothing platoon-like about them but the name – in reality it was only three groups, a hundred and twenty soldiers on twelve light tanks), followed by two special units armed with light 120mm cannons.

  Our job was to attack the most resistant positions, neutralise the snipers, and as official orders from general command said, ‘secure the quality of the movement of the main troops and support the liberation and transfer of the civilian population into the federal territories’. We had a support team behind us – the special paratrooper assault unit called ‘Thunder’.

  Their unit, just like ours, was completely independent. They travelled in armoured cars and had about ten tanks. They were perfect cutthroats, true assassins – wherever they went, they always wreaked havoc.

  We saboteurs, on the other hand, travelled in a BTR armoured personnel carrier, also known among the soldiers as a ‘coffin’, because its thin armour often got pierced in battle, even under fire from a mere Kalashnikov. To survive a surprise attack it was important to travel on top and not inside; at the first sign of gunfire you could jump off the car and take a defe
nsive position. In the city, however, the BTR had its advantages; having wheels and not tracks, it moved faster and handled better than a regular tank.

  We had two of our own drivers; they were hotheads, pros who would have taken us to hell and back without batting an eye. The older one had been in Afghanistan, and he told us that even though he had nearly burned to death in the BTR many times, he had never left it in the road – he’d always managed to get back to base, even with the wheels in flames.

  *

  According to commanding orders, we were supposed to use a strategy called ‘passive advance’. The units enter the city one at a time, occupy a position other than their own and then defend it until another group comes to take over. Then they advance, gradually approaching their actual combat position. Our objective was to reach the ‘line of fire’, but we had to cross half the city to get there; we would stay in constant radio contact with command. This strategy is particularly effective in urban combat, because even at the most difficult and dangerous points it ensures the creation of a safe zone, which is invaluable for the assault units who always need to be restocked with weapons, to stay connected to the support troops and have a path for transporting the wounded.

  When we entered the city the first skirmishes were already over. We went through streets full of dead Arabs and Afghans, with the bodies of some of our infantrymen and a few civilians. Many civilians came out from cellars or other hiding places and ran in the direction we were coming from. These were simple people who had lost everything. Their life was an endless nightmare; the way these people lived – or rather, subsisted – in war was terrible.

  From the start of the First Chechen Campaign, the civilians hadn’t seen a single day of peace. Those who weren’t able to flee to Russia or the nearby republics, like Dagestan, Ossetia or some other place, had been forced to witness the sad spectacle of two armies destroying their homes, killing their families, and making their existence a hell on earth. Each of their faces was marked by signs of fatigue and a fatal indifference towards everything.

  In war, the living made more of an impression on me than the dead. To me, the dead looked like a bunch of receptacles that someone had used and then thrown away – I looked at them as I would broken bottles. Whereas the living – the living had this horrible emptiness in their eyes: they were human beings who had seen beyond madness, and now lived in the embrace of death.

  It was terrible to see old people with children in their arms running in the opposite direction as we marched by, without stopping for a second or turning around. Our paras showed those people the way out, gave them some food even if they had very little, since they were assault troops and only carried their weapons and the minimum needed for survival. Some civilians would take the food and recount what they had gone through during the terrorist siege; others would reveal where the snipers were and wish the soldiers luck. There were many people in tears, hysterical, desperate.

  At one point a woman appeared, filthy and with a tangle of hair on top of her head as if it had exploded; in her arms she was holding a little baby covered in blood. The woman walked towards our car with crazed eyes, shouting, asking for help. When she was a few metres away, I could see that the baby had been dead for some time. Her belly was split open, a big black hole that the mother had tried to plug up with torn pieces of rags and sheets. I felt horrible.

  Nosov yelled to the civilians:

  ‘Someone help her for the love of God! Take her out of here, or she could get run over!’

  A pretty girl emerged from the crowd. From the look of her she seemed Chechen. She put her arm around the woman and said gently:

  ‘Let me hold your baby, let me have her for a while, so you can rest. We still have a long way to go…’

  The mother gave the baby’s body to the girl, who took that blood-encrusted corpse and hugged it in her arms as if it were still alive. Only then did the woman move away from our cars and return to the line, and as she walked she repeated mechanically:

  ‘We have to find a doctor, when we get out of here, we have to find a doctor for my baby…’

  Our captain looked at each one of us. We tried to appear calm, but the tension was evident. We couldn’t wait to throw ourselves onto the line of fire.

  ‘Relax, boys, relax. We’ll get to them very soon…’ His words were full of contempt – it sounded as if he’d spat them out. It spurred us on. Maybe because he was able to transmit his rage in a dignified way, putting into words the emotions we all felt.

