Afgantsy

sixteen thousand feet high, a march which went down in army legend. The regiment soon suffered its first casualties: one soldier was captured and his mutilated body was found two days later. His murderer had foolishly held on to the man’s rifle. He was found and shot on the spot.²⁹

The regiment’s task was to block the caravan route from Pakistan and China through the Wakhan Corridor, a thin sliver of land carved out by the British eight decades earlier as a barrier between themselves and the Russians, and to prevent the lucrative export of lapis lazuli, which the insurgents mined in the high mountains. Its nominal strength was 2,198, but in practice it could usually muster no more than some fifteen hundred men because of casualties, sickness, and detachment.³⁰ The base was about three miles outside Faisabad itself, in a broad valley surrounded by hills and mountains. It had a hospital, a shop, a bakery, a library, and a laundry. You could bathe in the fast-flowing River Kochka nearby, a dangerous business: thirty soldiers drowned in the course of five years. Such accidental deaths were normally written off for the record as battle casualties.

The officers lived in modules. The soldiers lived in tents, each with room for sixty men, heated by two wood stoves in the winter. The better tents were made in three layers: the outside layer consisted of waterproof canvas, the next was made of thick material to provide insulation, and the inside layer was of light cloth to brighten the tent up.³¹ The inhabitants often covered the inside of their tent with wood from ammunition boxes. This made it more homely, kept out the draughts in the winter, and stopped it blowing about so much in the wind. The soldiers had no proper boxes in which to keep their possessions, so they used the space between the walls of the tents to hide letters, photos, presents for their families, home-brewed beer, drugs, and other contraband.

The 1st Battalion was lucky enough to live in more permanent accommodation at Bakharak, some twenty- five miles from Faisabad, in a valley surrounded by high mountains and fed by three rivers, whose banks were thick with cherry trees. Villages lay on the broad mountain terraces, surrounded by orchards and small cultivated fields. Irrigation canals watered the whole valley. The battalion consisted of three rifle companies, mortar, rocket, and howitzer batteries, a reconnaissance platoon, a signals platoon, and an administrative platoon—nominally about five hundred men, though at times the number might fall to half that.

The road from Bakharak to Faisabad was open at first. Supplies got through without trouble and the battalion commander could go to regimental meetings in Faisabad by jeep. But by the end of 1980 the battalion was cut off from the rest of the regiment by the insurgents. Attempts were made each summer to send through a supply column. Each summer the column got bogged down under fire and needed to turn back. So the battalion had to be supplied by helicopter: twice a day, except on Sundays, weather permitting. The helicopters would arrive in pairs, two Mi-8s, flying at a great height until they were over the landing strip, firing flares as protection against the mujahedin’s anti-aircraft rockets. The soldiers would rush to greet them as they landed, to unload the cargo and to collect their letters from home.

The battalion lived in an old Afghan fort, about seventy-five yards square, with a watchtower on each corner. The men were on duty from five in the morning to ten at night, and slept in rooms built into three of the mud walls. The fourth wall was more than three feet thick and twelve feet high. The roofs were flat, made of wood branches and earth which had bonded together and kept the place cool in summer and warm in winter. The windows were covered with plastic and looked out on a gallery surrounding the internal courtyard. The soldiers built another low wall around the territory. It contained the elements of a garden, with shady trees, roses, and grass. A huge apricot tree stood in the middle and a thick mulberry tree in one corner. There were irrigation ditches with running water even inside the perimeter of the fort. Outside the wall were a small helicopter pad and a park for the battalion’s armoured vehicles. The generator sometimes worked for only two hours a night and the soldiers had to make do with kerosene lamps.³²

