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the world, we have to go back to the USSR.

 
    PART II
    Everything You Know Is Wrong: The USSR

 
    CHAPTER THREE
    The Lost Boys
    Soviet Union, 1992
    BY DECEMBER 1992, for Mickey and his crew, not only was the disastrous, drawn-out Soviet-Afghan war over: The Soviet Union had given up the ghost completely, bankrupted by its own arms-race supremacy and torn asunder by the tensions between reformers like President Mikhail Gorbachev and the old guard, between satellite states from Lithuania to Georgia making their bid for secession, and by the instinct for stamping out dissent. From the Berlin Wall to the McDonald’s in Red Square, from universal comradeship to the “new Russians” sweeping around Moscow in armed cavalcades of BMWs, the times were changing indeed. When he’d left for Afghanistan in the early 1980s, Mickey had left a home he knew. By the time he’d returned, that home was no longer there.
    Drafted in small numbers initially to shore up a “tame” Afghan communist government, like America’s Vietnam, the game quickly changed for the Russian military. Now huge numbers of men with the world’s best weaponry, tanks, aircraft, and intelligence found themselves struggling to survive the stealth-and-sabotage tactics of Afghans fighting for their own land and familiar with the endless mountain passes. Increasingly motivated by fear, desperation, and the thirst for revenge, both sides quickly developed a reputation for playing dirty. Reports of torture, looting, the massacring of civilians, booby traps and poisoned supplies and indiscriminate dropping of explosives began to emerge. And as the Afghan tribal leaders and mujahideen began receiving covert backing from Pakistan, the Gulf, and the CIA alike, flights of the “Gruz-200s” (Soviet military code for the Il-76 and giant Antonov cargo planes that carried Soviet soldiers’ bodies home) stepped up their frequency. Soviet withdrawal went from unthinkable to inevitable, and having delivered and supplied the Soviet armed forces in Afghanistan, Mickey and his comrades became the ferrymen who would spirit them back out, alive or dead.
    Returning home, Mickey and his fellow veterans saw everything they’d thought was eternal, secure, and structured turning to ashes in a matter of months. The campaign was lost, their wages (when the government could afford to pay them at all) rendered worthless by a collapsing ruble; the air force itself was a busted flush, the economy going down the pan, and their hopes for any kind of future, in the armed forces or out, were looking bleak.
    In a parallel universe, a Russian-set version of The Full Monty would portray the sense of listlessness, despair, and betrayal felt by these erstwhile Soviet poster boys of heroism and virtue, suddenly told they’re no longer needed, won’t be paid, and that everything they fought for was wrong anyway. The Soviet army was on the scrap heap, and whole garrison towns had become dilapidated and abandoned, almost postapocalyptic husks. One of them was Mickey’s.
    TORRENTIAL RAIN DOES few cities any favors, but it’s hard to believe Vitebsk could ever really be beautiful. Perhaps I’m being unfair. Like anywhere, the fourth-largest city of the Socialist Republic of Belarus has its old town, though it’s now reduced to a couple of whitewashed promenades, and the center—all potted auto routes, soot-spouting Volgas, and dirty yellow buses full of elderly ladies in headscarves—is no worse than many of the former Eastern bloc’s industrial centers. But there’s something about the way the slate sky pushes down on acre after acre of horizontal concrete blocks (offices, houses, hospitals, and municipal car parks all seem to have been designed by the same firm of architects who may or may not have been heavily influenced by Tetris) that can make a man itch to get into his car, or anyone’s car, and drive very far