Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War by Svetlana Alexievich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Enduring Shame of War

War is a nightmare. It remains a nightmare longest for those soldiers who have survived it. The truth is that they don’t survive it, they re-live it one way or another for the rest of their lives. And what they re-live is exactly what all combat soldiers do: the utter absurdity of what they have accomplished.

So this book, although written in 1990 reporting the thoughts, memories and regrets of young Russian soldiers and surviving family members, female civilian employees and nurses who were assigned to Afghanistan, is indistinguishable from the reported experiences of American young men in VietNam twenty years before or of the British and American soldiers who followed the Russians into Afghanistan thirty years later. Roughly a half-century of experience of violent death. This experience is always the same for the grunts who do the shooting and diving for cover, and who suffer from the fear and discomfort of patrols, outposts, and missions that they know are not only dangerous but also ill-founded and useless.

And the personal consequences for these soldiers are virtually identical: alienation from family and friends, drug addiction, psychotic episodes, psycho-somatic disabilities, and a host of other maladies generally known as PTSD. It has become clear that every front-line combatant suffers deeply and permanently from the experiences of killing, being the constant target of killing, and the witnessing of comrades being killed and maimed. The Russians put the situation succinctly:

“… in order to experience the horror you have to remember it and get used to it. Within two or three weeks there’s nothing left of the old you except your name. You’ve become someone else… It’s a total transformation, it happens very quickly, and to practically everyone… everyone’s damaged in some way, no one escapes intact.”

But there is something else that is now also becoming evident. The most enduring effects of combat may not be in the soldiers but in the societies to which they and the bodies of their colleagues return. The introduction to the book is by a veteran of the American War in VietNam who was part of the interviewing process among the Russians. He is very clear about the central commonality between his comrades and the young Russians:

“… of all the comparisons between the American GIs who fought in Vietnam and the young Soviets who fought in Afghanistan, perhaps the most remarkable and consistent is their bitterness towards their governments. Both groups of men feel profoundly betrayed, and it is having been lied to that most sticks in the craw.”

Warfare destroys the fabric of the society that undertakes it. The hundreds of thousands, indeed millions, of disillusioned young men who have been through combat experience and return carry with them this sense of betrayal. They may hesitate to talk about their experiences of death, privation, and suffering. But this betrayal is unavoidably communicated to spouses, family and friends. They are the vectors for a social virus which is unstoppable. Neither the absurd restrictions imposed by the Soviets about discussion of military experience, nor the equally absurd propaganda by the US government about the national duty to stop communism could halt the spread of suspicion that the real enemy is the government.

That the Russian war in Afghanistan was a precipitating factor in the fall of the Soviet state, I think is unquestionable. That the American war in VietNam started a significant if less drastic change in American politics beginning with the Reagan administration and subtly spreading at state level is also likely. That the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan contributed to the breakdown of traditional political party positions in America and the eventual elevation of Trump and his divisiveness is explicit. Wars kill more than people. War destroys trust in organisations and institutions far removed from the battlefield. War demands deceit within the nation that pursues it.

But the deceit involved in war goes even deeper than governmental and military lies, distortions and cover-ups. All of these recent wars were popular in the sense that there was wide-spread public support for their prosecution. In each the stated motivations and objectives were noble: to free, to protect, to build, to develop. Families were proud to send their sons to do their patriotic duty. Everyone was re-assured by the statements of political leaders that military involvement was both necessary and essentially short-term. When the facts of the case emerged, it was clear that the public had been duped. Or rather, they had duped themselves through their naive confidence in largely vacuous concepts like justified warfare, theories of strategic vulnerability, the evil of socialism (or capitalism). They, not their governments were the real culprits. They didn’t just allow war, they promoted it.

Shame is an overpowering emotion. The testimony of soldiers is literally shameful in a population that knows it has erred grievously. The public response to soldiers returning from VietNam was exactly the same as for the Russians returning from Afghanistan - shame. The soldiers were the scapegoats for that shame but it resided in those who mocked them, blamed them, accused them, and ignored them. And this shame has a cultural half-life longer than the generation alive during the conflict.

Shame, because it is so unbearable, gets passed along surreptitiously. And it shows up in a sort of self-hatred of the kind visible in America and Russia at the moment. They cannot admit to their own monstrously bad behaviour. So they turn on each other and create diversionary issues - abortion rights, immigration horrors, budget deficits - to avoid confronting the shame.

So the shame lingers and festers. Given an opportunity it provokes the need to demonstrate confidence, bravado, to mask its presence. And the process of war begins its cycle once again. As a Russian artillery officer put the situation: “Our children will grow up and deny their fathers ever fought in Afghanistan.” But those children will probably be sent to fight somewhere else.

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