Zinky Boys Read Online Free Page B

of a sudden. From too much vodka, was it, or flu? Too many oranges, perhaps? Their loved ones wept and the rest just carried on until they were affected by it themselves. The newspapers talked about how our soldiers were building bridges and planting trees to make ‘Friendship Alleys’, as they called them, and about how our doctors were looking after Afghan women and children.
    At our training-camp in Vitebsk everyone knew we were being prepared for Afghanistan. One guy admitted he was scared we’dall be killed. I despised him. Just before embarkation another guy refused to go. First he said he’d lost his Komsomol card! Then, when they found it, he said his girl was about to have a baby. I thought he was mad. We were going to create a revolution, weren’t we? That’s what we were told and we believed it. It was kind of romantic.
    When a bullet hits a person you hear it. It’s an unmistakable sound you never forget, like a kind of wet slap. Your mate next to you falls face down in the sand, sand that tastes as bitter as ash. You turn him over on his back. The cigarette you just gave him is stuck between his teeth, and it’s still alight. The first time it happens you react like in a dream. You run, you drag him, and you shoot, and afterwards you can’t remember a thing about it and can’t tell anyone anyway. It’s like a nightmare you watch happening behind a sheet of glass. You wake up scared, and don’t know why. The fact is, in order to experience the horror you have to remember it and get used to it. Within two or three weeks there’s nothing left of the old you except your name. You’ve become someone else. This someone else isn’t frightened of a corpse, but calmly (and a bit pissed off, too) wonders how he’s going to drag it down the rocks and carry it for several kilometres in that heat.
    This new person doesn’t have to imagine: he knows the smell of a man’s guts hanging out; the smell of human excrement mixed with blood. He’s seen the scorched skulls grinning out of a puddle of molten metal, as though they’d been laughing, not screaming, as they died only a few hours before. He knows the incredible excitement of seeing a dead body and thinking, that’s not me! It’s a total transformation, it happens very quickly, and to practically everyone.
    There’s no mystery about death for people caught up in war. Killing simply means squeezing the trigger. We were taught that ‘he who fires first stays alive’. That’s the law of war. ‘You need to do two things — run fast and shoot straight. I ’ll do all the thinking round here,’ our CO told us. We pointed our guns where we were told, and then fired them, exactly as we’d been trained, and I didn’t care, not even if I killed a child. Everyone was part of it over there: men and women, young and old, kids. One time,our column was going through a kishlak when the leading vehicle broke down. The driver got out and lifted the bonnet — and a boy, about ten years old, rushed out and stabbed him in the back, just where the heart is. The soldier fell over the motor. We turned that boy into a sieve. If we’d been ordered to, we’d have turned the whole village to dust.
    All any of us wanted was to survive. There was no time to think. We were eighteen or twenty years old. I got used to other people’s deaths but I was frightened of dying myself. I saw how a man could become nothing, literally nothing, as though he’d never been. When that happened they put empty full-dress uniforms in the coffin, and threw in a few spadefuls of Afghan earth to make up the weight …
    I wanted to live.
    Never, before or since, have I wanted to live as much as I did there. After a battle we’d just sit and laugh. I never laughed like I did then. We loved jokes, the older the better. For example: This currency smuggler or fartsovshik comes to