halfway down from the rim, on the table edge and said, “Kontact'.
Each of us in turn repeated the gesture, saying, “Yest, kontact,” as if we were a flight of Kobra pilots lined up on a grassy strip during the Great Patriotic War.
The man making the toast would then reply, “Ot vinta,” the command for the ground crew to clear the prop and start engines.
We would all then hoist our glasses, with our elbows at a precise ninety degrees from our torsos, exhale loudly, and drain the cognac.
But these parties became increasingly rare events as we dug into our serious training schedule. The weather on this eastern Georgian plateau held good through the spring and summer of 1984. And we were soon flying three or four sorties a day, four times a week. This meant our wake-up time was shifted from 0530 to 0400. As we were required to get at least eight hours sleep a night, we were usually in bed immediately after dinner. The pace was exhausting, but no one complained. As always, Colonel Rinchinov had been right: Young fighter pilots loved flying more than anything else. We would have gladly flown seven days a week, if Air Force regulations had permitted.
And as the pace of training got tougher, we broke the stress with practical jokes and humor. Just before pulling on our G-suits every morning, someone would always crack a new joke that would keep us laughing until we climbed into our aircraft.
One day, during a particularly rough training cycle, Boris Bagomedov, the usually serious Dagestani, had us practically rolling on the tarmac.
“All right,” he said with his hoarse accent, “what’s the difference between an American, an Israeli, and a Russian pilot? An American pilot jumps in his cockpit and sits on a thumbtack.” He plucked at the seat of his flight suit to extract the imaginary tack. “‘Shit! What the hell is this?’ So he throws the tack out and gets on with his job.
“An Israeli pilot climbs into his F-16,” Boris continued, repeating the same gesture. “He cries out in pain, pulls out the tack, looks at it, and sticks it in his pocket. ‘This may be useful someday,’ he says.”
Boris folded his arms across his chest in a typical Russian posture. “A Soviet pilot sits down in his MiG-23 and gets a tack in his ass. He pulls it out and swears, ‘Blyat! What’s this?’ Then he thinks for a moment. ‘Maybe it’s supposed to be there.’ And he sticks it back in his ass.”
Like all good jokes, Boris’s story had a core of truth.
In July pilots from the 2nd Squadron came back to Vaziani on leave from Afghanistan and filled us in on the realities of combat in that particularly nasty war. The Mujahedin were a murderous bunch who took pleasure in torturing and butchering any unlucky Soviet pilot that they shot down and captured. And the Kandahar Air Base was often brought under mortar or rocket attack, so the air crew were not tempted to stray into town.
But they flew an intense schedule. There were no dogfights, of course. And the air-defense tactics of the Mujahedin were relatively primitive, at least for the moment. The enemy forces had American Redeye shoulder-fired missiles, which were not very effective in the hands of the Afghans. But their 12.7mm and 14.5mm antiaircraft machine guns could be dangerous below an altitude of about 4,500 feet. This happened to be the bomb-release altitude we were currently using for our ground-attack training. So we listened intently to the veterans from the 2nd Squadron.
Colonel Rinchinov immediately shifted tactics and tailored our attack training to meet these new conditions. Most of our bomb and rocket-attack training was conducted on a dedicated range of the sprawling Karachala Air Base in Azerbaijan. This was an ideal location to test our new tactics. Now we flew steep, fast, high-G bomb runs, dropping like an old Luftwaffe Stuka from 21,000 feet and releasing our 1,000-pound fragmentation bombs at about 9,000 feet before hitting the air brakes and executing a savage, seven-G pullout. After a bit of practice we could hit targets on a sixty-degree dive angle and consistently pull out above 6,000 feet.
Then our intelligence officer reported that the Mujahedin were receiving new American Stinger shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles. These were far superior to the Redeyes. Major Kuchkov studied the specifications of the Stinger and concluded that he could develop bombing tactics to overpower the missile’s maneuverability and tracking. His new ground-attack maneuver was brilliant. Basically the four aircraft in a link would roll in on their target from four separate directions if possible, in a slightly staggered sequence. After weapons release at about 3,000 feet altitude, each plane would pull up steeply at a sixty-degree, six-G climb. The dive would be made with enough energy to allow the initial climb with the throttle at idle to minimize infrared emissions. In the climb, the pilot would begin a complete roll while simultaneously popping decoy flares. The roll would end with the aircraft back in level attitude, only 300 feet above the ground, with the nose turned toward the target and the tail pipe shielded from the enemy’s Stinger positions. The pilot would then hit his afterburner and speed away on the deck.
It was one hell of a maneuver to master, even on the simulator. But we all recognized how effective it would be in combat against the Stinger.
We became so proficient in our ground-attack training that our 3rd Squadron was selected to represent the regiment in the division weapons competition that summer. Kuchkov led us into the bombing run on the poligon, using his dazzling anti-Stinger maneuver. No sooner had he recovered than the division safety inspector was screaming on the radio, “Stop this gross violation! Stop this hooliganism immediately!”
Kuchkov was called on the carpet, but was not seriously reprimanded. The worst outcome, however, was this new innovative maneuver, which could have saved many lives in Afghanistan, was never added to the combat training syllabus.
In September 1984 I was one of five new lieutenants in the regiment to pass the written and practical flight examinations to qualify as a Second Class pilot. I was less than two years out of the Armavir Academy when I crossed this difficult hurdle, an achievement that usually required four years of regimental flying. This was less of a tribute to me than to the excellent leadership of Colonel Rinchinov, Major Kuchkov, and their subordinate officers.
The 3rd Squadron had received the warning order to prepare for deployment to Afghanistan after the New Year. We became even more serious about our training. No one was reckless, however. Major Kuchkov and Colonel Rinchinov trusted our individual judgment in any given situation. They recognized that self-preservation was a strong motivating force, even among hot young fighter pilots. Rinchinov always gave us the old Russian tailor’s advice, “Measure seven times and cut once.” This did not mean to act timidly, but rather to exercise mature prudence.
During this period the regimental Party secretary advised me that I was probably now ready to submit my application for membership in the Communist Party. I had been a candidate member since coming to Georgia. In any given Air Force regiment every active pilot and most of the maintenance officers were Party members. Party membership was not quite an automatic-privilege, however, and there was a certain traditional ritual to follow. Men with reputations as heavy drinkers were excluded and brand-new lieutenants were rarely accepted. Several of my fellow lieutenants also received the secretary’s nod at this time. They consulted their Komsomol manuals and submitted standard answers to the most important question on the membership application form: “Why do you wish to become a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union?”
The stock answer always had something to do about the Party being in “the vanguard of the proletariat.” As long as you used some combination of that tested formula, your application was usually endorsed by the unit’s Communist kollectiv.
But I decided to write another answer. As long as I was going to become a Party member, I wanted to take the matter seriously. I understood that fewer than fifteen percent of Soviet citizens were granted this privilege, and I saw the Party as an elite group that could help bring about the needed fundamental reforms that Chairman Andropov had begun, but which were stagnating under his elderly successor, Konstantin Chernenko.
“Since becoming a military pilot,” I said to the members during the regimental Partkom meeting called to consider our applications, “I have gained increasing responsibility. I now feel that I am ready to take on an even greater responsibility, membership in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”
The secretary seemed thrilled by my answer, and Partkom wrote a glowing endorsement to my application.
A few weeks later I boarded a transport that flew my group of successful new applicants to division headquarters in Mikha Tskhakaya. Dressed in our pressed uniforms, we stood before the red banner of the Soviet Union and the standard plaster bust of Lenin as we took our oath as full Party members. Normally I wasn’t much for
