ABSTRACT
The Soviet army came a long way in the course of the Afghan War, and two examples seem to illustrate this to perfection. One soldier recalled an operation in March 1980, when a unit of mechanised infantry, a mix of tanks and soldiers in wheeled armoured personnel carriers (APCs), was sent to flush out some Afghan army deserters, gone to ground in a village to the east of Kabul. The force rolled serenely in single file down the only road, fully 'buttoned up' -in other words, with all the hatches shut and bolted and everyone locked safely behind inches of armour plate. The major problem with this is that the only visibility came from little periscopes or through thick slabs of dust-caked armoured glass, and no one saw the Afghan soldier who calmly stood up alongside the road and threw a hand grenade under the leading personnel carrier, whose front wheels then obligingly blew in opposite directions. While the second APC's gunner frantically swung his machine-gun to bear on the enemy, the driver failed to realise what was going on and piled straight into the back of the disabled leader. Relying on the rather more primitive means of a clean pair of heels, the Afghan promptly escaped in the ensuing smoke and confusion. It took another ten minutes for the unit to reform in rather more effective combat order, tanks to the fore, infantry on foot to screen the carriers, which in turn were ready to provide covering fire, all according to the training manuals. By this time, the deserters had already fled into the hills. So the unit settled for burning the village to the ground and trundled disconsolately back to base, pausing once to repair a tank which had thrown a tread when an out-of-practice driver gunned his engine while negotiating soft sand, and once to bargain with a passing Afghan for some grain for the commissary, which was eventually confiscated anyway. This is a particularly ludicrous episode, admittedly, but by no means uncharacteristic of the
mayhem when, after the elite spearhead forces had done their work, the second echelon units rolled in, manned by fat reservists ten years out of uniform, callow conscripts scarcely sure which bit of the gun was the dangerous end and lazy, time-serving officers who had counted on being given a soft posting in some remote spot on the southern border of the Union. Lev, the soldier who recalled the operation, would have laughed himself silly at the memory, had he not lost a leg when that single grenade blew a red-hot wheel-axle up into the troop compartment.
