NONFICTION - Oct. 25, 1992

ZINKY BOYS: Soviet Voices From a Forgotten War by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Julia and Robin Whitby (Norton: $19.95; 220 pp.). The striking similarities between the Soviets’ intervention in Afghanistan and ours in Vietnam are generally well known: Both wars pitted 19-year-old boys against highly motivated guerrillas whose use of terror left them plagued by prolonged emotional problems, and both returned these boys to hometowns where locals did not understand them. (Unluckiest of all were the “zinky boys,” who returned in hermetically sealed zinc coffins that were secretly buried at night.)

Just as striking as the similarities in our two countries’ experiences, though, are the differences in the way we filter those experiences. While American writers tend to look back at Vietnam through a clearly pro or con lens, for instance, Soviet journalist Svetlana Alexievich lets her dovish views (“Every living thing has a right to a life of its own”) be consistently and caustically challenged in these pages. After explaining how his friend in the army, a gentle young man who played the violin and wrote poetry, was skinned and dismembered by the mujahedeen , one anonymous veteran who calls her very early one morning exclaims, “I don’t give a damn about your New Testament or your so called truth. I brought my truth back in a plastic bag.”

A courageous reporter, Alexievich smartly contrasts the vacuity of Communist slogans (like the “Communism--Our Bright Future” sign hanging over Kabul’s dead streets) with the richness of the veteran’s improvised songs (“Who needs glory! I want to live--that’s all the medal I need.”). Nowhere is the complexity of the Soviets’ reaction to the war conveyed more powerfully, though, than in the statements of the veterans themselves, as in the military adviser who asks, “What color is a scream? What does it taste like? What is the color of blood? Red in hospital, grey on dry sand and bright blue on stone, in the evening when it’s all dried out.”