Improvements were added gradually. In the first year there was no bathhouse: the soldiers remained dirty throughout the winter until the ice broke on the river and they could wash themselves.³³ The quarters were given wooden ceilings so that bits of wood and earth no longer fell on the sleepers’ heads. The walls were whitewashed. Brick stoves were built to keep the place warm. A line of concrete blocks was set up to commemorate the battalion’s dead. It was called the Alley of Glory, and the soldiers goose-stepped past it when they mounted the guard. The ‘Lenin Room’ acquired a television set: you could just about get two Soviet programmes when the generator was working. Sometimes a cinema operator brought a film from Faisabad. But for the most part the soldiers of the 1st Battalion had to amuse themselves as best they could. There were of course no women at Bakharak. From the vantage of their watchtowers, the soldiers would unscrew the sniperscopes from their rifles to look at the local women in their courtyards.³⁴

There was a straggling kishlak of about fifteen hundred inhabitants a few hundred yards from the fort. In 1982 the mujahedin shelled the fort a couple of times with mortars. Towards the end of the war a sentry was killed by a sniper. Otherwise the relationship between the inhabitants of the fort and the inhabitants of the kishlak was not particularly hostile. The soldiers were not supposed to go there on their own lest they were attacked or kidnapped. But they were occasionally allowed to visit the bazaar in armed groups with an officer, sometimes accompanied by armoured vehicles, to buy cigarettes and matches, sweets as a substitute for the sugar that they used to brew their own beer, braga, lamb and rice to make plov (pilaf) to celebrate someone’s birthday, jeans and tape recorders to take home, and fresh fruit, which cost next to nothing in season. The drugs were cheap too, or you could get them in exchange for a bar of soap.³⁵

Despite the hardships, the morale of the soldiers held up, for the most part, well enough. They did their duty on the battlefield and they endured stoically until the longed-for day of demobilisation arrived. Everything depended on the quality of their officers. The Soviet officers had been thoroughly trained in the principles of leadership: how to look after their men and how to manage them in battle.³⁶ But when they arrived in Afghanistan most of them had no practical experience. And—as in other armies—not all of them were up to the job.

The soldiers knew well enough what they wanted from their officers: competence and fairness, personal courage, tactical skill, and a sense that their lives would not be sacrificed unnecessarily. What they did not want, but felt they got too often, were commanders more concerned with promoting their military careers than caring for their soldiers’ lives. These are the concerns of soldiers throughout the ages: Private Warren Olney, who fought for the Union in one of the first battles of the American Civil War, expressed himself in almost the same terms.³⁷

Long after they had served together in Bakharak, Alexander Gergel called on his company commander, Captain Yevgeni Konovalov, in retirement. ‘With his Cossack moustaches he was dashing in appearance, lively, full of joie de vivre in every word and movement… When I now look back over those past events, I am horrified to think what a difficult position the company commander found himself in: on the one hand, the oppressive commands of his superiors and on the other, the commands of his conscience, which prevented him from sacrificing his eighteen-year-old soldiers to promote the interests of a few careerists, who looked on the war as a way of getting on in the service more quickly. I greatly respected my commander when I was serving with him. But later I respected him even more when I understood how much he had really done to protect us, and to ensure that we got back safe and sound to our parents. Under Konovalov, our company was one of the best. But I think that he soon understood the pointlessness of the war, and was determined not to expose his people unnecessarily to hostile fire, or carry out stupid orders with too much zeal.’³⁸

‘The main thing,’ said Alexander Kartsev about his time as an infantry lieutenant, ‘was to keep the men occupied with real work. After I… was sent to command a platoon at a guard post, I found that the senior soldiers (and the cronies of the deputy platoon commander) had got into the habit of making the new arrivals do sentry duty at the worst times: at night and before dawn. Since I had to sign the roster, it was not difficult to see what was going on. And if instead of sleeping you go round the sentries twice a night, you see and learn a great deal. We sorted out the problem within a week.

‘Then we made sure that the men were always busy, so that they did not have too much free time. In addition to the necessary business of strengthening our fortifications, I organised daily PT sessions. We had no radio or television, the newspapers arrived irregularly, and we were seriously short of information. So in the evening I got each soldier to talk about his home and his family, and those who could play the guitar or the harmonium would put on concerts.

‘And the platoon commander needed to know his men: not only his deputy, but the four sergeants, the Komsomol secretary, the medical orderly, the drivers, the gunners. That was already half of the platoon; and you