Ralph Peters - Red Army

He saw his first casualty. A strange Russian boy, pawing at the sky as though reaching for the bottom rungs of a ladder hanging just beyond his reach. The boy strained his arms, calling for his mother through a bloody 101

Ralph Peters —~

hole of a mouth, a bloody face under bloody blond hair. The boy gargled the single word, "Mother," over and over again, clawing at the sky and slapping the back of his head in the mud.

Leonid rushed by in horror. He fired his weapon in the general direction of his progress, clearing his own way, hopelessly disoriented.

An infantry fighting vehicle exploded off to the side, shooting brilliant colorations through the murk. Leonid found himself sitting down, baffled by how he had left his feet.

Where was the enemy? He couldn't see anything except running shadows and huge black vehicles that grumbled unexpectedly out of the smoke only to disappear again. If he was going to die . . . if he was going to die . . . he realized he did not even know what country he was in. They had driven so long. Was this still the German Democratic Republic? Or had they counterattacked to the west? Who was winning? How could you ever tell?

A ripple of artillery shells nearly deafened him, their force tearing at his uniform like a brazen girl. He kept his footing and trotted vacantly forward, out of tune with the danger of the exploding rounds. He passed a vividly burning vehicle around which blackened bodies lay. A voice barked in an Asiatic language, and a collection of small arms rattled in the mist.

Leonid discovered a machine gunner lying behind a low mound. For a moment, he lit with hope: Seryosha!

No. It was a stranger. Leonid flopped down beside him anyway, glad for any companionship. He began to fire his weapon in the same direction as the machine gunner.

An officer appeared, shrieking at them for their stupidity. The wild, red-faced captain waved his pistol and ordered them to go forward.

Leonid and his companion lifted themselves off the wet grass and moved cautiously in the direction the officer had indicated.

Dead men. Dead men. Uniforms peeled back. Blood and bone and the strewn offal of slaughtered pigs. Vehicle bonfires. And still no sight of the enemy.

Vehicle engines screamed at the side of a hill. Leonid tried to follow the sound. Then he heard tank guns, quite near, easily recognizable to anyone who had ever camped on a training range.

Trees. Leonid headed for the dark trunks, still keeping pace with his anonymous companion, neither of them consciously leading the way.

Leonid wanted to get out of the paths of the careening vehicles.

Small-arms fire erupted close by. Leonid stood, out of breath, remaining upright for several seconds before he realized that the muzzle flashes 102

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were aimed in his direction. His companion had already dropped behind a log, sweeping the wet woods with his squad machine gun, drawing magazines mechanically from a pouch.

"Over there," he shouted to Leonid. "In the brush."

Leonid tried to fire, but he had let his magazine go empty again. He hurried to change it, fingers refusing to behave with any discipline. He could not understand how anyone could tell friend from enemy. Perhaps everyone was simply shooting at everyone else. Leonid fired into the maze of trees.

Light. Heat. Painful noise. Leonid saw the machine gunner's body coming up from the side of his field of vision. The boy rose off the ground as though jolted by electricity, then his body seemed to hover for an instant before coming apart. He was a lifeless ruin as he flopped onto Leonid, covering him with waste.

Leonid screamed. He pushed and slapped at the body, trying to drive it away. He did not want to touch it. Yet he frantically wanted to scour the mess off of himself.

Dark figures bounded through the mist. Leonid pawed at his weapon, hands greased with another man's death. But the figures vanished like phantoms.

Leonid crawled in close behind a pile of weathered stones and matted leaves. Time had gotten out of control; the rhythm was all skewed. From beyond the edge of the trees, he heard a rising shout from many voices, a middle pitch between the high notes of rounds in flight and the bass of armor at war. He struggled to his feet, relieved to find his own body intact. As fast as he could run, he went toward the sounds of battle. He did not think even briefly of rejoining the fight. He simply wanted to be close to other living men.

103

EIGHT

Lieutenant Colonel Shilko stepped outside of his battalion control post and had a smoke under the tarpaulin. Each time a nearby battery let go a volley, the tarpaulin shivered water onto the ground. The rain had picked up again. It was miserable weather for a war.

Shilko wished he knew what was happening up front, in the direct-fire war. So far, he had received no updates on the situation, only an overload of fire missions. The targets moved deeper and deeper into the enemy's territory, which was a positive sign. On the other hand, his battalion deputy for technical affairs, in the process of trying to locate spare parts, had heard a rumor that the regimental- and divisional-level artillery units positioned closer to the forces in contact were taking severe punishment from enemy counterfire. His uncertainty left Shilko in limbo. Personally, he found the war thus far not much different from a training exercise, except that far more ordnance had been expended and operations had an especially frantic air about them. But no enemy rounds had landed anywhere near his batteries, and the occasional planes overhead merely screamed by on their way to other rendezvous.

The battalion's greatest problems at the moment were a hopeless backlog of missions and a rate of ammunition expenditure already running over twice as high as had been projected. Plenty of ammunition 104 —

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had been dumped on the ground by the guns for the initial fires in support of the plan, but Shilko faced the problem of dealing with a supply system in the division he supported that was totally unused to handling rounds in the appropriate caliber. He did not trust that system to dependably feed his guns once the battlefield really began to move. The system was supposed to push the correct ammunition forward to him from higher-echelon ammunition depots, but Shilko worried that his orphaned battalion might too easily be forgotten.

In order to remind the division rear services and the artillery technical support staff of his existence, Shilko had ordered half of his resupply trucks to dump their cargoes by the guns. Then he had sent the trucks off to draw more ammunition under the guidance of his deputy commander for political affairs. One thing Shilko trusted about the battalion's political officer was the man's ability to play the system within the system to acquire whatever the battalion really needed. If the rear services officer made no progress, the political officer could work through his own counterpart to move the system. If the rounds were anywhere to be had, Shilko knew his requisition would be satisfied—as long as the trucks could make their way on the jammed-up roads.

The difficulty with the lagging missions required a different sort of improvisation. The division's targeteers continued to send Shilko's guns more missions than they could possibly fire, whether the ammunition held out or not. First Romilinsky, the battalion's chief of staff, then Shilko himself had tried to explain the situation to division. But the missions continued to queue. Everyone wanted support from the big long-range guns. Finally, Shilko gave up on formal processes. He had been an artilleryman long enough to recognize what kind of missions were not worth firing after too long a delay, and he quietly took it upon himself to periodically purge the target schedule without notifying anyone outside of the battalion. Shilko always considered himself a conscientious officer. But he also recognized the need to be a practical one.