The Afghan war began for me in the front-line Chirchik. The famous training school in the shortest possible time squeezed out all the civilian sauce from our spring draft. Like a simple but perfect machine, it shook out all that was superfluous, equalizing everyone, smart and stupid, strong and weak, educated and dense.
Training is a unique place where you understand that you are not the strongest, not the fastest, and not the smartest. And the "equestrian" classes have hammered into the head the confidence that the paratrooper is an eagle for only three minutes, and everything else is a horse. With what gratitude I later recalled our night races with a box of sand on a hump! For in war your advantage over death is the ability to run fast. Fast and long. And up the hill. And as soon as you get tired and sit down, she will immediately sit next to you, hug you and you will have something to talk about.
Extreme physical activity did an amazing thing, the person became extrapractical. Fulfilling only the norm, no more, using every opportunity for rest and sleep. It is necessary to meet the time on the march, believe me, not a minute earlier, it is necessary to do the standard of exercises on the shells, not one more. The desire to be the first and the best kicked off completely. And at night, the war in Afghanistan came in the terrible stories of junior commanders. Imagination excited, but any questions ended with a "Kandahar bridge". After a year of service, I began to understand the sergeants of our equestrian company, the report on sending across the river remained in the office, and the guys simply burned with envy of these salags, whom they chased in the tail and mane, preparing where they could hardly get themselves. After all, everyone has their own task.
Whatever it was, but the joy that I felt while flying aboard to Kabul was immeasurable. We flew abroad. Not for war. And they didn’t want to understand anything, and they didn’t know anything. Were we doing some kind of international duty? Given the ability to sleep with open eyes in political information classes, no one will say no. Another thing is more important: who were these children who were not even twenty years old, many of whom even shaved every three days. I made a soldier out of them every day. In a certain philosophical, mystical sense, endowing with a certain knowledge, which later, in civilian life, unmistakably allowed one to define "ours" by sight. Of course, the Afghan experience is much broader and more varied than the experience of one DSB, but it is precisely from such rivulets of awareness that the sea of the Afghan war personality consists. Especially if this trickle falls with icy force from the highest peaks.
Yes, I was lucky, lucky to be in the very rush of the Afghan events, in the "caravan" hostilities. That is, there was enough material, texture with the tool. The soldier's luck allowed not to become the very "material" in this texture. I was lucky while my immediate commander was responsible for me, and stopped being lucky when I myself was entrusted with responsibility for eighteen people. Diving into the underworld would probably be more comfortable. Already returning to the mainland, he looked in horror at a group of young summer with a thin mustache, excited by their mission. Realistically imagined that they would have to command the platoons. In war, all are soldiers, but a commander is a martyr if he is a real commander. And the more personnel he has in charge, the more bitter his third shot of vodka will be. Omitting, of course, those people who have a soul of two kopecks, into one Soviet telephone call, in which neither conscience nor shame fits.
Whoever talks about the "Afghan syndrome", about the ordeal of front-line soldiers, but in reality, service in the DRA for many has become a real springboard to life. I am sure that a bitter drunkard, with anguish telling tales about "red tulips" under a stall, would have become like that, having served as a clerk in a construction battalion. War does not break, war tempers. It makes the strong even stronger, and the weak, the weak always. And in everything. It will not be changed by war or lottery winnings. Will not weaken or strengthen, weakness is a constant constant. The VUS in my military card opened almost all doors in the USSR. Personal connections even interfered with this, because they made it difficult to make the right choice. Only the "operator Kyps" helped, whom the command imposed on me to drag a little through the mountains, but with wise advice. What we remember to this day, every two or three years, I make him drink vodka, when in February, and when in August.
Afghanistan has confirmed the amazing peculiarity of the Russian, Soviet people, the brotherhood of veterans. For the first time after the Great Patriotic War, the military brotherhood brought soldiers to the dates of the calendar. In uniform and without, on whose chest was written their whole book of life, the most important thing that the Almighty gave them. By awards, decals, badges, you can study the geography of the globe. Each of these soldiers can become the hero of the book of any military writer. Each has its own unique story, which seemed to him once, and maybe even now, ordinary, ordinary. The path of war, the work is like this. Sacred work, because you are on it every day, or even an hour, or even a minute, you experience your death. Afghanistan-Asia, Vietnam, Africa, Yugoslavia, Moldova, Chechnya and now Ukraine. Ukraine stands alone.
Ukraine stands alone. Not even because acquaintances have already died on it. And from different sides. For a soldier, this is prose, the end of the road. But because in every episode of the battle I saw I saw myself. A twenty-year-old boy, transferred from the mountains of Afghanistan to the Ukrainian steppes. And the comparison is not in my favor. I look into the eyes of the fighters and see what I have experienced in a little over a year, they are experiencing in a few weeks. What can I tell them? They, whose training was real battles, and the death of relatives and friends was the motivation? What else can a thirty-year-old soldier teach them how to cheat with death? Tell that I understand their every look, every word, every movement and every deed? That I feel the same bitterness when they pull Soviet military ID cards out of the pockets of their defeated enemies? I know that all this is unnecessary for them, because war is a super practical thing. And the culmination of this practicality is victory. Do the least bit to win, and they will thank you. For the living and for the dead.
It will take some time and on the fifteenth of February new faces will appear at the gathering places. With unprecedented awards on the chest, with new badges, dressed in motley camouflage. We will drink vodka and take off our hats under the third. There will be many conversations about everything, and little about patriotism or other correct speeches. After all, patriotism is as practical as war. There will be joy that we have survived, survived, but not because the most courageous and strong. Because I was lucky. New obelisks will appear in the cities, with new names, with candles burning and flowers. In the textbooks, new-old names of cities will appear, which will sound like the ringing of a bell. Directors will shoot new films about the war, writers will write new books, singers will sing new songs. And we will always remain soldiers.
