Free Fall: A Sniper's Story from Chechnya

"This book is a story constructed with true details, a distorted reflection of the reality that we experienced. That is, I changed the names of characters and units to protect those involved; I omitted place names and also blurred the times when the events narrated here actually took place. N.L."

"In Transnistria people did nothing but talk about Western society. The United States and Europe were living examples of economic and social prosperity; everybody wanted to become Western, thinking that if they wore designer clothes, ate fast food and bought foreign cars, democracy would naturally follow, and take root in our great and beautiful Land. It was like an infectious disease, a fever whose origin and character nobody could explain."

"Never call me "Senior Lieutenant Sir" again, is that clear? From now on, you’re saboteurs. We don't have ranks, just names, remember that. So I'm "Comrade Zabelin" to you."

"I had a head start; in addition to the target shooting I did in a city sports team, I had lots of hunting experience in Siberia with my grandfather Nikolay. Whenever I went to visit my grandfather, even when I was still just a kid, my father often let me shoot his Kalashnikov."

"My task, along with six other men, was to do the cleaning and take the food to the blocks where the military prisoners were being held. None of them was mentally stable; it was like they were in a catatonic state. They didn’t respond to questions; they behaved like animals, scurrying from one side of the cell to the other and then freezing the moment you looked at them, as if they were afraid to be caught moving. They lived according to the simple orders dictated by the whistle; they would eat in their cells, then march out to the yard, take their blows, undergo humiliation and torture from the guards, and then go to sleep at night only to wake up the following morning and start it all over again. They couldn’t communicate with each other, and any activity that would let them think was prohibited. They were unrecoverable, so deeply traumatised that – as one of the guards later confirmed – once they left prison, they never managed to reintegrate into society again. Many of them committed suicide; some wandered the streets until winter came and the cold killed them."

"We saboteurs had an unusual uniform; we wore civilian clothes, things from home. As we would be conducting missions behind the front lines, travelling through territory under enemy control, it was essential that we be able to pass unrecognised."

"Zabelin had taught us the precious rules of ‘saboteur survival and solidarity’, as he called them. They were like commandments, and each of us had to learn them by heart. The idea was to create a sense of unity, to make us into our own clan within the army. The rules were very precise: saboteurs obey no one outside their commanding officer; under no circumstances may saboteurs be transferred to other units of the armed forces; in armed combat, saboteurs are forbidden to leave their dead on the ground. If a group suffered serious losses and was left isolated from the rest of the unit, they were not allowed to retreat from the line of operations. The only valid alternative was the most drastic: suicide. Each of us carried a personal hand grenade, which we were supposed to use to blow ourselves and the others up should the unit be surrounded by enemies and run out of ammunition. They were extreme rules, and I didn’t like them very much. I didn’t understand why we would have to kill ourselves, just because the saboteur strategy had no retreat plan, unlike every other unit of the Russian army. What’s more, unlike the rest of the Russian army, we had nothing to do with military law. Every Russian soldier is required to memorise if not the entire military code, at the very least the principal articles. But as for us, we’ve never even touched our books, just as none of us has ever learned to march or salute properly."

"The idea of jumping out of a plane scared me, and I had no desire to try it. The first time, Zabelin had to force me to jump, dragging me to the side door and pushing me out into the air. The parachute opened by itself. I felt something hard yank on my shoulders and my neck went crack – whiplash, as I found out later – and in a few seconds my legs hit the ground."

"The colonel himself put on the videocassette. The first image that appeared on the screen showed the flag of the Russian Federation, which waved proudly amidst smoke and fire, riddled with holes and torn in one corner as if mice had nibbled away at it. At that instant I felt panic rise within me. I couldn’t show my desperation, but my whole body screamed silently. I knew immediately, I was sure beyond a shadow of a doubt: they were sending us to Chechnya."

"I would soon discover that in this war, for the sake of practicality – and thinking back on it now, it’s a very shameful thing – all our enemies were called ‘Arabs’, whether they were Chechens, Muslims, Afghans, Taliban, terrorists, or fighters who had sided with any political creed. The word ‘Arab’ was the way we indicated the enemy."

