In case anyone thinks I was exaggerating, here are a few excerpts from the book I mentioned:
“You can get a beating for anything at all. If a spirit doesn’t show respect in his conversation with an older soldier, a ‘Granddad’, he’ll get beaten up. If he talks too loudly or goes about the barracks clattering his heels, he’ll get beaten up. If he lies on his bed in the day, he’ll get beaten up. If the people back home send him good rubber slippers and he decides to wear them to the shower, he’ll get beaten up and lose his slippers. And if a spirit even thinks of turning down the tops of his boots or walking around with his top button undone, or if his cap is tipped back on his head or to one side, or he doesn’t do his belt up tightly enough, they’ll thrash him so hard he’ll forget his name. He is a spirit, the lowest dregs, and it’s his job to slave until the older soldiers have been discharged.
But at the same time the older soldiers jealously guard their rights over their spirits. Every self-respecting granddad has his own spirit, a personal slave, and only he is allowed to beat and punish him.”
“We stop noticing living people, in fact we hardly see any. Everything that’s living seems temporary to us, everything that leaves this runway, everything that arrives here in columns, and even those who have just been called up into the army, all of them will end up heaped on top of one another in the helicopters. They simply have no other choice. They’ll be starved of food and sleep, tormented by lice and filth, be beaten up, have stools smashed over their heads and be raped in the latrines - so what? Their suffering is of no importance; they’re going to get killed anyway.”
“Everybody beats everyone. The dembels, with three months service to go, the officers, the warrant officers. They get stinking drunk and then hammer the ones below them. Even the colonels beat the majors, the majors beat the lieutenants, and they all beat the privates; and granddads beat new recruits.
“No-one talks to each other like human beings, they just smack each other in the mouth. Because it’s easier that way, quicker and simpler to understand. Because ‘you’re all going to snuff it anyway, you bitches’. Because there are unfed children back home, because the officer corps is addled with impoverishment and hopelessness, because a dembel has three months left, because every second man is shell-shocked. Because our Motherland makes us kill people, our own people, who speak Russian, and we have to shoot them in the head and send their brains flying up the walls, crush them with tanks and tear them to pieces. Because these people want to kill you, because your soldiers arrived yesterday straight from training and today they are already lying on the airstrip as lumps of charred flesh, and flies lay eggs in their open eyes, and because in a day the company is reduced to less than a third, and God willing, you’ll stay among that third. Because the one thing that everyone knows is how to get drunk and kill, kill and kill some more.”
“Fourteen members of our company are AWOL, absent without leave. Young conscripts flee in their droves, heading straight from their beds into the steppe, barefoot and wearing only their long johns, unable to withstand the nightly torment any longer. Even our lieutenant, who was called up for two years after he graduated from college, did a runner. There are only eight of us left, us five and three local boys - Murky, Pinocchio (or Pincha) and Khariton. We live together in the reconnaissance company, and the recon regard us as their personal slaves and do what the hell they like with us.”