Passing that tremendous sight, the paras who were with us in the column stood on top of the cars, removed their berets and saluted their fallen friends, shouting their beloved slogan in unison:
‘Angels in the sky, demons on the ground!’
Torturing prisoners was prohibited by military regulations, and according to the law any perpetrators of such an act were to be tried in court and at a minimum sentenced to serve in military prison. Of course, I’ve never heard of any of our men who had tortured or disfigured prisoners’ bodies being reported or turned over to the authorities.
Once, our paras, in a town that had just been liberated, captured an Arab; after cutting off his nose and ears, they gouged out his eyes and filled the sockets with gunpowder. Not content with that, they kicked his arms until they were broken and then shot him in both heels. In that piteous state, in agony but still alive, he was left right in the middle of the main street.
Only afterwards did it come out that the Arab was a big shot – a terrorist wanted by the secret service, who had experience in the Yugoslav wars and a close network of important connections; some people even said that he had studied law at a university in the United States… This story quickly reached the ears of a general in central command, who went personally to the front line to track down the culprits. When the general asked the entire paratrooper division (composed of almost six hundred men, all assembled before him) who was responsible, everyone – including officers and lieutenant colonels – stepped forward. To prevent a nationwide scandal, the general went back to command and swore never to stick his nose into the affairs that took place on the front lines…
Battle command is very different from the commanders who plan the war on paper from the safety of an office, calculating operations based on the moral principles of Russian Army regulations. The officers on the front lines had many bloody wars under their belts, and had a completely different way of understanding military code. The men in command, when they learned of enemies being tortured and killed, said we were a ‘bunch of maniacs’, ‘sadists with inhuman conduct’. The truth is that it was impossible to remain a human being after even just a month on the front lines. And many of us were there for the entire duration of our military duty, over two years, and then some re-enlisted and stayed even longer as contract soldiers.
In the face of the horrors we went through every day on the front, some lost their soundness of mind, others risked losing it, and many just died. The soldiers often had to be cruel – it was a matter of survival.
At the sight of that poor wretch tied to the car, I must admit that there were a few sniggers among us. A column of infantrymen and some explorer units was behind us; one of their cars stopped, an officer came out with a pair of pliers and tried to free the body.
There he was, about to cut the cord that bound the dead Arab’s hands, when our Nosov noticed what was going on. He immediately kicked our car’s turret and shouted:
‘Halt, skulls![5] Halt!’
The car hadn’t come to a full stop before Nosov jumped down. Running up to the officer, he started yelling:
‘Soldier! What the hell do you think you’re doing with those pliers?’
The officer gave Nosov a sideways look, then said contemptuously:
‘Who are you, and why aren’t you acting according to regulations? Identify yourself! Name, rank, and unit!’
‘Captain Nosov, saboteurs…’
The officer, who was a little younger than Nosov but a rank higher, eyed him from beneath the brim of his hat:
‘Captain, I order you to return to your vehicle – you’re blocking the column!’
Nobody had ever dared talk to our captain like that before.
Nosov ripped the pliers out of his hands and threw them into the rubble, screaming at him like a madman; in fact, even we were startled.
‘Boy, you get back in your vehicle and never dare give orders to a saboteur again! When you were still jerking off or taking it in the arse from your schoolmates I was already burying my brothers in Qandahar! Who gave you permission to untie him?’ He pointed to the Arab’s flayed body. ‘Did you put him there? Well, when you’ve got the balls to do something like that then you can take him down…’
The officer tried to reply, serious and impassive:
‘Captain, I must inform you that when we reach our post I will be forced to report your conduct to command!’
‘Your piece of shit post only exists thanks to the sacrifice of those boys!’ Nosov snarled, pointing at the names of the dead paratroopers written on the piece of cardboard. ‘Go ahead and inform whoever you please, do whatever you want; I wipe my arse with your regulations… If I see you laying a hand on any other monuments around here, I swear on the souls of my dead brothers that I will shoot you!’
After these words Nosov gave the officer an impertinent military salute, turned around, and headed back to the car.
The officer stood there for a second, without moving, thinking about what he had just heard, returned the salute, albeit belatedly, almost instinctively, then returned to his car.
Throughout this whole incident, what struck me the most was what our captain had called that disfigured cadaver. He called it a monument.
Many veterans of the war in Afghanistan, especially the older paratroopers, would leave these ‘monuments’ in the streets after a particularly difficult battle. They were terrifying sights, always the body of a dead enemy that the soldiers would savage in a frightening way. But the real horror in this ritual lay in the fact that in order to make these ‘monuments’, soldiers used people who were still alive.
One time, after a skirmish in which a para group attacked and liberated a fortified area, we found a prisoner in this sort of condition who was still breathing. They had cut the skin on his torso and back into strips, in imitation of the stripes on the shirt the paratroopers wear, which back home they call a telnyashka. They had nailed the poor devil to a door, heavy tent stakes sharpened into points struck through his hands. Nearby someone had written the motto, also in blood: ‘We may be few, but we wear the telnyashka!’
However terrible this was, it had become a kind of custom for them, a matter of dignity and prestige, which the paras always tried to honour without anyone ever daring to go against it.
Our column kept scouting the liberated areas, headed for the line of fire. The line kept moving forward, and after every operation we would always lag behind, so every time we would have to catch up to it again. We forged ahead like waves of water, so as not to give the enemy a chance to rest, make a move, organise an attack against us. We were always fighting, always.
Every now and then we would run into various support units; the carriers restocked our supplies, took care of the injured and accompanied the soldiers who were going to rest.
A kilometre away from the front we had to stop; the car couldn’t go any closer, otherwise, in the midst of battle, it would have been torched in seconds. Running with heads down, taking cover behind a light tank, we began moving towards the site along with the paras.
The road was narrow, and the enemy was shooting at us crossways. I could feel the bullets ricocheting off the armour of the tank and then dispersing in every direction. We couldn’t stick even our noses beyond the tank, the gunfire was so heavy.
After a while the tank stopped, and the turret turned towards the shots. A cannon blast went off, and at the same time, a volley of bullets from the heavy machine gun, which was next to the cannon inside turret. The explosion was so violent and sudden it made me fall down; my head spun.