"We haven’t got offices or secretaries, so everyone’s his own secretary around here. We’re saboteurs, a mobile unit. Today we’re in one place, tomorrow in another. We’re independent, get it?"

"I would soon learn that the saboteur base never stayed in the same place for long, and from time to time they would put us with units that needed our assistance. In the intervals between one operation and another we would sleep in the place we called ‘home’, that is, the temporary barracks, where the only things we never ran out of were weapons and ammunition, which were scattered everywhere and even got mixed up with our food."

"‘What’s this business about the clean-up crew?’ I asked impatiently. ‘What fields am I supposed to clear? It’s not like I have to go pick tomatoes, right?’ ‘Really? You haven’t figured it out?’ he said, giving me a sad look. ‘You have to collect the bodies. They make you do it so you get used to contact with dead bodies, so you won’t have a hard time at the crucial moments. We’ve all been there, friend – you’ll be on clean-up duty for a couple of weeks.’"

"‘Never grab them by the vest, they’re full of rats. They’re dangerous, those beasts – they eat human flesh, so they’re strong and aggressive. Last year a rat almost tore three fingers off one guy in a single bite. Follow my advice; just grab the bodies by the legs and before you tie them, tap them with your foot a couple times, and those pests will run away.’"

"Among the saboteurs, on the other hand, hazing didn’t exist. We were like brothers, because each of us knew that in hard times it’s always better to have a brother by your side than an enemy."

"He had fought in all the post-Soviet wars; for a time he had even been stationed in the former Yugoslavia, where he was an instructor for the special units of the Serbian army. When the Chechen conflict broke out, he’d been one of the first Russians sent out there. [...] when he fought in the war in Afghanistan, Chechnya was still part of the USSR and many Chechens had actually done their military service under him. It was incredible to think that the same soldiers – now grown men and professional soldiers – were now fighting against us. It often happened that one of the Chechen prisoners would recognise among the Russian soldiers an old friend from military school with whom they had once fought."

"Among the terrorists, besides an unbelievable number of Russian-made firearms, like Makarov 9s, Stechkins and Tokarev 7.62s, European or American guns were always going around, generally ACP 45s, PARA 9s or 9x21s. I myself took a 9x21-calibre 98 Beretta FS from a dead man’s body, a beautiful, very handy weapon, more precise and secure than Russian pistols."

"The enemy’s bayonets and knives were almost always American, and when we could we took them for ourselves. We liked those weapons a lot because they were useful and easy to handle, whereas the Russian bayonet seemed like a sort of universal tool you could use for anything – even plumbing, if you wanted – except close combat."

"With a heavy head and a constant whistling in my ears, I pulled out my bayonet and leapt into the dark where I thought my adversary was. We hit each other again and again; I hit him with the knife, while he tried to strike me with the butt of his empty gun. When I finally made it out from underground, and my comrades brought out the man’s body, I saw that I’d practically ripped him apart. He was missing a few fingers; his whole face was full of open bleeding wounds. I had even gouged out one of his eyes. I don’t remember how I delivered the final blows, but on one side he didn’t have a single centimetre of living tissue left."

"Even if keeping the enemy’s weapons was prohibited by Russian military law, we didn’t care. As our captain would always say: ‘If they want us to play their game, then they can at least let us use the toys we want!’"

