“I didn’t pay money for them,” he said. “The dushman who had them paid me with his blood.”
He shoved the beads across the table and fingered his knife blade thoughtfully. Obviously these were not a suitable gift for his wife or child. Turquoise was supposed to be a good-luck stone, but the beads had not been very lucky for that Afghan. Later, when I rolled the beads between my fingers, I often thought of the Afghan guerrillas in the steep mountains who were defending their homeland as they aimed their Kalashnikovs at the young Soviet soldiers sent there to fulfill their “internationalist duty.”
For a few minutes we sat in silence. Then the woman speaker on Radio Liberty announced in the precise diction of the Moscow intelligentsia that the percentage of Afghan territory controlled by Soviet and government forces had decreased dramatically during the course of the summer fighting. Valery chuckled, as if at some private joke. The Soviet military, he said, controlled less than a third of the country. And the towns they did manage to hold on to always reverted to the dushman after dark.
I flipped through the pile of photos that he had brought out. Several were of Valery on patrol with his small section. They were strung out along a steep ridgeline of bare, broken rock jutting at crazy angles between beds of rotten old snow. Each man carried a heavy rucksack with a bedroll slung beneath it. Valery kept his AKM assault rifle hanging close to his chest. He had a new long forty-five round magazine, an innovation of the Afghan war. To a soldier, this evoked desperate, close-range engagements in which the normal thirty-round magazine was not adequate. He stared up at the camera, his eyes crusty from the snow glare and exhaustion.
Finally I broke the silence between us. “What was it really like?”
Valery took the picture from my fingers and squinted at it through his cigarette smoke. “That was going toward the pass above Nayak,” he said thoughtfully. “We crossed three valleys on that march. Each one took us half a day up and half a day down. When we got to the phase line for the assault, those two boys' — he tapped his thick finger on the photo — “stepped on mines. We had to drag them halfway down the mountain to find a usable landing zone for the medical helicopter. By then, one of them was already dead.”
I nodded. “It must have been rough.”
“We were ordered back up the ridge,” Valery said, still peering at the grainy black-and-white photo. “When we finally got to the line of departure for the assault, the dushman had pulled out.” He laughed. “Their camp was empty, just a few brass shell casings and some horse crap in the snow.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “That’s hard.”
Again he snorted with brittle laughter. “Two men died to capture a handful of horse manure.” He tossed the picture on the pile. “Sasha, when we came off that ridge, I spotted one of the butterfly mines lying on the edge of the snow. You know the little plastic ones?”
I nodded.
“I stood there, staring at the mine,” Valery said, his voice wooden. “Then found myself walking toward it. My leg was up, my boot was right over it. I had to really struggle with myself not to stamp on that mine and finish the whole business right there.”
Valery lit another cigarette, his fingers shaking.
“Well,” I said, “you’ve done your time out there. They won’t send you back.”
He cocked an eye. “Oh, but they will, Sasha. There aren’t many of us left, the old-timers who know the ropes.”
“But you won’t have to go for a third tour, Valery,” I assured him. “They can’t force you.”
“I’ll go if they ask me,” Valery said quietly. “Someone who knows the score has to take care of the young boys they drop out there, fresh from the training barracks.” He shook his head sadly. “I’ve replaced six lieutenants who died in those mountains. I’ve learned how to stay alive.”
Valery’s wish to protect the young soldiers was only one reason. He had also become as much addicted to the war as he apparently was to those little green pills. Back here, serving routine peacetime duty, he felt old and empty. It was only out in those heartbreaking mountains of rock and ice, where death could come at any moment of the day or night, that he could still feel alive.
The long war in Afghanistan was changing more than just brave combat soldiers like Valery Tallokonikov. When the 512th Regiment’s 2nd Squadron returned to Vaziani from Kandahar, the commanding officer, Major Nikolai Gorbunov, received a much-deserved decoration. He had led his men for a year in some of the worst of the mountain fighting, without losing a single pilot or aircraft. In fact, Major Gorbunov was ordered to help revise the ground-attack tactics manual, based on his successful experience. Then suddenly one Monday morning, the Osobii Otdel descended on the regiment and the major was placed under investigation.
