Valery had told me about finding burlap-wrapped bundles of opium and pasty white heroin base in the camps of Mujahedin his unit had overrun. The official policy was to burn this contraband. But some enterprising Soviet troops — in both the Army and the Air Force — had another disposal technique. Soviet soldiers killed in the war were embalmed in primitive field mortuaries and sealed in zinc coffins for air transport home. But some of these coffins did not contain the eviscerated body of a young Soviet soldier, but rather forty or fifty kilos of opium, hashish, or heroin.
No one knew how long this practice had been going on. That summer, however, a family in Leningrad insisted on opening their son’s coffin. Inside were bundles of hashish and opium sealed in plastic wrapping, but no body. The KGB investigation eventually led to a smuggling network centered on an Air Force transport squadron. Normally the caskets arriving in the Soviet Union would be secretly opened in a hangar, the drugs removed, and a suitable weight of sandbags put inside before resealing. Somehow, this one slipped through.
In the middle of the summer, a message came to the 283rd Division in Tskhakaya that my friend Boris Bagomedov had been shot down and was missing in action. Three days later a second message confirmed that he had been killed. A week later we received a briefing on the shoot-down from the division intelligence officer. After the briefing I was both shocked and saddened. And I began to better understand Valery’s point of view.
Boris had been flying number four position in a four-plane strike, which included two Su-17s from another regiment. A squadron commander from that regiment led the mission, because his unit had more experience. The strike had been planned as a routine daylight bombing attack on a suspected Mujahedin village high in the Panjshir Valley northeast of Kabul. The intelligence on ground offenses indicated the enemy had only a few light machine guns and small arms.
The two MiG-23s from the 2nd Squadron rendezvoused with the Su-17s and proceeded to the target area. The weather was perfect, clear and warm. Boris’s friend, Eduard Igorov, flew the number three aircraft and reported that Boris was in good spirits that morning. Even though the squadron commander had almost a year’s experience in the war, he accepted the intelligence report on face value and planned a simple straight-in approach on the target. The planes were to strike from one direction only.
That would have been acceptable tactics, I suppose, if the Mujahedin had only been armed with Kalashnikovs. In fact, the rebel “village” turned out to be a major fortified staging area, a warren of bunkers, caves, and air-defense sites. The enemy had DShK 12.7mm machine guns, at least one ZU-23 twin-barreled 23mm antiaircraft cannon, and American Redeye and Stinger shoulder-fired infrared homing missiles.
The flight lead made his bomb run without receiving ground fire. But by the time the second and third aircraft rolled in, heavy red tracers looped and twisted around the target zone. Eduard Igorov’s plane was hit in the tail, but he retained control. Boris must have known the situation when he rolled in on his own bomb run. The enemy was wide awake and had definitely gotten the range. They were so confident of shooting him down that they didn’t even use one of their valuable missiles.
Boris’s plane exploded even before he pulled out of his dive. The tumbling fireball smashed into the ridgeline across the valley from the enemy fort. Eduard saw the ejection seat fire from the tumbling mass of debris. But he couldn’t be sure Boris’s parachute deployed before impact. The surviving pilots definitely saw an orange and white parachute canopy crumpled on the rocks not far from the smoke of the crash site.
They called in an Mi-8 rescue helicopter and requested more fighters to suppress the ground fire. Two helicopters answered the call. After the surviving MiG-23 and the Su-17s made strafing runs on the enemy ridgeline, one of the Mi-8s flew across the valley to strike the enemy bunkers with its own rockets and machine guns while the second helicopter flew straight toward the parachute on the ground.
The helicopter pilots had a grim responsibility. According to Soviet military regulations, a man’s family did not receive death benefits or a pension if his body was not recovered from the war zone. Soldiers’ statements that they saw a comrade fall in battle were not considered sufficient evidence of his death. This cruel regulation stemmed from the desperate days early in the Great Patriotic War when some men had gone missing from their units in the thick of battle, but had actually deserted to the Germans or been captured. A soldier was meant to fight to the death if surrounded. To surrender willingly was a serious offense, punishable by years in prison.