"Our captain was convinced that the war in Chechnya was nothing but a farce, a performance that Russia had put on all by itself, making use of its friends in the Arabic world and even paying the mercenaries to fight against us. Since I had always kept my distance from political discussions, the captain’s claims weren’t always clear to me. His theories completely overturned my beliefs about the governing structures; Nosov often talked about the power of ex-KGB agents, asserting that somehow a group of veterans within our secret services had the Russian government under their thumb"

"‘So imagine that I come along and propose that you play a trick on Moscow. I send a couple of friends to your store, you send a few of yours, and one day our friends start a fight there. While they’re beating each other up – they break some tables, a few old chairs and maybe even one of the windows – Moscow, as a good representative of the law, steps in to calm them down and tries to reestablish order. In that instant, I take all the chocolates I want from your store, pay you how much I owe and run away. Thanks to the chaos-effect, our dear friend Moscow didn’t see a thing, and you and I got something out of it – and the next time, potentially, we can do it over again. The situation with the war in Chechnya is very similar, except that instead of you it’s the leaders of the Arab community, who control the drug trade, human trafficking, gun running, petrol and so on. The chocolates, in other words. Instead of me there’s the Russian secret service, who after the fall of the USSR took control of all illegal trafficking on national territory. Moscow, on the other hand, represents legal society, that is, the few who are still trying to somehow obey the law and have faith in institutions (this also includes the representatives of those countries that receive the traffic). And the idiot friends who come to fight in the store to trigger the chaos-effect are the Russian army and the mercenaries. The moral of the story is very sad; without realising it, we’re creating chaos to divert attention from the serious things going on in this place. The war we’re fighting is just a cover for the trafficking run by the corrupt people in the government.’"

"[...] I reflected at length on how stupid we’d been, we Russians, over the course of history. For centuries we had pursued various political ideas – often going against the natural laws of humanity – only because we weren’t able to get out of the system, which kept us trapped inside a constantly shrinking circle."

"Every hour the number went up like we were at an auction. But one thing was certain: lots of them were Arabs and Afghans, poor people recruited to fight, almost all of them drug addicts. Before going to battle they would do so much heroin that, when they ran out of ammunition, they would shuffle up to our soldiers like a bunch of zombies, their arms dangling and their eyes bulging. Those poor guys had come so far just to fight us a couple times and then die so miserably. Their leaders, though, were professional mercenaries who had fought in several wars – in Afghanistan, in the former Yugoslavia, in all the conflicts that the Muslim world had taken part in. They were cowards, they’d take those soldiers to the battle site completely high on drugs and then abandon them. Their only interest was organising direct encounters and then vanishing, taking off. The only thing they were capable of was throwing the clueless to the wolves and making a nice chunk of change off it, which – as our captain Nosov said – ‘came straight from Red Square’."

"The first thing a saboteur had to do with his Kalashnikov was saw off the little iron hooks for latching the gun to his sling. Usually the metal parts kept touching and made a lot of noise – at night, especially in humid air, that noise could be heard up to twenty-five metres away. We used the classic Kalashnikov sling – or alternatively a mountain climbing rope, the ten millimetre ones – and wrapped electrical tape around it several times to attach it directly to the folding stock and the grip, which was plastic on the new models and wood on the old ones. The tape blocked all sound, and it was very resistant. In city battles, where you always needed to have your hands free and your rifle handy, we would often tape our Kalashnikovs right on our chests, against our jackets. I always wore my bulletproof vest wherever I went – it was like a sort of underwear. I even wore it to the bathroom, whether I was on base, with my comrades, or on a mission in the middle of the woods."

"we would be transported to wherever our assistance had been requested. Many times, we jumped out of a plane, primarily at night – that’s why our parachutes were black, and the other paratroopers called us ‘bats’. At the end of a mission, attack, or any other military operation, to show the others that we’d been the ones who took care of the mess, we would draw a bat somewhere. It was a kind of signature, a sign of recognition and valour. [...] In special operations, like ambushing nerve centres or freeing hostages, our captain would leave in plain view a white glove, which was part of the uniform saboteurs wore during military parades."

"Other soldiers were always obliged to follow the orders given by any higher-ranking official, whereas we never were. This is why we’d clashed with the officers of other divisions many times, especially the younger ones who would give us orders that we never obeyed. Our freedom from military hierarchy wasn’t liked by anyone."

"Usually the Arabs wore boots produced in the West with high-quality materials, and every infantryman dreamed of having at least one pair."

