One Soldier's War In Chechnya by Arkady Babchenko

Author:Arkady Babchenko
Language: eng
Format: epub

17/ The Storming Operation

It's quiet. Day has broken but the sun still hasn’t risen and the cloudless sky in the east is illuminated by pink reflections. That’s bad - it’ll be another bright day perfect for snipers.

We sit in the cellar of the command building, warming ourselves by a fire and devouring our dry rations. We’re a bit scared, jittery; it’s as if we’re suspended in weightlessness, just temporary life-forms. Everything is temporary here: the heat from the fire, breakfast, the silence, the dawn, our lives. In a couple of hours we will advance. It’ll be a long, cold, hard slog, but still better than the uncertainty we face now. When it starts everything will be crystal clear, our fear will abate and yield completely to the strong nervous tension that is already starting to overtake. My brain is already lapsing into soporific apathy and the urge to sleep is strong. I just want it to start. I am woken by a rumbling that squeezes my ears. The air shakes, like jelly on a plate, the ground trembles, the walls, the floor, everything. The soldiers get up, keeping close to the wall, and peer out of the window. Only half awake, I don’t understand what's going on and I jump up, grabbing my rifle.

Have the Chechens started shelling us, I wonder? One of the lads turns round and says something. He is speaking loudly, his throat visibly straining to force out the words, but the noise muffles like cotton wool and I can’t hear anything. From his lips I read the words: ‘It’s started.’

It’s started. Now I really am scared. I can’t stay in the gloom of this cellar any more. I have to do something, go somewhere, anything but stay sitting here.

I go out onto the porch and the rumbling intensifies so much that my ears hurt. The infantry press themselves against the walls and hide behind the carriers, all of them in helmets. The commanders stand at the corner of the HQ. house: the Kombat, the guys from regiment headquarters, all craning their necks as they look round the corner in the direction of Grozny, where the explosions are coming from. My curiosity wakens and I too want to see what’s going on. I go down the steps and have only moved ten paces when a sturdy piece of shrapnel the size of a fist slams down at my feet and lies there, hissing in a puddle, its jagged blue-charred edges flashing up at my eyes. Right after comes a shower of hundreds of tiny pieces of shrapnel bouncing off the frozen clay. I shield my head with my arm and run back into the building, tripping and flying inside as I cross the doorstep. I have no more desire to go outside and I make my way down to the basement, to a breach in the wall where light is shining through. A crowd stands at the opening, half of them inside and half outside, exclaiming from

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