Moscow, feeling sorry for him, gave him some water to drink, and the captain smiled.
‘Give him a drink; I’m sure his throat is all dry… What a shitty day, boys, surrounded by a bunch of homos…’
When we got to base, there was already a delegation waiting to pick up the prisoner.
Captain Nosov spoke to the colonel while his men loaded the Arab onto another helicopter. The colonel called Nosov ‘son’, and the captain called him ‘old man’; you could tell that they were buddies.
The colonel said:
‘The infantrymen complained, saying that you made a bloodbath, you tortured a prisoner…’ He wasn’t at all angry; he spoke with a mixture of complicity and irritation.
Nosov, as always, was playful and in good spirits:
‘You know how they are, old man, those guys shit themselves as soon as they get wind of an Arab… They need to be shown that we’re the dangerous ones – they should be afraid of themselves, not those ignorant, incompetent, drugged-out religious fanatics…’ Whenever he spoke, Nosov had a mysterious power; his words carried a strange certainty. The colonel thought for a moment, and then, smiling, clapped a hand on his shoulder:
‘Son, you’d certainly know better than anyone else. But remember, if anything ever happens, I’m always here…’
As the helicopter ascended, the colonel smiled from the window and waved. Then he made a sign on his chest, as if he were drawing our bat with his finger. Still smiling, he clenched his fist, as if to say ‘Keep it up!’ We all broke out in big grins and waved back at him, as if he were our own grandfather who had come to visit us.
I thought a lot about what happened that day. Sometimes I regretted not having killed that poor man I’d shot in the knee. But later, after some time had passed, I came to understand the insane logic that guided our captain’s actions, and I realised that, yes, it was true that he made some extreme decisions, but he did it so that we could keep fighting the war the way we did.
We owed our reputation to Nosov’s great skill in handling complex situations well in the face of the realities of war.
And if his choices didn’t always conform to human morality, it was only because they reflected the horror and the difficulty we endured every day in the war, trying to stay alive, strong and sound.
FIRE ON US
…for this offensive special commitment is required of the soldiers and officers in the assault units and of all the active units on the front lines. Given the high priority of this operation, the nature of the task does not call for the capture, arrest or transport of terrorists or any other member of an illegal armed group. All human units who pose a threat or cause difficulty in carrying out orders during direct combat must be physically eliminated; whatever weapons or ammunition they may have must be destroyed on the spot or used by the active units to carry out the received order. Any form of communication with representatives of illegal armed groups is prohibited, as with civilians or any individual who does not belong to the units working in the area. Respond to any requests from terrorists for medical aid, negotiation, conversation, or unexpected offers to surrender to the law of the Russian Federation with gunfire.
Pummel, throttle, crush…
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.
4
Charismatic nineteenth-century Russian nationalist and representative of imperial tsarism in the Caucasus. He applied a policy of terror and repression towards the Caucasian peoples, especially those of the Muslim faith, forcing them with violence to adopt Christianity.