"We realised that one guy had survived. Miraculously, he was still alive and in one piece; perhaps when the chaos broke out he had hidden and we hadn’t caught him. Yet even if he didn’t have a single wound, he was completely disorientated – he walked in circles around his dead companions, disarmed, his hands raised towards the sky, speaking in his language with a desperate tone. He wore a military uniform with the insignia of one of the many fundamentalist organisations involved in the war in Chechnya; he had a long beard and a small cap completely covered in medals, the kind that Muslims usually wear. It struck me, because there in the woods among the corpses he truly looked out of place. I sensed that it would have been better for him if he were dead."

"We’d made an agreement with the infantry; since they were only rarely involved in operations like that and they needed shoes, guns and so on more than we did, they were free to take their trophies. They would leave us the rifles, scopes and infrared laser pointers, which the Arabs had in abundance, given that the United States systematically and with great generosity refurnished them with all the necessities."

"‘We were here, the saboteurs!’ The man’s entire torso was skinless, from his navel to his neck. The Arab had lost consciousness, but you could see he was still breathing softly. Next to him, on the ground, there was a layer of skin. Nosov had cut it in the shape of a bat, just like the ones we drew on the city walls. The captain said to the infantrymen: ‘Go ahead and take it if you want, keep it as a souvenir. That way you can tell everyone that at least one time in your pointless lives you knew some real men… Remember that being cruel doesn’t mean cutting the noses or ears off the dead to make a necklace or a keychain… You don’t rape women or beat children. Try to look your enemy right in the eye when he’s still alive and breathing, that’s enough… And if you have the balls to do something else, well go ahead…’ We said nothing, mulling over what had just come out of our captain’s mouth. The infantrymen seemed frightened, some had stepped back, pretending they hadn’t seen anything. The silence that had fallen around that inhuman torture was broken by Shoe. With an almost indifferent and calm expression – as if he were on vacation – he proclaimed: ‘Well, not too bad, Ivanisch, that bat almost looks real!’ A young officer from the infantry pulled his gun out of his holster and went over to the Arab, aiming at his head. Nosov gave him a dirty look. ‘What are you doing, son?’ he asked, calm. ‘Enough, I can’t take it – I’m going to kill him…’ The officer was shaken up. His hand trembled as it gripped the weapon. ‘This guy stays as he is,’ Nosov yelled, ‘and in fact I hope he lives till his friends get here… They think they’re cruel? They don’t know shit about cruelty! I’ll teach them personally what it means to be cruel!’"

"In war, the living made more of an impression on me than the dead. To me, the dead looked like a bunch of receptacles that someone had used and then thrown away – I looked at them as I would broken bottles. Whereas the living – the living had this horrible emptiness in their eyes: they were human beings who had seen beyond madness, and now lived in the embrace of death."

"Mercenaries from various countries were recruited as snipers, lured by the good pay. I often encountered Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Estonian snipers, very competent marksmen from the former Soviet Union sports scene. They could shoot with precision, but many lacked the basics of military strategy. My hunting education in the forests of Siberia, which I received as a boy from my grandfather Nikolay, turned out to be extremely useful, and I learned everything else at training camp thanks to Yakut, the Siberian instructor I mentioned earlier."

"We were all wearing light jackets, with jumpsuits underneath, trainers on our feet and no helmets on our heads, just regular beanies. Mine was grey with a pom-pom on top. The other units made fun of us, calling us ‘bums’ since we wore whatever we came across. Obviously it bothered them to have to wear uniforms; they would rather have been able to do as we did – when it was hot we could wear shorts. None of us shaved, we all had goatees or at least a few days’ stubble, and we often kept our hair long. By our looks we were more likely to be taken for a group of terrorists than a unit of the Russian Army. We did it on purpose, obviously, because we often ended up going behind the line and having to blend in with the enemy, even though every so often one of our own shot at us, thinking we were Arabs."

