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the war zone. The first thing he does is find out how much a POW would fetch in cheki [hard currency vouchers, used to buy otherwise unobtainable goods in special shops.] Answer: eight cheki. Two days later there’s this great cloud of dust in the garrison — it’s the fartsovshik with about 200 prisoners in chains behind him. His friend says: ‘Sell me one, I’ll give you seven cheki for him.’ ‘Not likely,’ says the fartsovshik , ‘I paid nine myself.’
    We could hear that daft joke a hundred times and still laugh. We’d laugh at any damn stupid thing till it hurt.
    There’s this dukh , a sniper, lying there calculating his ‘tariff. He gets three little stars in his sights — 1st lieutenant, that’s worth 50,000 afoshki. Bang! One big star — a major, 200,000 afoshki. Bang! Two little stars — 2nd lieutenant. Bang! That evening the dukh boss pays him for the 1st lieutenant, the major and the — ‘What. You shot the 2nd lieutenant? Our provider! Who’s going to sell us our condensed milk and blankets. Hang this man!’
    We talked a lot about money — more than about death. I didn’t bring back a thing except the bit of shell they took from my brain. Some of the guys brought in porcelain, precious stones, jewellery, carpets. They picked them up in battle when they went into thevillages, or bought them. Or else they bartered. For example, the magazine of a Kalashnikov bought you a make-up set for your girlfriend, including mascara, eye-shadow and powder. Of course the cartridges were ‘cooked’, because a cooked bullet can’t fly, it just kind of spits out of the barrel and can’t kill. We’d fill a bucket or a bowl with water, throw in the cartridges, boil them for a couple of hours and sell them the same evening. Everyone traded, officers as well as the rest of us, heroes as well as cowards. Knives, bowls, spoons, forks, mugs, stools, hammers, they all got nicked from the canteen and the barracks. Bayonets disappeared from their automatics, mirrors from cars, spare parts, medals … You could sell anything, even the rubbish collected from the garrison, full of cans, old newspapers, rusty nails, bits of plywood, and plastic bags. They sold it by the truckload, with the price depending on the amount of scrap metal. That’s war for you.
    We vets are called Afgantsi. I hate the name. It’s like being branded — it marks us out as different from everyone else. But different in what way? Am I a hero, or some kind of an idiot to be stared at? Or even a criminal? People are already saying the whole thing was a political mistake; they may be whispering at the moment but soon they’ll be shouting it from the rooftops. I left my blood over there, and the blood of my friends too. We were given medals we don’t wear and will probably return, medals honestly earned in a dishonest war. We’re invited to speak in schools, but what can we tell them? Not what war is really like, that’s for sure. Should I tell them that I’m still scared of the dark and that when something falls down with a bang I jump out of my skin? How the prisoners we took somehow never got as far as regimental HQ? I saw them literally stamped and ground into the earth. In a year and a half I didn’t see a single live dukh in captivity, only dead ones. I can’t very well tell the school kids about the collections of dried ears and other trophies of war, can I? Or the villages that looked like ploughed fields after we’d finished bombarding them?
    No, the schools need heroes, but all I can remember is what we destroyed and how we killed. And yet, we did build things for the locals, and give them presents. It was all mixed up togetherand I still can’t separate the good from the bad. I’m scared of such memories, I run away from them.
    I don’t know anyone who’s come back from Afghanistan who