When I was drafted into the army in April 1984, I was a nineteen-year-old boy. The club where they took us was a distribution centre. Officers came there from various military units and picked out the soldiers they wanted. My fate was decided in one minute. A young officer came up to me and asked, “Do you want to serve in the commandos, the Blue Berets?” Of course I agreed. Two hours later I was on a plane to Uzbekistan (a Soviet republic in Central Asia), where our training base was located. During the flight, I learned most of the soldiers from this base were sent to Afghanistan. I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t surprised. At that point I didn’t care anymore because I understood that it is impossible to change anything. ‘To serve in the Soviet army is the honourable duty of Soviet citizens” — as it’s written in our Constitution. And no one gives a damn whether you want to fulfil this “honourable duty” or not. But then I didn’t know anything about Afghanistan. Up until 1985, in the press and on television, they told us that Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan were planting trees and building schools and hospitals. And only a few knew that more and more cemeteries were being filled with the graves of eighteen- to twenty-year-old boys. Without the dates of their death, without inscriptions. Only their names on black stone …At the base we were trained and taught to shoot. We were told that we were being sent to Afghanistan not to plant trees. And as to building schools, we simply wouldn’t have the time …Three and a half months later, my plane was landing in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan … We were taken to a club on base. A few minutes later, officers started to come by and choose soldiers. Suddenly, an officer with a smiling face and sad eyes burst in noisily. He looked us over with an appraising glance and pointed his finger at me: “Ah ha! I see a minesweeper! ” That’s how I became a minesweeper. Ten days later, I went on my first combat mission. Vladislav Tamarov
About This Quote

During the invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, the French newspaper "Le Monde" published an article about an Afghan boy who had escaped from the Soviet army. The boy told his story in an interview with a French journalist. He described how he had contracted smallpox while serving in the Soviet army. He said that he had told his commanding officers about it, “but they didn't take me seriously … I went to see one of our doctors, but he didn't believe me …So I lied to him … I told him that after I was discharged from the Red Army, I came home to my village and started working in a mine.

Then I began to cough … I was dying …For two months, I couldn't get into the clinic … So then I went to see another doctor, but he was afraid …And finally, when I could no longer stay at home, my father took me to Kabul. There's nothing wrong with me!”

Source: Afghanistan: A Russian Soldiers Story

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