"Torturing prisoners was prohibited by military regulations, and according to the law any perpetrators of such an act were to be tried in court and at a minimum sentenced to serve in military prison. Of course, I’ve never heard of any of our men who had tortured or disfigured prisoners’ bodies being reported or turned over to the authorities. Once, our paras, in a town that had just been liberated, captured an Arab; after cutting off his nose and ears, they gouged out his eyes and filled the sockets with gunpowder. Not content with that, they kicked his arms until they were broken and then shot him in both heels. In that piteous state, in agony but still alive, he was left right in the middle of the main street. Only afterwards did it come out that the Arab was a big shot – a terrorist wanted by the secret service, who had experience in the Yugoslav wars and a close network of important connections; some people even said that he had studied law at a university in the United States… This story quickly reached the ears of a general in central command, who went personally to the front line to track down the culprits. When the general asked the entire paratrooper division (composed of almost six hundred men, all assembled before him) who was responsible, everyone – including officers and lieutenant colonels – stepped forward. To prevent a nationwide scandal, the general went back to command and swore never to stick his nose into the affairs that took place on the front lines..."

"Many veterans of the war in Afghanistan, especially the older paratroopers, would leave these ‘monuments’ in the streets after a particularly difficult battle. They were terrifying sights, always the body of a dead enemy that the soldiers would savage in a frightening way. But the real horror in this ritual lay in the fact that in order to make these ‘monuments’, soldiers used people who were still alive."

"The Arabs had several models of explosive devices at their disposal, many of which were Italian-made, coming from San Marino. They had different mechanisms, but were all deadly weapons. Some of them had been scattered throughout the city we were supposed to attack, thrown in the street in order to attract our soldiers’ attention. They were made to look like mobile phones, watches, videocameras, and unfortunately sometimes toys or boxes of crayons. We all knew about these dangerous surprises, and if during the First Chechen Campaign a Russian or two had lost his hide, I don’t remember a single case of that happening in the Second. But many civilians died, including – disgracefully – children. When we saw those mines in the street we wouldn’t hesitate to shoot them to make them explode, thus rendering them harmless. The idea of picking them up and trying to deactivate them, on the other hand, never occurred to any one of us."

"I began inspecting the upper level of the two buildings with the scope. Almost immediately, right in the middle of one, inside a small shed that connected the roof with the stairs inside, I found my sniper. [...] He was young and had short blond hair, probably a ‘tourist’ from the Baltic countries. He had to be a mercenary, or an athlete. [...] In short, my sniper was what we would call a ‘water boiler’, a novice marksman who thinks he’s a pro just because he has good aim. He was too sure of himself – it must have been his first experience with war. But he didn’t know that it would also be his last. [...] I was about to shoot when I realised he was talking to someone. So I hesitated, and in my sight a young woman appeared, with long blonde hair tucked into a military cap. She seemed like one of those American porn stars photographed half-naked stroking a pile of guns. I felt total disgust at seeing two young people who had come here to kill our boys for money. I waited for them to come closer. She said something to him, smiling; he stood up for a moment and touched her face before kissing her. That’s when I took the first shot."

"Even back during the First Chechen Campaign, it was very common for the enemy to have the same equipment as us, even the latest models produced in Russia – which, for our army, were still considered experimental prototypes and thus were barely in circulation – sometimes ended up in their hands. The Russian politicians of the time – led by that ‘stupid drunk Yeltsin’, as Nosov always called him, ‘who sold out to the United States of America’ – needed, according to our Captain, a black hole, a place that swallowed money and spat it out clean, supporting their so-called ‘democratic’ regime, which was run the American way – that is, with wars, lies, illicit trade and total lack of respect for the people of the Russian Federation. That black hole was Chechnya. ‘The Americans gave Yeltsin and his men a huge helping hand – they were able to control the whole orchestration of this disgusting war,’ Nosov vented for the thousandth time while we were on our way to base in the helicopter. ‘Who knows how much fun the strategists at the Pentagon had when they came up with this foul plan of local war right within the borders of their old enemy, the USSR... And through misinformation, political and ethnic agitation, they provoked us like a bunch of war dogs, straining at the leash.’ Essentially, their tactics were analogous to raping a dead body. It wasn’t enough for them to kill the ‘Soviet bloc’ – they still wanted to satisfy their sick thirst for dominion somehow, and to our shame there wasn’t anyone in Russia capable of stopping them..."

