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 cut-throats, 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 defensive 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.