site member prompt Challenge 6

[JamesSavik]

This is a conversation between a military officer at the front and an old friend at home-- a war that is going badly and the people at home are being lied to about it.

 

Read about Alexi's emotions and the setting and Write the conversation.

 

Level: Challenging

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After 1:00am in the morning, Captain Alexi Markov's desk smelled like cold coffee and cigarette butts. His uniform was wrinkled and dusty from the day�s battle. The Afghan dust seemed to stick to everything. (1)

 

There had been another pointless battle earlier in the day. A pointless patrol had suffered a pointless ambush. The poorly equipped and trained Soviet troops fought as well as they could with what they had. Four vehicles had been destroyed, another four were damaged. Twenty of his soldiers were killed and another fourteen were hospitalized.

 

There were twenty files on his desk: the files of twenty young Russians who would never go home. Twenty young faces that that assumed formation with the hundreds, maybe thousands of young corpses, that would haunt him till the day he died.

 

The children that they sent him to fight the Kremlin's pointless war were woefully unprepared. They arrived starry eyed young pioneers(1) fresh from obsolete training for a different kind of war. They were then thrown into the meat grinder that the Afghan occupation had become. Those soldiers that survived for six weeks would probably make it to become grim faced veterans at the age of nineteen or twenty.

 

Markov was past being angry. What was inside of him was a toxic mixture of emotions: constant fear, betrayal, sadness for the dead and sadness for the living.

 

A company commander for the 103rd Guards Armored Division(3) picked up the phone on his desk at divisional HQ in Kabul. Talking to Misha had always calmed him down in the past and he needed calming badly. If he were to have to face the division's commanding general without pulling his sidearm and shooting the drunken fool in the head for wasting his men, he needed calming down.

 

He dialed his old friend�s number. It rang three times and a sleepy voice answered, "Hello?"

 

"Misha, I need to talk."

 

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(1) Afghanistan is a very rough country with a very difficult mixture of terrain conditions: mountians, hills, plateaus and desert can all coexist with a few miles of each other. Sandstorms are common deposting fine grit on everything.

 

(2) Young Pioneers- the Soviet Union's version of the Boy Scouts with the addition of quite a lot of Communist Indoctrination.

 

(3) Guards Armored Division- these are mixed formations of tanks and armored infantry (motor-rifle) companies. Infantry are transported in armored personal carriers like the ubitiquious BMP.