"We saboteurs had every kind [of explosives], because the nature of our actions was so broad that we had to be ready to use any tactical solution. The important thing was not getting them mixed up in the chaos of battle – that’s why we each carried certain types of bombs in certain places that everybody knew, so if one of us happened to get hurt or killed, the others could take his bombs without wasting time figuring out what colours they were marked with. And of course the marks were very subtle; they couldn’t be seen very well during the day, let alone at night or in the middle of pandemonium – one mistake could prove fatal. I was afraid of grenades, as I was of explosives in general. They gave me the sense of something unstable, extremely dangerous. In my jacket, in a pocket I’d sewn on the back, I always carried one, but I never wanted to take more than that – expert snipers would often aim right at grenades naively kept in the most visible parts of a jacket. Once during a battle, I saw a stray bullet hit a grenade hanging from the vest of a VMF soldier. That mistake cost the soldier his life, and some of his nearby comrades were seriously wounded by the shrapnel. Fate is terrible: a weapon can be dangerous even for the person carrying it."

"We saboteurs all had complete faith in our captain, because his unit was the only one in which nobody had died since it had been formed. We felt protected, which was crucial in war because, as Nosov often said: ‘The soldier who feels defenceless is already halfway dead.’"

"The other soldiers, when they found out that I was a sniper, would often ask me what was so great about my position that had me roaming around at night in the middle of enemy territory, going through mine fields, risking my life to find the best position and staying there motionless for hours watching the enemy, when most of the time things were resolved in a few seconds, or with a single explosion… I’d smile just slightly, but if I were sure that they wouldn’t take it the wrong way, I would reply that I was motivated by a great love for death, the true pleasure that only hunting human beings can provide. A sick feeling."

"Moscow went over to an Arab who was lying face down. He turned him over and cut his bulletproof vest laterally; he quickly checked the pockets, emptied a bullet case, putting the cartridges into his backpack, and moved right on to the next, while the infantryman followed him like his shadow. At one point, Moscow came across a man who was wounded; he slid his knife into his heart and the man died without batting an eye."

"The bullets were polished to a mirror shine, the tips painted black. These were very expensive special cartridges, definitely not stuff meant for the army. The body was steel, covered with a light coat of varnish, and the tip was metal so it could go through kevlar or iron the same as air. The matrix was liquid mercury, which made its trajectory extra precise; most importantly, the gunpowder charge was stronger than normal, because it had to create enough force to propel the bullets, which were much heavier than normal ones. We didn’t have ammunition like that in our possession, only the Arabs did. It came from the black market, through ties with America. People said that a special company in Texas manufactured them, and that they cost five dollars each. This type of projectile was famous and feared among the soldiers, because there was no bulletproof vest that could withstand their force. In military slang they were called ‘bye-bye mommas’ – if a round like that hit you were done for."

"Even today, I often find myself observing open spaces and thinking how perfect they would be for a military operation. Where a normal person sees a landscape and contemplates the beauty of nature, I realise that, against my will, I am figuring out where the machine gun should go."

"We entered one of the rooms. There were just a few mattresses and some sleeping bags; the floor was covered with clothes, Turkish toiletries, boxes of vacuum-packed food (some still half-full with spoons inside) and a pot with some tea. Next to one of the mattresses there was an unopened pack of single-use syringes; in a corner there was a pile of used syringes with brown spots on them, most likely heroin. On the mattress there was a brick-sized block: a nice fat chunk of hashish. One side of it was burnt and crumbled, and beside it was a box of filters and a bag with some tobacco. This was where our enemies prepared their ‘vitamins’ so that they could get through the attacks without fear and exhaustion."

