reach its great Socialist potential if the people were well led and motivated. I shared his optimism.
“Finally,” I told Pashka and Igor one night in the sauna, “we have a man in Moscow who will shake things up and get this country back on track.”
That spring the regiment’s 1st Squadron left for Afghanistan to replace the 2nd Squadron in Kandahar. Boris Bagomedov was now a member of the 1st Squadron, and I was with him on the apron the morning the squadron prepared for takeoff on the first leg of the flight east.
I had known Boris for six years; we had shared that huge tent of candidate cadets in the sweltering selection camp at Armavir. Even then, he had looked older than the other boys. His face had a definite Asian appearance, with sharp, clean-cut features and smooth olive skin. Unlike most Muslim men, he did not wear a mustache. But he spoke with the distinct accent of the Dagestan mountains, swallowing his consonants and rounding out his vowels. However, none of the Russian guys in that tent had mocked him as a “national hero.” Boris had the thick chest and wide shoulders of a classical wrestler. He was incredibly strong and could do 140 pull-ups on the chinning bar. And when he moved, it was with a certain slow grace.
Neither the academy’s academic course nor the flight training had come easy to him. But Boris ground along, the tortoise to the flashy hares like Sergei and Karpich. It hadn’t surprised me when Boris was selected for accelerated MiG-23 training. People made a real mistake when they confused his native reticence and quiet manner with stupidity. It was only in our last year in the academy that we were able to convince Boris to taste vodka and enjoy the forbidden pleasures of pork sausage.
I certainly recognized this ethnic aspect of my friend more clearly after Boris went home to his village in Dagestan on his first annual leave from Vaziani and returned with his new wife, Sultanat. In his matter-of-fact way he announced that this shy young girl who matched his chiseled features and olive complexion had been selected to be his wife when she was a child. After Boris went to the academy, Sultanat studied to be a primary school teacher so that they would be social equals.
Boris was inordinately proud when he announced that Sultanat was expecting a child. Almost nine months to the day after their wedding, she gave birth to a healthy boy, who we all joked would naturally be named Bagomed Bagomedovich Bagomedov Bago-medovsky.
“No,” Boris said, his serious face knit in a frown, “we will call him Bulat.”
Only when we broke into loud guffaws did Boris realize we’d been having him on. That night he bought the cognac and helped us drink it.
But three months later no one in the regiment was laughing. It was a clear winter Wednesday morning, and we had already flown two training sorties, when the zampolit sent the commander’s GAZ and driver racing out to the flight line to pick up Boris. There had been an accident with Boris’s baby in the military housing compound, and Boris had to meet his wife and child at a civilian hospital in Tbilisi. Boris didn’t even change out of his flight suit before clambering into the vehicle.
He did not return to the regiment for several weeks. But we all had heard the story by afternoon. Sultanat had been feeding the baby his first solid food in their tiny apartment. And this young Muslim girl, far from her home village, was too shy to ask other women how to best prepare food for an infant. The baby spit up on a piece of fruit and began choking. Soon the baby was turning blue.
When Boris reached the hospital, the baby was still alive, but was failing fast. To his shock and bitter dismay, he and his family were kept out in a crowded waiting room. No one brought an oxygen bottle; no doctor appeared to perform a simple tracheotomy. The Georgian nurses were indifferent.
By the time Boris forced his way past the nurse station and physically accosted a doctor, his baby son was dead.
He took his wife and the body of their child back to Dagestan and returned alone three weeks later to Vaziani.
When I saw him again, his smooth, composed face was a mask of grief and torment. Colonel Rinchinov had explained to him what went wrong in the hospital.
“Down here in Georgia,” Boris said through his clenched teeth, “you have to either know the doctor or pay a bribe to be treated.”
Boris’s face was still set in mournful anger. “How could they refuse to treat a baby? Is this the Socialist morality the zampolits are always preaching?”
He walked away before I could find some suitable answer.
Boris changed after that. Now he drank with relish. Where he had stolidly worked on his professional skills in the past, he now simply did minimal preparation for each training flight.
And here he was, signing the maintenance officer’s logbook to take possession of this MiG-23 for the flight to Tashkent and on to Kandahar. Around us on the tarmac, wives were hugging their husbands as children clung to the knees of their fathers’ flight suits. All the women and kids were crying. The war in Afghanistan was in its sixth year and showed no sign of ending. Luckily the 2nd Squadron had returned from their combat tour with no casualties. But no one expected the 1st Squadron to preserve this run of luck.
The signal came to clear the aprons for engine start. I grasped Boris’s hand, then hugged him. “I wish I were going with you, Borya. Be careful out there.”
“Sanya,” he said gravely, “if you only knew how much I hate going there.”
CHAPTER 7
Glasnost
1985
Soon after the 1st Squadron left for combat duty in Afghanistan, word came down that the new MiG-29 regiment in the Transcaucasus Military District would not, after all, be established at Gudauta. I was in my squadron ready room reading a new intelligence report on the American F-15 when Colonel Rinchinov came in and broke the news to Igor and me.
“Zuyev, you’ll be happy to learn that you’ll be returning to the garden spot of Georgia, Mikha Tskhakaya.”
The colonel explained this sudden change of plans. It seemed that a second regiment in the district was going to receive another model of fourth-generation fighter, the new Su-27 interceptor, which was very similar in configuration to the MiG-29, but heavier, longer and wider. Recent Defense Ministry doctrine required that all combat aircraft be hangared in hardened concrete aircraft shelters against possible enemy surprise attack. These shelters were also needed to perform maintenance on the new planes’ sophisticated electronics. That was one of the reasons Gudauta had been selected as the site for the new MiG-29 regiment. As a PVO installation, the 182nd Regiment’s big Su-15s had all been kept in these supposedly bombproof hangars. Each of the Gudauta hangars was big enough to accommodate one of the smaller MiG-29s.
But the structures were too small for the Su-27, which had a much wider wingspan than either the Su-15 or the MiG-29. This meant that concrete aircraft shelters for the Su-27 would have to be built at some base in the district. The bureaucratic wizards in Tbilisi and Moscow, however, had decreed that the new Sukhoi interceptors would be based in Gudauta and that my old unit, the 176th Regiment in Tskhakaya, would be equipped with MiG- 29s. This decision was illogical. It meant that brand-new concrete aircraft shelters would have to be built at both bases.
According to our Stroybat construction officers, their battalions could build one apartment building for officers and their families for the cost of three of those shelters. I mentioned this fact to Igor.
“Well, my dear comrade,” Igor said, grinning bleakly as he always did when breaking the news of some gargantuan bureaucratic stupidity, “you’ve no doubt heard that in the Soviet military the medics perform tonsillectomies by going through your ass.”
“How can a system this fucked up possibly work?” I asked.
On the ready room table lay a copy of Red Star, in which the Army chief of staff had written an article that General Secretary Gorbachev’s sweeping reforms were going to completely transform the Soviet military into the world’s best-equipped, most efficient fighting force. I thought for a moment of the military housing complex here at Vaziani. Again I could picture the pilots’ wives in their shabby flowered housecoats, lugging their sloshing chamber
