The fog of war

It may be a universal truth that war is hell, but in “One Soldier’s War,” Arkady Babchenko’s jagged memoir of serving in the Russian army during the Chechen wars, nobody gets away unscathed, least of all the reader.

Early on, Babchenko describes the fate of Russian mothers who arrived in the war-torn former Soviet republic searching for sons who’d gone missing in action. Some of the women were accidentally shot by Russian soldiers; others, he writes, were captured by Chechens, who would “rape them, kill them and feed their innards to their dogs. They have been betrayed by everyone, these Russian women, they die by the dozen, yet they still wander around Chechnya with their photos, searching for their sons.”

Babchenko was 18, a second-year Moscow law student, when he was drafted and sent to Chechnya. It was 1995, a year after President Boris Yeltsin sent troops into the tiny Islamic republic to quell a rebellion that began after the breakup of the Soviet Union, restore order and reclaim Russian pride. Instead, the ill-trained young radioman arrived at a base on the Chechen border to find an army teetering on defeat. Conscripts wore rubber sandals because the military was too poor to issue boots. Soldiers supplemented their daily ration of porridge by looting food from Chechen homes and eating dog meat.

Babchenko describes rampant bullying. Officers “get stinking drunk and then hammer the ones below them. Even the colonels beat the majors, the majors beat the lieutenants, and they all beat the privates.” He details an incident in which officers, whose “faces are also swollen, but from three days of continual drinking,” punish two recruits for selling bullets on the black market by beating them, hanging them by the wrists, jolting them with electrical wires, putting them in flak vests and shooting them, then pushing them out the base’s gate to be killed or enslaved by Chechens.

Despite its poverty, the Russian army vastly outgunned the rebel Chechen forces. But after two years of fighting, including indiscriminate air and artillery bombardments, it was forced to withdraw and negotiate a truce. The rebels perfected many tactics now used in Iraq -- ambushes, sniper attacks, improvised explosives, and truck bombs.

In Babchenko’s account, first published in Russia in 2006, the military emerges as its own worst enemy. Drunken soldiers in tanks accidentally set themselves on fire. To pay extortion money to bullies in his unit, Babchenko and his comrades sell explosives, bullets, even missiles to black marketeers, who provide them to the rebels. “Thieving,” he explains, “is both the foundation of the war and its reason for continuing. The soldiers sell cartridges; the drivers sell diesel oil; the cooks sell canned meat. Battalion commanders steal the soldiers’ food. . . . Regimental commanders truck away vehicle-loads of gear, while the generals steal the actual vehicles themselves.”

If it all sounds too fantastically corrupt, one need only ponder the United States’ profligate spending in Iraq: the no-bid contracts, the debacle of the still uncompleted U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, the unaccounted billions in reconstruction dollars, the tens of thousands of missing weapons given to the Iraqi security forces. And just as U.S. commanders in Iraq tout a shaky alliance with former Sunni insurgents now called “freedom fighters,” Babchenko notes that the Russians pursued a similar detente with Chechen insurgents whom they also relabeled “freedom fighters” until they again took up arms. The second Chechen war, which began in 1999, continues today as a simmering terrorist movement.

For all its insights into the Russian military’s disintegration in Chechnya, “One Soldier’s War” is a deeply personal account of a young man’s transformation into a fighter. Wonderfully translated by Nick Allen, the memoir renders the miseries of combat with dreamlike lyricism. “Here, at war, everyone and everything seems to be at one with their surroundings, be it a person, a dog, a tree, a stone, a river. It seems everything has a spirit. When you dig a foxhole in the stony clay with an engineer’s shovel, you talk to it as if it were a loved one: ‘Come on my dear, just one more shovel, just a tad more,’ and it yields to your entreaties, gives another chunk, hiding your body deeper.”

After Babchenko finished his compulsory service in 1996 and earned his law degree, he volunteered for the second Chechen war. Returning as a seasoned combat veteran, he bullies a terrified conscript during a firefight. Stifling an impulse to beat the soldier, he takes the youth’s machine gun and fires into a Chechen village. He briefly enjoys the “special intoxication you only get when things are going well.” The chapter ends with Babchenko putting his rifle in his mouth and contemplating suicide after learning that he shot an unarmed man and killed his daughter.

But the allure of war remains. “The brightest, best thing in my life was the war and there won’t be anything better,” he writes. “And the blackest, lousiest thing in my life was also the war, and there won’t be anything worse.”

Hating the war, loving the war, hating himself for loving it. For Babchenko, war is like an abusive lover he can’t let go of. It’s a relationship, he argues, that can be fully understood only by those who have been in battle. “In war a person [becomes] some other kind of creature,” he writes. “We don’t have just five senses; there is a sixth, seventh, tenth even, growing from our bodies like tentacles and grafting themselves onto the war. And through them we feel the war. You can’t talk about war with someone who has never been there, not because they are stupid or dimwitted, but because they don’t have the senses to feel it with.”

Unfortunately, there are half a million Americans and counting returning from Iraq and Afghanistan today who know exactly what he’s talking about. *