"On the sofa lay a woman dressed in a military uniform, with the insignia of a group of Islamic fundamentalists sewn on the sleeve. The sergeant lowered his weapon and we moved closer. She stared at us wide-eyed and mumbled something in an accent similar to that of the Chechens, Georgians and everyone who we disdainfully called chernozhopiy – ‘black arses’, or members of the Asian races of the Caucasus. She was speaking Russian, but what she was saying was completely incomprehensible. She was afraid to die, that much was clear. The explorer sergeant extracted a huge knife from his right boot. It looked like something a butcher would use, very thick and with a wide blade. The woman went even paler, if that was possible, and without trying to get up from the sofa kept spitting out bursts of words that didn’t make any sense. ‘She must be their medic,’ the sergeant said, for no particular reason. None of us was able to say a word. We were all curious to find out how this romantic little encounter was going to end. Shoe was behind me, and with a voice weakened by the cold he said: ‘Come on, brother, shove the blade between this Muslim bitch’s legs. Now we’ll show you how real operations are done, we’ll teach you what surgery is...’ Shoe was scaring me, but I was frightened of myself too. All of us were worked up, yet at the same time disgusted at what was happening. The explorer sergeant grabbed the woman’s neck with one of his huge hands, and held her still. She tried to scratch his face, she struggled, but he was smiling, as if she were his daughter and they were play-wrestling on their couch at home. Without any sudden movements he stuck the knife into her chest, at the left breast. The blade went in easily, and he pushed it in slowly. It seemed like he was enjoying every moment. With his other hand he kept hold of her neck. She tried to free herself while foam started to trickle out of her mouth, and it quickly turned red. The woman’s face was purple, swollen; she made a sort of deep, guttural moan, kicking and shaking as if she were having an epileptic fit. When the handle of the knife hit the woman’s uniform, I tried to picture the blade sunk all the way through her flesh; the knife was so long that it must have impaled her, its tip touching the fabric of the sofa. The sergeant lifted her and sat her down. She looked like a broken doll. Her eyes were empty, her arms hung limp, blood oozed from her slightly open mouth, but it was light – perhaps she had bitten her tongue as she was dying. She had the typical face of women from the Caucasus: small, barely pronounced eyes, a long and disproportionate nose. She was young, she couldn’t have been over thirty."

"Nosov and the others were in the hall. They had captured an Arab. Zenith was holding him down on his knees, on the floor. Moscow kept hitting him on the head with the handle of his combat knife. His entire face was covered in blood. Nosov asked him something in Arabic, repeated the same thing a few times, then turned to Moscow: ‘Sergeant, this warrior of Islam is clearly suffering from a concussion, give him first aid!’ Moscow responded by slitting the Arab’s throat, blood spraying on the opposite wall, then he pressed the prisoner’s head against the floor with his boot, bent down and drove his knife into his left side several times. He was dead; all you could hear was the air, pushed by the blood, coming out of the holes in his lungs."

"We were the ones who established the constitutional order, the ideal we were ready to lose our lives for, the ideal we all hated… But we knew that, in reality, such an ideal didn’t exist. At least not for our officers, not for our fallen and wounded, not for the families of the missing in action... Because if a soldier is ‘missing’, the government doesn’t pay anything for the transport of the body or for the funeral – but a missing person could also be a deserter or a traitor who abandoned his unit and went to the enemy side. Those who were truly missing were few, because in the large units the majority of the fallen were left on site – they were referred to as missing because the bodies ended up in common graves and nobody could find them. That was why we no longer had respect for the constitutional order – because we knew there was no order, the entire Nation had plunged into chaos."

"Once we were outside the town we looked at what we had left behind: collapsed houses, smoke rising into the air... total destruction, as if every inch of the town no longer existed. Nosov observed everything, a strange look on his face, neither satisfied nor dissatisfied; if anything, he seemed lost in a strong nostalgia, like when you see something for the last time. Our captain stood firm, still, holding on to the turret of the tank. At some point he said, under his breath, to himself: ‘Anyone who doesn’t want to be under us will end up underground...’"