Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War by Svetlana Alexievich

Author:Svetlana Alexievich [Alexievich, Svetlana]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2015-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

1st Lieutenant i/c Mortar Platoon

I have the same dream every night. It's like watching a film over and over again. Everyone's running and firing, including me. I

fall down and wake up and I’m on a hospital bed. I start to get up to go and have a smoke in the corridor. Then I realise my legs have gone and I’m back in the real world ...

I don’t want to hear any talk about a ‘political mistake’, OK? Give me my legs back if it was really a mistake.

Have you taken unfinished letters from soldiers’ pockets ... ‘Dear Mama ... ’, ‘My Darling ... ’? Have you seen soldiers shot to pieces by old blunderbusses and modem Chinese machine-guns at the same time?

We were sent to Afghanistan to obey orders. In the army you obey orders first and then, if you like, discuss their merits - when it’s aU over. ‘Go!’ means exactly that. Ifyou refuse you get thrown out of the party. You took the military oath, didn’t you? And back home, when you ask the local party committee for something you need, they tell you, ‘It wasn’t us that sent you!’ Well, who did send us?

I had a friend out there. When I went into action he always said goodbye to me and hugged me when I came back alive. I’ll never find a friend like that here at home.

I hardly ever go out now. I’m ashamed ...

Have you ever tried our Soviet-manufactured prostheses? I’ve heard that abroad people with artificial limbs go skiing, play tennis and dance. Why don’t the authorities use foreign currency to buy decent arms and legs instead of wasting it on French cosmetics, subsidised Cuban sugar or Moroccan oranges?

I’m twenty-two, with my whole life in front of me. I need to find a wife. I had a girlfriend. ‘I hate you,’ I told her, to make her leave me. She pitied me, when what I wanted was her love.

‘I dreamt of home, of nights I lay

Listening to the rowans sigh.

“Cuckoo, cuckoo, tell me pray

How many years before I die . . . ?” ’

That was my favourite song. I used to go into the forest, and ask the cuckoo, and count his calls, but now - sometimes I don’t want to go on living one day longer.

I still long to see that landscape again, that biblical desert. We all have that yearning, it’s like standing at the edge of a precipice, or high over water, and looking down untU your head spins.

Now the war’s over they’re trying to forget all about us, or else hide us out of sight. They treated the veterans of the war with Finland the same way2. Thousands of books have been published about World War II but not one about the Finnish war. Our people are too easy on their rulers - and I’ll have accepted it myself in ten years or so.

Did I kill anybody in Afghanistan? Yes. You didn’t send us over there to be angels -

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