pots across the gravel walk each morning to empty them in the bachelor officers’ latrines. And then there were the young pilots themselves, living seven to a three-man “apartment,” plagued with broken windows and crumbling plaster. But at least they had a toilet and a tap with a sink that drained. In my apartment I had a water tap, but no connection to the sewer. My friends joked that I had become an “English gentleman,” shaving and washing each morning from a metal basin.
“Well,” I told them, “at least Englishmen don’t have to stand in line for soap and razor blades.”
“What’s a razor blade?” Pashka had asked, completely deadpan.
As I hung up my flight suit, these images melded with that of the smooth curved flanks of the MiG-29 in the Lipetsk hangar. It did not seem possible that a nation capable of producing such a beautifully designed and engineered weapon could not find some means to house its military officers in decent conditions.
I slammed my locker door. Gorbachev will kick those bureaucrats in the ass, I thought. He’ll straighten things out.
When I arrived back at the 176th Regiment at the Mikha Tskhakaya Air Base in late June, the changes under way were apparent, but some of the old patterns persisted. The regimental commander who had replaced Homenko, Lieutenant Colonel Gennadi Torbov, complained about inspectors from division staff scrutinizing his flying schedules too closely and safety officers “trying to jam the regiment’s gears” with needless petty regulations. But replacements from my MiG-29 orientation group at Lipetsk and from other regiments were arriving every day to fill up the 1st with First Class pilots.
One of the first problems we had to overcome in making the transition to the new fighter was the lack of UB-model two-seat trainers. Naturally the Mikoyan OKB had designed a dual-cockpit training version of the MiG-29. But when they began producing this model at their factory in Gorkiy, they encountered problems with the large one-piece canopy.
This was part of the general growing pains any new aircraft experiences during its early production. For example, the test flights at Gorkiy revealed that the fighter’s autopilot could develop a violent, dangerous aerodynamic overswing on passing through transonic speed to Mach 1 at low altitude. A crew from the regiment at Kubinka had almost been killed when their two-seater went out of control in such an overswing. Luckily their new K-36D ejection seats worked perfectly at low altitude, demonstrating that the system did indeed live up to its reputed high-speed, low-altitude capability. We all felt good that the ejection seat worked so well, despite the widely held myth in the West that the Soviet Air Force cared more about precious equipment than the lives of its pilots. The test model MiG-29UB, of course, was destroyed.
The net result of these shakedown problems for us was a lack of two-seaters for dual-pilot instructor training. But we were all First Class pilots and appreciated the challenge of flying the new jet without a nanny riding behind us. Our first model 9-12 MiG-29s were not due to arrive at Tskhakaya until July. Meanwhile, we read our manuals, constantly updating the loose-leaf pages with revised data, and practiced flying MiG-23s.
For the first time in over two years, I was not on a highspeed treadmill toward the next scale on the pilots’ rating ladder, and I could afford to spend more time with my friends. So I was pleased that Valery Tallokonikov, with whom I’d been very close at the Armavir Academy, had completed his second combat tour in Afghanistan and had been reassigned for training as a GCI battle-control officer at Tskhakaya. Valery had been a year ahead of me at Armavir. Although not a Samarskiye, he had befriended my group and saved our ass on several occasions when the instructors were about to discover our vodka caches or schedule a snap bed check when we were AWOL. He was an open-faced, husky guy, with long arms and deep-set blue eyes. His face was very Russian, and even at Armavir as a young cadet he seemed to have that typical ageless Russian patience that you often saw in old people in the country.
In his last year at the academy, Valery was washed out of the MiG-21 flight-training program because of repeated safety violations. Valery was the kind of fellow who did not take well to mindless discipline. He was grounded after buzzing his girlfriend Rita’s house in a nearby village. He switched to the GCI course and volunteered for the toughest section: forward ground strike controller. These were VVS officers who traveled with the ground troops or paratroopers and coordinated close air support.
