Petr shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Nothing? You mean no one,” Miss Croogar corrected him, scribbling in her pad. “No matter. You’re a hero now. I’ll bet the girls will be lining up for a kiss—”
“No. I mean nothing. I won’t do anything after the war.”
Now Miss Croogar looked confused. “You gotta do something—”
“I think he means that he will continue to serve his country,” interrupted Miss Croogar’s Russian advisor. Stalin and his Politburo didn’t trust foreign journalists, so they assigned “advisors” to watch over them. The advisor’s truest purpose was to prevent Miss Croogar from writing anything that might embarrass the Communist Party.
“I’ll never survive the war,” Petr declared with complete confidence.
It was not the answer Miss Croogar was expecting, but she only hesitated a moment before writing down his response. “What makes you think so?”
“You said I’m a hero, yes?”
Jillian nodded. “That’s why I’m here.”
“Russian heroes always die.”
Miss Croogar paused and stared at Petr. This interview was becoming far more interesting than the propaganda puff piece she had expected. “Why’s that?”
“Because they’re always given the most dangerous jobs.”
The advisor nodded at that. “They’re fearless. It is part of the Russian character.”
No, not because they’re fearless, Petr wanted to say. Because they’re expendable. He didn’t dare say it out loud, though. He knew better than to criticize the army or the government, especially with an official right there at his bedside. Petr was slightly surprised that he had even consciously summoned the thought. He had grown adept at burying his thoughts, especially potentially subversive ones, deep in the back of his mind.
Miss Croogar continued to stare at him in the silence. He had the odd sense that she could read his mind. But it wasn’t disturbing. It actually felt comforting somehow.
“Is John Wayne joining the army?” Petr asked.
Miss Croogar looked confused. “Who?”
“John Wayne,” Petr said earnestly. “Your paper, it is from Hollywood, right?”
“Los Angeles, not Hollywood.”
“That’s not the same thing?”
“Not exactly. And John Wayne’s an actor, not a soldier.”
Petr was disappointed. “I’ll bet he’d kill a lot of Germans.”
Miss Croogar smiled. “But not a lot of tanks,” she replied, referring to Petr’s heroics. “You just gave me an idea…” She scribbled something down on the pad of paper. “I’m gonna call you the Russian John Wayne.”
Petr turned red with embarrassment. “Don’t do that.”
Miss Croogar smiled and winked. “Already done.” She folded up her steno pad, shoved it in her breast pocket, and patted it before standing up. “You Russians are always so pessimistic. You’ll survive this war, you’ll see. You’re the Russian John Wayne now. John Wayne never dies.”
Petr didn’t respond. He only watched as the reporter and her government escort exited the hospital.
Despite Miss Croogar’s claims to the contrary, Petr’s suspicions about his impending doom were confirmed by his subsequent transfer. The political officers now believed that his talents were being wasted in the Katyusha battery. He was a tank killer, they thought, and should be trained as such. So that same January, with his legs fully recovered, Petr remained in a rear training battalion. They would teach him to fire the new PTRD antitank rifle.
The PTRD was a simple weapon. It was basically a giant rifle that fired a huge bullet. Fyodor, Petr’s new teammate, told him not to shoot it at a tank’s turret or engine but at something more vulnerable.
Fyodor Malenkov was a short, stocky man who used to work on a collective farm east of Moscow. Judging from his round face and almond eyes, his ancestors had likely come from somewhere in the Asian steppes. Fyodor had taught himself to drive and maintain his farm’s single tractor, and this was the skill that convinced Red Army recruiters to make him a tank driver. He was trained in the operation of the T-28 infantry support tank, an obsolete vehicle quickly being replaced by the new T-34s. Such experience gave Fyodor unique insight into what tankers feared.
Armored vehicles were claustrophobic, loud, uncomfortable, and confusing. Their thick steel plating was supposed to protect their crews, but, psychologically at least, the opposite was true. “I always felt vulnerable,” Fyodor once confessed to Petr, “as if I were driving a gigantic bullet magnet straight at the enemy lines. Once I saw the tank right next to me simply disappear, blown from the inside out by hidden artillery. Another time we were assigned to recover a vehicle that had been hit by a flamethrower. It was still hot, and the corpses inside smelled like roast pork.” Life as a tank crewman meant constant uncertainty and terror, Fyodor explained. “One moment you’d be leading an assault, seemingly invulnerable in your steel coffin, and the next moment you’d be a puddle of burned flesh.”
Even worse, tank crewmen were often running blind. They could open hatches to see, but that was suicide during combat. As a driver, Fyodor was entirely dependent on the eyes of his commander. Unlike the rest of the crew, the tank commander dared stick his head out of a turret hatch and had much greater awareness of the battlefield around him. “Kill the tank commander,” Fyodor advised, “and the crew will be helpless.” Fyodor lost his own tank that way. When his commander was killed in his open hatch, Fyodor and the rest of the crew panicked. They bailed out of the vehicle and ran for the Russian lines. After having lost so many expensive weapons in the opening months of the German invasion, the Red Army now had more tankers than tanks. So, like Petr, Fyodor had been reassigned and retrained.
Petr doubted he could follow Fyodor’s advice. But he was committed to try, because the only alternative was to rely on his mine dog. Mine dogs—brand-new secret weapons—were the second weapons for which Petr was trained. Petr wasn’t exactly the one being trained, of course—the dog was. Petr and Fyodor were simply assigned a dog and instructed on how to command him.
Petr’s dog was named Duck. He was an eighty-four-pound Alsatian wolf dog, the breed later called a German shepherd. Duck was larger than most mine dogs, no doubt because he’d been well fed as a Moscow family’s pet. Duck was named by the family’s two-year-old son, who’d only known three words at the time: Momma, Poppa, and duck. The name seemed to fit, since his favorite pastime was chasing ducks and geese in Moscow’s parks.
The military requisitioned Duck after he’d lived with the family for three years. By that time the young boy had learned quite a few more words, such as patriotic, defender, and fascist invaders. It wasn’t difficult for the Red Army agent to convince the boy that his pet should be trained as a soldier and that Duck would become a true hero of the Soviet Union.
The Red Army agent didn’t tell the boy that Duck would be strapped to a bomb and trained how to blow himself up. Thus the designation of mine dogs: they were living, breathing antitank mines. They were attached to several pounds of TNT and trained to run under panzers, where the tank’s armor was weakest. The action would knock down a wooden stake mounted so it stuck straight up on the dog like an antenna. The trigger would detonate the explosives, killing the dog and destroying the panzer, or so the theory went.
The problem was that Petr liked Duck. He was a smart and affectionate dog. He’d often push his snout up under Petr’s hand, forcing Petr to pet him. And it took Duck less than a day to recognize Petr as his new handler. He responded to Petr’s voice commands immediately but absolutely refused to obey anyone else. Petr thought he was a brilliant dog, as well as a fine physical specimen. Petr believed he would’ve made a good hunting companion and often thought what a waste it was to make Duck commit suicide under some German tank. But Petr was not in charge of the Red Army, and neither was Duck. Their job was simply to do as they were told.