One Soldier's War by Arkady Babchenko, Nick Allen (Translator), Nick Allen (Translator)

The Washington Post - Thomas de Waal

…One Soldier's War evokes Catch-22 or, closer to the source, the savage ironies of Isaac Babel's tales of the 1919-21 Russian-Polish war, Red Cavalry…The memoir, by turns horrific, sad and funny, fills a big gap by providing us with the first-person experiences of an articulate Russian soldier.

Publishers Weekly

If you haven't yet learned that war is hell, this memoir by a young Russian recruit in his country's battle with the breakaway republic of Chechnya, should easily convince you. And yet Babchenko, who was drafted in 1995 as a second-year law student for the first Chechnya campaign, actually volunteered for the second one in 1999 for reasons even he is hard put to explain. Written shortly after his discharge from the army, the book burns with the need to tell of his personal ordeal and that of his fellows as young, innocent and woefully inexperienced grunts condemned to a miserable life ruled by shell-shocked superiors and perpetual threats. Here there are no good guys or moral high purpose-"No one, from the regimental commander to the rank and file soldier," Babchenko assures us, "understands why he is here"; one fights only for the fellow soldier next to him. Babchenko, now a journalist, demonstrates genuine literary ability, especially in the earlier vignette-like chapters, but readers will glean little about the conflict's political and historical context. Redundancy weakens a narrative that otherwise would have benefited from brevity. (Feb.)

Kirkus Reviews

Apocalypse Now? The guys on the boat had it easy, as this memoir from the Chechnya front demonstrates within a few sentences. Drafted into the military at 18 during the regime of Boris Yeltsin, "a despotic leader [who] couldn't have cared less about individuals," Babchenko was quickly shipped off to the Northern Caucasus, not long after the war there began. His introduction to the hells of war came in the form of having to drink corpse-tainted water-no surprise, however, given the way the corpses were piling up. As Babchenko notes, in a single engagement, the Battle of Grozny, nearly 5,000 Russians died, while the Chechen losses were beyond counting. The water was the least of his problems, for as a draftee he was regularly beaten and robbed, if less so than a Jewish comrade, "puny, cultured Zyuzik . . . [who] takes the beatings particularly badly . . . he still can't get used to the fact that he is a non-person, a lowlife, a dumb animal, and every punch sends him into a depression." Forced to raid civilians and each other for food, Babchenko's unit lacked any visible structure. Weeks passed before he was even aware that he had a commanding officer, and all around him his fellow soldiers were being picked off by guerrillas or running away in the hope of making it alive to Russia again. "Even our lieutenant, who was called up for two years after he graduated from college, did a runner," writes Babchenko. The indignities and ironies continued to mount. Only after they had been in combat for months did the army get around to issuing dog tags to identify the Russian dead, thin little pieces of aluminum that disintegrate in no time: "If you roast in a carrier they'll just melt and no one willbe able to identify you." Consequently, there evolved a thriving black-market trade in iron dog tags-and pot, trying to score some of which leads Babchenko into a dangerous misadventure. "War always smells the same-diesel oil and dust tinged with sadness," Babchenko reflects. A harrowing, masterfully written tale that, like Anthony Swofford's Jarhead and Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down, bears promise of becoming a classic of modern war reportage.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0802118607
  
• ISBN-13: 9780802118608
• Format: Hardcover, 395pp
• Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
• Pub. Date: January 2008
• Sales Rank: 99,065