He had originally been assigned to a motorized rifle regiment guarding a sector of the Kabul-Herat highway in the mountains of the Hazarajat. But the ground controller working with a parachute regiment’s reconnaissance group had been killed and Valery volunteered to take his place. This was a long-range unit that operated independently of the regiment’s main force, traveling by foot or helicopter deep into hostile territory to locate enemy bands.
I brought a bottle of Armenian brandy to Valery’s small apartment in the base housing compound and sat down to talk about old times at Armavir. My first impression was that he had aged decades in the four years since I’d seen him. Valery’s close-cropped brown hair had turned gray at the temples. His face was furrowed with lines of strain, and deeply tanned up to the midpoint of his forehead, where the flesh was dead white from constantly wearing a field hat or helmet. But the biggest change was in his eyes.
Valery didn’t want to talk about the war at first, and I refrained from asking. But after a couple of drinks, he seemed to loosen up. Soon after I arrived, I saw him slip a small plastic bottle from his jacket pocket and palm a little green pill, which he washed down with brandy.
Another thing unusual about the evening was that Valery kept his small Toshiba shortwave radio tuned either to the Russian language service of the Voice of America or to Radio Liberty, America’s Russian language shortwave service station. When the news came on at the hour and half hour, he would wave me silent and sit listening, his face fixed in interest.
“They’re the only guys you can trust anymore, Sasha,” he said, pointing at the small radio. “Out there' — his chin tilted toward the east — “nobody listens to Moscow or reads the State press. They’re all packed with shit. And besides, the reception is terrible.”
Valery certainly had a point. Secretary Gorbachev had announced a new policy he called glasnost, “openness,” in the official news media. This strategy seemed intended primarily to expose corrupt bureaucrats and Party officials who were blocking economic progress. But Gorbachev also appeared willing to look honestly at our own history. On the fortieth anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany, for example, Marshal Dmitri Yazov, Gorbachev’s Defense Minister, spoke of the “thirty million” who died during the Great Patriotic War. When I listened to that speech on May 9, I was sure he had made a serious mistake; I had always been taught that twenty million Soviet citizens died during the war. But later, Pravda confirmed Yazov’s figures. I wondered what other surprising revelations glasnost might bring.
But despite glasnost, I had certainly noticed that Soviet television and newspapers never mentioned catastrophes such as fires or plane crashes. The few times that I had listened to Radio Liberty, I had been surprised at the number of coal mine disasters, apartment building collapses, and similar calamities they reported from all over the Soviet Union. And it wasn’t just natural disasters, either. The month before, I had taken a chance to listen to a Radio Liberty report about a prodemocracy demonstration in Moscow’s Pushkin Square that had been broken up by the Militia.
That report was repeated on West Germany’s Deutsche Welle, so I knew it was probably true.
Technically a military officer could be severely disciplined for listening to foreign radio propaganda. But Valery knew I would never inform on him. At nine that night, Radio Liberty broadcast a summary of the recent heavy fighting along the Afghan border with Pakistan. It was as if he had never left the war.
The brandy and the pills had started Valery talking about the war. Now he did not seem able to stop. Twice, he told me, his small unit had been surrounded and Valery had had to fight hand-to-hand in the steep, snowy mountains. On his second tour he was assigned to Kabul, but once more he was sent to a forward unit in the mountains when another ground controller was killed. The duty was among the most hazardous facing Soviet forces in Afghanistan. The Mujahedin guerrillas — dushman, “bandits,” to Valery — had been taught by their foreign advisers to search for the telltale twin radio antennas of the forward air controllers section. Killing the Russian soldiers in this unit was a sure way of stopping the cluster bombs and rockets from the sky.
When he finally stopped talking, Valery presented me with a handsome set of silver and turquoise Afghan prayer beads that had to be quite valuable. At first I tried to refuse them, because I knew that his wife, Rita, and their little daughter were due at the base soon and the beads would make a nice present for one of them.
“No, Sasha,” Valery insisted, “I want you to have them.”
“They’re too valuable,” I argued.
Valery grinned and slipped a long-bladed Damascus fighting knife onto the table between our brandy glasses.
