Nicolai Lilin - Free Fall

‘Son, you’d certainly know better than anyone else. But remember, if anything ever happens, I’m always here…’

As the helicopter ascended, the colonel smiled from the window and waved. Then he made a sign on his chest, as if he were drawing our bat with his finger. Still smiling, he clenched his fist, as if to say ‘Keep it up!’ We all broke out in big grins and waved back at him, as if he were our own grandfather who had come to visit us.

I thought a lot about what happened that day. Sometimes I regretted not having killed that poor man I’d shot in the knee. But later, after some time had passed, I came to understand the insane logic that guided our captain’s actions, and I realised that, yes, it was true that he made some extreme decisions, but he did it so that we could keep fighting the war the way we did.

We owed our reputation to Nosov’s great skill in handling complex situations well in the face of the realities of war.

And if his choices didn’t always conform to human morality, it was only because they reflected the horror and the difficulty we endured every day in the war, trying to stay alive, strong and sound.

One morning – really early, it must have been four a.m. – Moscow woke me up. My comrades and I had slept in the courtyard of a half-wrecked building in a public housing district on the outskirts of the city. We’d been embroiled in a series of bloody skirmishes with the enemy for days. My group and I had been fighting on the front lines but luckily we were all still in one piece. We hadn’t taken any losses, but we were dead tired.

It seemed like the battle was never going to end. Every second was crucial, every action was important and required great concentration, and at the end of the day we felt like juiced oranges. During battle, we had a clear objective: to push the enemy to the other end of the city, where the armoured infantry units were waiting to eliminate all of them… It was an exhausting task, and Captain Nosov had given us permission to take a break, to go behind the line to rest amidst the rubble, in the area guarded by our infantry.

Before falling asleep, some of us said that maybe the mission was over; we were all hoping we wouldn’t have to set foot in that godforsaken city again. Then, sleep came.

A little while later – at four, as I said – Moscow woke me up by tapping my chest with the butt of his Kalashnikov.

Slowly and reluctantly I opened my eyes and looked around. I struggled to remember where I was. I couldn’t put anything into focus.

‘What’s going on, how long did we sleep?’ I asked Moscow, my voice worn-out.

‘We didn’t sleep for shit, brother… And it doesn’t look like we’ll be going back to sleep any time soon.’

The order from command called us back to the front line in the northeast area of the city, where a cluster of enemies had got through a breach in our ring of troops. They had American-made armoured cars, off-road vehicles, and they were equipped with heavy weapons: grenade launchers, 120mm cannons and a pair of multiple launch rocket systems called ‘Grad’, which is Russian for ‘hail’. That night those bastards had attacked the weakest point in the ring – the Arabs, besides being numerous and well armed, had surprise-effects of their own. Nobody had expected a move like that; usually the cities where operations took place were surrounded so that the enemy couldn’t get out. We had never seen anyone trying to come in to take part in the battle.

This event caused an immediate scandal. Command was furious. The infantry had been given orders to contain the attack, but manpower was limited and they had no heavy artillery to back them up. They managed to retreat without too many losses, and this in itself constituted a good outcome. The helicopters came late, after the greater part of the enemies had already infiltrated the city. Firing from the sky, our men had only managed to take out the tail end of the group.