  Once a medical officer said something about Nosov that, when I thought about it later, really seemed true, right on the mark. I was at the hospital where I had gone for treatment after my first wound. The friendly surgeon and I were discussing the likelihood of making it out alive from this bloodbath we’d ended up in. I was complaining, saying that it took a lot of luck not to get hurt in war, and then he said to me:

  ‘If you want to save yourself, friend, you have to do what your captain did.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  And, smiling, he said:

  ‘All you have to do is marry the war, love her, and she’ll love you forever…’

  Personally, I wasn’t so worried about facing the enemy. What really tormented me was the reality of the situation. No matter how many Arabs I killed, I knew I couldn’t change the fate of the war, or of any one of us.

  Our column advanced quickly. The battle was getting closer and closer – there was the constant sound of machine gun fire, hand grenades blowing up, grenade launchers being shot… A disorientated group of enemies would pop up here and there – we killed them without even getting off the cars. The heavy guns on the turrets took care of them. Like rats gone berserk they ran in every direction; they hid in the houses, but none of us went after them – we left them to the infantry, we couldn’t lose time on them. A real battle awaited us further on.

  Meanwhile command kept sending directives over the radio, keeping us apprised of the situation. Just when we were almost at the line of fire, three more orders came, one after the other. First they told us to join up with a paratrooper unit poised to penetrate the defence in one area, but we had no support. The order was immediately cancelled because in the meantime the paras had come across a group of explorers and infantrymen and had already taken positions to break through the line, so we were no longer needed. A second later we heard that the affected area had been attacked and breached by the 102nd paratrooper division, who were on the road. The third order – to advance and wait for exact coordinates – came when we were at the line of fire. The battle was right there in front of us, we would find our men along on the road, busy defending the positions they’d occupied in civilian buildings and homes.

  We had to drive through a small public housing district. All the buildings were destroyed, and our support units had set up an emergency hospital right there in the ruins, plus a few distribution centres for food and weapons.

  I passed through that district, filled with our infantry and medics going to and fro, each with a specific task, and I felt like I had gone behind the set of a theatre. On stage the show went on, while in the wings there were many people working, putting something big into motion, something very important that many people placed even above their own lives.

  A guy in a medical unit uniform asked us if we had enough medication. He was holding a box full of individual medical kits. We only had one kit for each of us, so Nosov told him:

  ‘Sure, son, toss a few over, you never know…’

  The skinny kid threw ten medi-kits, held together with a rubber band, over to our car. Then he yelled:

  ‘Lots of snipers on the roofs, too many… watch out for the snipers on the roofs!’

  Nosov grabbed the first aid kits and replied:

  ‘Thanks, kid, and if there are snipers that’s too bad for them… We’ve got a Siberian sniper with us!’

  Then Moscow, giving me a hard tap with his shoulder, yelled to the medic:

  ‘Hey, man
, you know how they shoot in Siberia? They can hit a squirrel in the eye from three hundred metres away!’ Everyone burst out laughing, making faces at me, since I was the centre of attention.

  The only thing I was thinking at that moment was not coming to the same end as that Siberian squirrel…

  It was true, the most dangerous people in urban combat were the snipers. If an expert marksman learned how to act, move, hide – and was fast and patient enough – he became the perfect assassin and could even change the course of a battle. One of my tasks during combat was to locate and neutralise these sorts of dangers. It wasn’t easy – even locating a sniper’s position required weeks of preparation, lots of work, camouflage, exhausting waits. All this just to fire a single bullet. But the shot had to be precise and definitive.

  Mercenaries from various countries were recruited as snipers, lured by the good pay. I often encountered Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Estonian snipers, very competent marksmen from the former Soviet Union sports scene. They could shoot with precision, but many lacked the basics of military strategy. My hunting education in the forests of Siberia, which I received as a boy from my grandfather Nikolay, turned out to be extremely useful, and I learned everything else at training camp thanks to Yakut, the Siberian instructor I mentioned earlier.

  The snipers were the lords of the battle. In my experience, anything was preferable to going up against another sniper, because I could never be sure what I was dealing with.

  We stayed there for a few minutes, just standing on the line of fire. Nosov made two requests for orders via radio, but command didn’t know where to send us – it seemed that our men were making progress on every front, and help from the saboteurs was no longer needed. After a while, they finally gave us some coordinates – we had to go to a building where our infantry were outnumbered and undergoing a series of violent attacks from the enemy.

  We rushed over to the location: a large, five-storey building, half-burned out and full of broken furniture. Through the shattered windows – and through the holes in the walls from mortar rounds and cannon balls – you could see bits of paper flying through the air like ghosts stirred by the wind.