This could burn out any of the older NATO tanks, such as the American M-60 or the German M48A5. But it wasn't powerful enough to deal with tanks with Chobham armor, such as the newer German Leopard 2 or the American M1 Abrams.
Each BMP contains an infantry squad. The BMP-2 carries nine soldiers. There are two crewmen, a driver, and a vehicle gunner who handles the woodpecker. The squad leader sits in the turret with the gunner to direct his troops. In the alleyway to the left of the turret and behind the driver is a seat for the squad sniper with an SVD sniper rifle. At the rear of the BMP-2 is seating for six soldiers — two bench seats, holding three soldiers each. Two of the soldiers are regular riflemen, armed with AKS-74 assault rifles. There is also an assistant squad leader (such as Demchenko) with an AKS-74 assault rifle, a grenadier with an RPG-16 antitank rocket launcher, and a squad machine gunner with a PKM light machine gun.
Demchenko's squad was typical of Soviet Ground Forces units. Over the past few years, more and more ethnic minorities were being drafted into combat units. In the old days, combat units were predominantly Slavic: Russian, Byelorussian, or Ukrainian, with a smattering of ethnic minorities. Most of the minority draftees were dumped into paramilitary construction battalions for the duration of their two years of duty. They would see a rifle for the first and last time while swearing their military oath. After that, all they'd see would be shovels and wheelbarrows. But these days, in the early 1990s, there just weren't enough Slavs to go atound anymore. The minorities had to make up the slack.
Demchenko's squad was a good example of this. The platoon commander, Lieutenant Bobrov, the squad machine gunner, Pvt. Nikolai Grachev, and the RPG-16 grenadier, Pvt. Fyodor Ignatov, were all Russians. The latter two were off collective farms and were not exactly university material. The BMP-2 driver, Pvt. Kurbanbay Irisbekov, was a Turkmen from Soviet Central Asia. His understanding of Russian was poor, and Demchenko had no idea why they had trained him as a driver.[12]
Admittedly, driving a BMP-2 was a good deal easier than driving a tank, but the driver was expected to assist in maintaining the vehicle. Irisbekov tried hard, but he just wasn't clever when it came to hardware. Demchenko was luckier with the vehicle gunner. He was a young Latvian,
Aleksander Zarins, a very bright kid, active in the Latvian DOSAAF rally car clubs. Like many Latvians, he was a bit standoffish from the Russians. But he and Stashu Demchenko got along well and kept the vehicle in shape. They usually assigned Irisbekov the simple tasks and the dirty jobs. He had little choice in the matter.
The squad's sniper was a young Armenian, Baginak Zakharian. He was an excellent rifleman, which was surprising since he came from the city of Yerevan. But coming from a major city, Zakharian had received a good education and spoke Russian reasonably well. The two squad riflemen were also from Central Asia — Sharifzian Kazanbayev, a Tatar, and Makhmet Latipov, a Beshari from Kazakhstan. Both spoke acceptable Russian, or at least knew enough to get along.
It was Soviet policy to mix the different ethnic groups because the army did not want ethnic cliques to form. They assumed that mixing the groups would force soldiers to speak Russian with one another. This worked to a point, but in the garrison, troops from similar backgrounds did hang around together whenever they had the chance. It was a relief to speak one's native tongue and reminisce about "the good old days" before army life.
And here they all were, bouncing down a forest road in West Germany, a polyglot Eurasian squad, off to do battle with NATO. Stashu Demchenko had managed to change the normal seating arrangement in the BMP. He preferred to sit in the forward seat behind the driver. At least this gave him some forward vision. When they dismounted, it was important for him to know the situation confronting them. From the back seats, it was difficult to get any sense of the battlefield.
His unit was riding down route E53 near Zweisel. The area was mountainous and wooded. Coming from the hill country near Lvov, Demchenko felt at home. The scenery was picturesque. But the rest of the squad was uneasy. To the young men from Central Asia, the forests seemed gloomy and foreboding. The damp, foggy weather combined with the terrain created an especially claustrophobic aura. On either side of the road were dark pine forests, the tops of the trees grazed by the low-hanging fog. The three Russians in the squad, all from the wide open steppes, found the countryside here particularly unappealing. The night before, the squad had spent time bragging of their martial skills and the fate of any German luckless enough to encounter this dangerous bunch. By morning, however, the cheap heroism had evaporated. Anxiety and uneasiness had taken its place.
Riding the BMP-2 into combat is no joy. The vehicle is very cramped inside, and its torsion bar suspension is stiff. When traveling over rough ground, you feel every bump and ditch. The fact that there is little padding on the seats doesn't help matters. And unless you are a dwarf, your head touches the roof. If the vehicle starts bouncing around during cross-country travel, your head will get slammed back and forth against the roof. Infantry helmets give damn little protection against this kind of abuse. Riding in BMPs is not for the squeamish or those prone to claustrophobia. Not only are you crammed in shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the squad, but you can't see anything. The vehicle is very dark inside, with only a halfhearted attempt at interior illumination. And in combat, gear and stowage piles up, and pretty soon the small electric lights are completely covered. Each rifleman has a small periscope to view the outside. But the periscope opening is only about two inches by four inches. If you try to look through it while the vehicle is in motion, you're inviting a bad case of motion sickness. You have to bend over to use the periscope, which makes you even more vulnerable to the pummeling from vehicle motion. Your head keeps bobbing up and down from the herky-jerky ride of the BMP, and the view outside seems to have the same sickening up-and-down motion. Riflemen soon learn to curb their curiosity and just sit back.
An even more disagreeable experience occurs when the squad tries to fire its weapons from the inside of the BMP. Demchenko and the 1st Squad had done this often enough on qualification training. Each rifleman has a small firing port in front of his seat. The AKS-74 assault rifle, the current version of the Kalashnikov AK-47, is designed to fit into this socket. So you fold up the stock on the rifle, and push the barrel into the plug. Actually firing the rifle requires some interesting contortions. You're supposed to aim the rifle using the periscope, but the receiver of the rifle is stuck into your chest, so it's hard to bend forward to peer through the periscope. The best way to do this is to let the gun rest under your armpit, but then it's hard to move the gun to either side. The worst moment comes when everybody fires. The noise of an AKS-74 is bad enough on the outside. From the inside, the noise is deafening. The rifles spew out cordite fumes, and the air becomes very difficult to breathe. You can't aim after a few bursts, because your eyes are watering from the fumes, and the sights are becoming fogged up from all the smoke. And try changing a rifle magazine while your gun is plugged into the socket!
As uncomfortable as the ride was, the squad's soldiers had other things on their minds. Like all soldiers in combat for the first time, they wondered what battle would be like. They worried about how they would act.
12
This is not as implausible as it seems. In 1988, a T-80 tank driven by a Kazakh was accidently steered onto the train tracks on the Leipzig-Berlin line in East Germany. It stalled, and in the ensuing crash six Germans were killed and thirty injured. The Soviet investigating team found that the driver could not read Russian warning signs at the crossing, didn't understand his commander's instructions in Russian, and hadn't figured out how to use the tank's night vision devices.