Free Fall: A Sniper's Story

‘Look, to understand the reasoning behind this conflict you have to know how the “chaos-effect” works. I’ll give you an example: you have a store full of delicious chocolates and a customer wants to buy them and take them home, but the law prohibits taking them away. They have to be consumed there, without leaving the store. But this guy knows a lot of other people who, just like him, want your chocolates, and they’re all prepared to pay you any amount to be able to take them away and eat them on their own time, or maybe even sell them to someone else. However, the law against the consumption of chocolate outside the store isn’t something you like either, because you’re interested in selling as much as possible. At this point Moscow comes into play, who in our story takes on the role of a representative of the law. He’s always there in your store, watching and making sure nobody takes any chocolate home. Obviously, you don’t like Moscow either. Do you follow me so far?’

Although it was a rhetorical question I nodded, and Nosov went on with his story:

‘So imagine that I come along and propose that you play a trick on Moscow. I send a couple of friends to your store, you send a few of yours, and one day our friends start a fight there. While they’re beating each other up – they break some tables, a few old chairs and maybe even one of the windows – Moscow, as a good representative of the law, steps in to calm them down and tries to re-establish order. In that instant, I take all the chocolates I want from your store, pay you how much I owe and run away. Thanks to the chaos-effect, our dear friend Moscow didn’t see a thing, and you and I got something out of it – and the next time, potentially, we can do it over again. The situation with the war in Chechnya is very similar, except that instead of you it’s the leaders of the Arab community, who control the drug trade, human trafficking, gun running, petrol and so on. The chocolates, in other words. Instead of me there’s the Russian secret service, who after the fall of the USSR took control of all illegal trafficking on national territory. Moscow, on the other hand, represents legal society, that is, the few who are still trying to somehow obey the law and have faith in institutions (this also includes the representatives of those countries that receive the traffic). And the idiot friends who come to fight in the store to trigger the chaos-effect are the Russian army and the mercenaries. The moral of the story is very sad; without realising it, we’re creating chaos to divert attention from the serious things going on in this place. The war we’re fighting is just a cover for the trafficking run by the corrupt people in the government.’

It’s not as though I knew much about the trafficking, but, explained in this way, the situation seemed a bit clearer to me.

Another issue was the mercenaries in Chechnya. It seemed impossible to track down the primary financial backer behind the armed terrorist groups. It was often the Islamic religious leaders themselves, the imams, who would use their places of worship as storage depots or makeshift field hospitals for their wounded. But they were just small fry, the latest cog in a complex machine.

I remember that after one of these discussions I said to our captain, my face serious:

‘Ivanisch, if you know that this war is wrong, if you really think it’s a joke, then why do you keep on fighting in it?’

He looked at me with an astonished expression and said in a playful tone:

‘Because I have nothing better to do. I’d be useless at home. The only thing I know how to do is war.’

After that remark, which for Nosov was clearly in jest, I reflected at length on how stupid we’d been, we Russians, over the course of history. For centuries we had pursued various political ideas – often going against the natural laws of humanity – only because we weren’t able to get out of the system, which kept us trapped inside a constantly shrinking circle.

Just thinking about it made me want to run. But it was physically impossible to cross the security lines that separated us from the other world, the peaceful world. And in any case, that would have been suicide – the images of military prison were still branded onto my mind.

THE PARA-BATS

My dear Mama, I’m writing you a letter:
‘Hi mum, I’m good,
the sun is shining, everything’s fine,
on the mountains as always there’s fog…’
Mama doesn’t know what we do on those mountains,
she don’t know a thing about our troubles.
The years of our youth are spent
in the Caucasus, where there’s always war…

The sound of bombs in the background, our brigade advances,
over there you can already hear the shots.
The sound of bombs in the background, the tracer bullets fly,
and the whole earth shakes from the cannons.
The helicopter goes off, and we must go on,
I hope you make it back, brother…
The helicopter goes off, and we must go on,
It’ll be hard, and some’ll never make it home…

Too young when we came here
to the Caucasus, where there’s always war.
We’ll never forget these terrible years,
and our friends left behind forever…
When we come back we’ll sit down together,
and before our third glass we’ll be silent.
The fallen in battle, the ones who made it home,
Now our souls are one…

Russian military song from the period of the Chechen conflict

We don’t need a soul, we’ve got blue berets instead,
we swoop from the sky like angels, with parachutes instead of wings,
we leap onto the ground like demons in battle,
we don’t care about a thing, we just want victory…

From the Russian paratrooper anthem

There’s fog over town, the ataman’s smoking his pipe,
and his Cossacks keep drinking their vodka.
The sentinels curse, the osaul’s dead drunk,
and the room’s filled with the empty bottles.

And while the enemy’s calm, the town celebrates,
we fill up with vodka, turn our nose up at death.
But if that bastard the enemy should harm our people,
the ataman, always first, will raise his sword high.

In the streets the accordion plays and the vodka flows,
the Cossacks will never tire of spirit—
‘One litre, two litres, three litres, four… that’s nothing, give us some more!’
But the little old ladies can hardly distil it any more.

And while the enemy’s calm, the town celebrates,
we fill up with vodka, turn our nose up at death.
But if that bastard the enemy should harm our people,
the ataman, always first, will raise his sword high.

And when the war comes, when the enemy’s near,
when his army wants to defeat us,
whatever they do will be pointless, we’ll kill ’em all!
Sword against tank, the Cossack will go…

‘The Cossacks’ Song’ by the rock group Gaza Strip[2]

We were supposed to get there at about eight in the morning.

The spot was a couple of tree-covered hills where three huge enemy groups had set up camp a few days earlier. Figuring out how many units those groups were composed of seemed impossible; the information was pretty vague and contradictory. Different numbers came from commanding headquarters on different occasions: first it was a matter of a thousand terrorists, then fifteen hundred, and finally almost three thousand. Every hour the number went up like we were at an auction. But one thing was certain: lots of them were Arabs and Afghans, poor people recruited to fight, almost all of them drug addicts. Before going to battle they would do so much heroin that, when they ran out of ammunition, they would shuffle up to our soldiers like a bunch of zombies, their arms dangling and their eyes bulging. Those poor guys had come so far just to fight us a couple times and then die so miserably.

2

Young Russians love this group for their use of swearing; this song is also popular among soldiers in the army.