But few of us actually considered surrender as an option in battle. All our intelligence briefings had stressed the fact that the NATO forces would torture Soviet pilots savagely to extract as much military information as possible. Then the poor devil would be either executed or killed in one of their horrible medical or drug experiments. Apparently the Westerners had carried on this barbaric tradition with the assistance of their ex-Nazi allies. No one in his right mind would surrender to the Afghan Mujahedin. Their torture methods were less sophisticated than the Americans’, but even bloodier.
By Soviet doctrine, pilots who are shot down are “transferred” to the infantry the moment their boots touch the ground and their parachute collapses. They are then bound by the same orders to fight on as the ground troops. Many of the fellows in Afghanistan carried hand grenades in their flight suits, and strapped a paratrooper’s folding- stock AKM Kalashnikov to their ejection harness.
Whatever the origin of the body-retrieval regulation, the crewmen of rescue helicopters knew they had an obligation not just to the airman on the ground but also to his family.
The rescue helicopter was halfway across the valley when it took a direct hit from a Stinger. Luckily the aircraft did not explode, but it did smash onto the side of the ridge several hundred yards below the wreckage of Boris’s aircraft. The sky above the ridges and valley was suddenly crisscrossed by streams of heavy-caliber tracers. At least one missile was fired, but exploded among the helicopter’s decoy flares. The pilot bore in to try to rescue the crew of the first Mi-8. But the valley was a death trap. The second helicopter went down on the lower slopes of the ridge. Now there were two helicopter crews on the ground and possibly an injured Soviet pilot.
By this time, rotating flights of strike aircraft were laying down an almost continuous bombardment on the enemy-held ridges. They dropped cluster bombs and napalm, fired rockets, and strafed with their cannons. The next morning a ground force of Spetsnaz commandos arrived in light-armored vehicles and rescued the helicopter crews. But the fire from the enemy positions intensified. Now the Air Force used powerful fuel-air explosives to neutralize the Mujahedin gun positions in the caves and bunkers. These were cruelly effective weapons. A mist of fuel droplets was dispersed from a canister by compressed gas and allowed to seep into the enemy positions before being ignited by a delayed fuse. The resulting explosion literally ripped the caves and bunkers apart, killing everyone inside. But the Mujahedin had devised means to counter even these bombs.
The fight dragged on for three days before the enemy fell back in good order. When the Spetsnaz finally reached Boris’s airplane, they found his burnt and mangled remains near the ejection seat. He had been dead before the parachute deployed. But at least Sultanat, his widow, would receive the pitiful death benefit of 120 rubles a month. Maybe back in her home village, I thought, as the major ended his briefing, she would be able to live on that shamefully small pension.
Walking down the corridor of division headquarters from the intelligence office, a picture suddenly rose in my mind. The previous winter in Vaziani, Boris had come down with the flu, and I had visited his small apartment to cheer him up. He had been newly married then. And Sultanat had been too shy to go out alone in the officers’ housing compound. When I entered the apartment, Boris was sleeping in bed, propped up with pillows, wheezing hoarsely. The room was almost dark except for a small reading lamp at the bedside table, where Sultanat had placed a tea tray. His young wife sat straight on a stool, six feet away, gazing intently at her sick husband, the way a faithful servant guarded her master’s sickbed in the old novels. Even though Boris only had a case of the grippe, the young woman’s face bore an expression of forlorn misery. In their world, he was more than just her husband. Boris was her lord and protector.
Now I could picture Sultanat sitting on a stool in the whitewashed parlor of a village house high in the pine mountains of Dagestan, staring at a zinc coffin on a tripod, draped in the red banner of the Soviet Union. What good had Boris’s faithful service to the Rodina done this unfortunate young woman? By marrying him, she had lost her firstborn son, a calamity that could never be extinguished. And now she was a widow with a baby daughter. And all she had in compensation was a pension that equaled a street-sweeper’s salary.
Two days later I found myself seated in the regimental officers’ dining room near the new division commander, Colonel Mikhail Popov. When Popov had finished his meal, I followed him outside. The colonel, who had replaced Major General Anosov, had a reputation for openness. On an impulse, I stepped beside him.
“Comrade Colonel, I’d like permission to speak,” I told him. “We’ve all heard of the death of Senior Lieutenant Bagomedov, and I know the division will be sending a replacement for him. I want to be the man who replaces him.”
