Their Vietnam: Review

If Afghanistan was the Soviet Union's Vietnam, then Gennadi [Bocharov] is its Michael Herr. Like Mr. Herr's "Dispatches," "Russian Roulette" is a deeply felt, close-to-the-bone, often sardonic, set of vivid sketches of the grunt's war. In one telling section, Mr. Bocharov, a young Soviet journalist who traveled with the troops and whose reports were a startling counterpoint to the party line, asks in turn a refugee, a soldier and the commanding general, a tough professional he clearly admires, why Soviet forces are in Afghanistan. No one can answer. The general says: "I'm commander of the Army. This question should be addressed to others." In a brief afterword to his gut-wrenching description of soldiers killed, maimed, maddened and otherwise destroyed, Mr. Bocharov concludes: "And so it was, during all those years of the war, the longest waged by Russia since 1813: the people lived in grief, and officialdom basked in the glory of doctrine." This is clearly the kind of book that would have been impossible to publish in the Soviet Union a few years ago. In pre-glasnost days, Russian readers were limited to such works as -- I am not making this up -- "A Tree Grows in Kabul," about a world-weary foreign correspondent who finds love and meaning as the Russians help out their poor Afghan friends. But in "Russian Roulette," they can read about "the luckiest soldier in Afghanistan" returning home dazed and partly paralyzed; about a good simple soldier from the countryside killed defending his comrades, who later visit a memorial to him "with the dilated pupils and moist eyes of drug addicts"; about an attempted cover-up of a massacre; and about a naive, eager young doctor going into an "amputation frenzy" in his first battle, trying to cut the head off a soldier climbing out of a tank.