Apparently some Osobist “knocker” had informed on Gorbunov, revealing a relatively minor but embarrassing indiscretion. It was reported that, in Afghanistan, the major had quickly acquired a mistress, a reasonably good- looking waitress in the officers’ dining room in Kandahar, and the major treated her well.
The Voyentorg at the Kandahar Air Base was one of the best in the entire Soviet military, stocked with a rich variety of contraband: Japanese electronics, blue jeans, and cigarettes seized from Afghan smugglers. And the prices were incredibly low: A soldier or airman paid in military script, which meant that a pair of Levi’s or a Sony video recorder often cost less than a hundred rubles. Gorbunov, not an especially handsome man, was said to have been generous toward the woman with his Voyentorg bounty, so she was generous with her own favors. Their liaison was open. This was a common practice, one of the advantages of rank. No one complained, because Gorbunov was a brave officer who always flew the most dangerous strikes and never departed the target area until the objective had been hit. And he was always the last man to drop his bombs or fire his rockets, which was the most dangerous slot in any attack formation.
But Gorbunov had gone too far toward the end of his tour. He decided to reward the waitress by taking her along as a backseat passenger in a MiG-23UB on a routine strike. She was thrilled to see the bombs impact far below in the steep gorge and to glimpse a few orange and green tracer rounds sparkle against the overcast winter sky. And that was the end of the indiscretion.
Gorbunov probably saw the incident as a minor diversion in his long combat tour. But he inadvertently broke an important Soviet Air Force taboo: putting women in the cockpit. Unlike Western air forces, neither the VVS nor the PVO had women pilots in combat or transport aircraft. The most important position a woman could obtain in the VVS was control tower dispatcher; most were clerks or waitresses. During the Great Patriotic War, there had been the famous Night Witches “bomber” squadron, in which women pilots flew night milk runs in old Po-2 biplanes, dropping small harassment bombs in safe areas behind German lines. Stalin made a lot of these women pilots, and even decorated several personally with major medals for valor. He understood that the image of women in combat would encourage men in the front lines toward even greater sacrifice. But since this small propaganda unit was disbanded, no Soviet woman had ever flown a military aircraft.
Certainly the waitress’s “combat” mission was an innocent fluke. But when the Osobists were finished with their dirty work, Major Gorbunov was stripped of his decoration and cashiered from the Air Force — discharged onto the street with no pension and no possibility of finding work as a civilian pilot. But one year later his small pension was restored under a new regulation meant to protect the rights of Afghanistan veterans who had committed infractions during the stress of combat.
What made all this even more distasteful was the fact that staff officers from Kabul routinely earned combat pay and presented each other decorations by flying as backseat “observers” on such routine strikes. They knew full well there was little danger on these missions, so it was obvious that Gorbunov had not “risked” State property or the life of a noncombatant Soviet citizen, as he had been charged.
When I told Valery about this, he merely shook his head and smiled. The logical explanation, he said, was that some senior staff rat had been pissed off at Gorbunov for stealing his girlfriend and had sent the Osobist mice out to nibble at crumbs. Russian girls in Kabul, Valery said, were earning a lot of money by performing “extra duty.” Some of them even received decorations from their patrons among the headquarters staff.
“Those girls earn the Order of the Red Banner for lying on their backs,” Valery said. “But you know what a young paratrooper gets for leading a charge?”
I shook my head.
“The Order of the Dick in the Ass.” Valery laughed bitterly. That particularly “decoration” was very familiar to the “Afghansti,” as the veterans had come to be called.
I could have dismissed Major Gorbunov’s sad story as an aberration if it hadn’t been for a sensational news story that exploded that summer. One of the first stories to appear in military journals in the civilian press concerned drug smuggling among the military in Afghanistan.
