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doesn’t smoke and drink. Weak cigarettes don’t help either — I buy the Okhotnichy brand we smoked over there if I can find them. We called them ‘Death in the Swamp’.
    Whatever you do, don’t write about the so-called spirit of brotherhood among us Afgantsi. I never saw it and I don’t believe in it. The only thing we had in common was fear. We were all lied to in the same way, we all wanted to survive and we all wanted to get home. And what we’ve got in common now that we’re back home is that we haven’t got a thing to call our own. We all have the same problems — lousy pensions, the difficulty of getting a flat and a bit of furniture together, no decent medicines or prostheses … If ever all that gets sorted out our veterans’ clubs will fall apart. Once I get what I need, and perhaps a fridge and washing machine and a Japanese video — however much I have to push and scratch and claw to get it — that’ll be it! I won’t need the club any more.
    The young people ignore us. There’s absolutely no mutual understanding. Officially we have the same status as the World War II vets. The only difference is, they were defenders of the Fatherland, whereas we’re seen as the Germans — one young lad actually said that to me! We hate the younger generation. They spent their time listening to music, dancing with girls and reading books, while we were eating uncooked rice and getting blown up by mines. If you weren’t there, if you haven’t seen and lived through what I’ve seen and lived through, then you don’t mean a thing to me.
    You know, in ten years’ time, when our hepatitis, shell-shock, malaria and the rest of it starts getting really bad, they’ll just get rid of us — at work and at home. They’ll stop putting us on their committees. We’ll have become a burden …
    What’s the point of this book of yours? What good will it do? It won’t appeal to us vets. You’ll never be able to tell it like it really was over there. The dead camels and dead humans lying in the same pool of blood. And who else needs it? We’re strangers to everyone else. All I’ve got left is my home, my wife and ourbaby on the way, and a few friends from over there. I don’t trust anyone else.
    Private, Motorised Infantry Unit
    The local newspapers calmly announced that our regiment had completed its training and firing practice. We were pretty bitter when we read that, because our ‘training’ was escorting trucks you could pierce with a screwdriver — the perfect target for snipers. We were shot at every day and lost a lot of men. The lad next to me was killed. He was the first man I actually saw die although we hardly knew each other. He was killed by a mortar and had a lot of shrapnel in him. He died slowly and although he recognised us, he shouted out the names of people we didn’t know.
    The night before we left for Kabul I almost had a fight with one guy, but his friend dragged him away from me: ‘What’s the point of fighting? He’s flying to Afghan tomorrow.’
    They were so short of things over there we didn’t even have a bowl or spoon each. There was one big bowl and eight of us would attack it.
    Afghan was no adventure story. My image of it is a dead peasant, all skinny with big hands …
    During action you pray (I don’t know who to, God probably): please let the earth, or this rock, open up and swallow me. At night the mine-detecting dogs whined pathetically in their sleep. They got killed and wounded too. You’d see them lying there next to the men, dead and with their legs blown off. You couldn’t tell their blood apart, in the snow.
    We’d throw captured weapons in a great pile: American, Pakistani, Soviet, English, all intended to be used to kill us. Fear is more human than bravery, you’re scared and you’re sorry, at least for