Free Fall by Nicolai Lilin

Afghanistan as young men, and had embarked on a long, sad life, bouncing from one war to another without rest, taking part in every bloody conflict that broke out in USSR territory before and after its fall.
    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.
    He was an expert saboteur, old Ivanisch, and every time one of us mentioned his name it was evident that the soldiers in the other units knew and respected him. Our enemies knew him well too, because 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 samesoldiers – 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.
    Sometimes Nosov would tell us war stories, and what struck me the most about him was the tenderness of the words he used to describe all the brutality and horror of social collapse. It was like he was talking about something very dear to him, like family. At times even the enemy seemed like a fundamental part of his existence, as though without it his life would make no sense.
    In my head, I had extremely contradictory images of our captain. Sometimes he seemed too brutish, almost inhuman, while at other times I felt that he cared more about us than he cared about himself. In time I would come to understand that for Ivanisch a single person was less important than the whole unit. Our personal histories didn’t interest him. He saw in each of us a role; we were part of a mechanism intended to carry out specific tasks. This was his way of caring about us; he couldn’t allow himself to get too attached to the individual.
    Nosov didn’t like to talk about himself or his family; we knew only that he had a sister named Rita, and that once in a while she would write to him.
    He burned those letters right after reading them, and if the circumstances allowed it he would immediately ask one of us – often me – to write a reply. He always said the same things; he told her how charming the places we found ourselves in were, how the sun went down, howbeautiful the rivers that flowed high in the mountains were. He explained how hard life was for the people there, and then every so often would ask us to add something of our own, ‘for beauty’s sake’, as he would say. In every letter he would reassure his sister, telling her to ‘keep clear of the war’ – of course he didn’t write that he was actually part of an active unit on the front lines; instead, he invented little stories about us, the men who were guarding a warehouse with him, in a safe place, on some Russian air base.
    All we knew about Nosov was that he didn’t have a house, a wife or children. His relationships with women were limited to the little parties organised by his officer friends, where young nurses and cooks would go. He himself called those soirées ‘bordellos’, and after every one they had to carry him back to the unit. He’d come in very drunk, semi-unconscious and with scratch marks from a woman on his face. All the officials said that Nosov was a hit with the ladies because he had a ‘big calibre’.
    There weren’t many of us; perhaps that’s why we became close to one another so quickly.
    The first time I felt a strong sense of solidarity was during one of my first battles. We were walking close to the wall of a house when we were attacked by surprise. As we tried to cross the yard a group of enemy soldiers lying in wait on the roof of the house across the way opened fire on