Red Army (54 page)

Bezarin touched his holster.

The sight of the major surprised Malinsky. He had neither wanted nor expected company. He simply wanted to see the Rhine up close, to savor his moment in history as best he could. To confirm the value of his sacrifice. And this nervous major appeared, reaching for his pistol. Malinsky decided to make the best of it.

“I would be grateful, Comrade Major, if you didn’t shoot me.”

The major reddened, embarrassed. He stammered out a barely intelligible apology.

“Don’t worry,” Malinsky told him. “It’s always a good thing to be on your guard.” He recognized the major as one of the men on whom he had pinned a medal not an hour before, and he offered him a cigarette, which the major clumsily declined. It struck Malinsky as odd that this fresh-baked hero would be alone, when Starukhin was holding court for all of his heroes at what promised to be one of the great parties of the century. Malinsky had excused himself so that Starukhin and his boys could relax and drink themselves sick. Starukhin seemed to Malinsky to embody much that was eternally Russian -- big, loud, vainglorious, generous, abusive of his personal power, desperate for comradeship, alternately slothful and passionate, and capable of great cruelty.

Well, who knew what devils chewed at this lone major? The war had very different effects on different men. Malinsky examined the younger man. The major’s face looked bright enough. Not as intelligent, and certainly not as sensitive, as Anton’s face had been. But it was the type of clean, earnest face that would go far under the new regime. Certainly, this Hero of the Soviet Union would not be a major much longer.

“Married, Comrade Major? Thinking of your wife and family, perhaps?”

The major had begun to recover from his embarrassment. But he remained ill at ease.

“No, Comrade Front Commander. I’m not married.”

Malinsky flicked his cigarette ashes toward the river. The storied Rhine was a bit of a disappointment to him, running grayish-brown, with eddies of garbage against the shore. “A girl, then?”

The young officer nodded, stupidly eager. “Yes, Comrade Front Commander. A wonderful girl. Very well-educated.”

Malinsky sensed that the major wanted to gush details and descriptions of his beloved. But the younger man had the discipline to restrain himself.

“Well,” Malinsky said, “you must marry her. Marriage is a wonderful institution. I highly recommend it. And you must have children. The Motherland needs to preserve the bloodlines of her heroes.”

Malinsky suddenly wanted to turn the discussion off, to drive the major away so that he might be alone. He thought of his wife. He would not see her for some time yet, and she would have to bear the news of Anton’s fate alone. It seemed terribly unfair that his wife should be alone at such a time. A soldier’s wife never had the comforts or conveniences of a normal life.

Anton’s wife, too, was alone. More alone than his own wife. No one would ever come back to the girl. Malinsky thought of Zena, a silly, irresponsible red-haired girl, impossible to dislike. Swollen with the energy of life, bursting with it. She had possessed none of the makings of a soldier’s wife except the ability to love his son. And that love had made his son so happy that Malinsky found it easy to indulge the girl’s artistic pretensions and ridiculous behavior. Yes, he thought, she made my son happy. I must take care of her.

Malinsky felt tears rising in his eyes, and such a display would never do. He fought for and regained control of himself, flicking the butt of his cigarette carelessly toward the river. But he could not reconcile himself to Anton’s death. He could not bear it. He would have been glad to die, to die miserably, in his son’s place.

He looked at the major, who had averted his eyes. Why should this man live instead of his son? There was nothing special about this major, nothing without which the world could not keep turning. His face bore none of the high traces of honor and breeding that Anton’s fine features had carried. Why, of all the sons, did Anton have to die?

Malinsky understood the mundane logic of it. He understood war. He even comprehended the minuscule importance of his son’s fate in the shadow of events that changed the world. But he could not, he would not, reconcile himself to it. He raged at the death, refused it, holding Anton alive in his heart.

The last of the Malinskys, he thought bitterly. Now we will be nothing more than a footnote in unread historical treatises.

Anton.

Malinsky followed the major’s stare out over the polluted water to the commanding span of the bridge. The Americans were going. Malinsky knew how close they had come to embarrassing his plan. They had almost beaten him. But “almost” was a word that carried no reward.

He felt no special hatred for the Americans. He admired the good order of their formations, their unbroken feel. He thought of how bitter this march must be for them, when they had fought so well. He believed he could have stopped them at the Weser until follow-on forces arrived. But he was glad he had not had to try.

Malinsky cut short his ruminations. It was time to go. He had other ceremonies to attend, other medals to award, and a host of tedious issues to resolve between toasts. He felt an urge to salute the Americans before he left, the tribute of an old soldier. But he doubted that the major would understand the gesture. The old traditions were dying, and you could not keep them alive artificially, no matter how hard you tried. A new and thoughtless age had overtaken them all. In the end, Malinsky simply wished the major luck with his girl.

The land power elements of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union have not been known officially as the Red Army for many years. Yet in our informal conversations, in the bold colors of our war games, and in many of our bleakest mental images, the Soviet military remains indelibly Red. Certainly, that shorthand term “Red Army” was the accepted terminology of my childhood in the nineteen-fifties, when my classmates and I practiced huddling under our school desks as a defensive measure against nuclear attack. And we have accepted that “Red Army” as a cliché both verbal and mental, conjuring a “faceless mass,” with only the rarest attempts at differentiating between its individual members as human beings.

Red Army
suggested itself as a title because it speaks so directly to that deeply ingrained mental image. It is
not
a book about lethal gadgets. While seeking the highest possible level of technical accuracy for its backdrop, this book is about behavior. How would that other system
behave
at war -- and how might its individual members prove like us or distinctly unlike us in their responses to the stress of combat? This book is not about the hardware or even the mission, but about the men. This is the area where I have personally found intelligence products grossly deficient, yet understanding the human dimension is an essential element of battlefield success or failure. It is not enough to memorize the technical parameters of missiles, MIGs, and battlefield lasers. We must, somehow, get at the consciousness behind the controls. My fundamental goal in writing this book was to attempt to bring those men to life in their rich human variety, to see them as a bit less faceless and enigmatic, in the context of modern battle.

For more than a dozen years, I have been frustrated by my inability in formal briefings, lectures, and documents, either in the mud of gunnery ranges or in the comfort of theaters, to adequately transmit anything sufficiently meaningful about the men behind the Soviet guns. When asked what the Soviet military is “really like,” I have often joked that it’s a lot like sex: Much that you’ve heard about it isn’t true; when it’s good, it can be amazing; but when it’s bad, it’s inexpressibly embarrassing. Yet such a pat answer only deflects an important question. What
are
they really like? While it would be impossible ever to fully answer such a query even were I Russian-born, the format of fiction, with painstaking fidelity in detail, seemed my only hope for bringing “the other guys” to life for my comrades and countrymen. This novel does not pretend to answer all of the questions. Instead, it is aimed at provoking thought and a new consideration of those men so tragically made our opponents by the events of this grim century.

Could
they
pull it off? Could they achieve the success the book allows them? If we examined only the achievements of Soviet military theory, the answer would be an emphatic
“Yes!”
The body of contemporary Soviet military theory is tremendously impressive -- far more sophisticated and comprehensive than the often-dilettantish concepts cobbled together in the West. But wars are not won by theory alone, and the area in which the Soviet military is perhaps the least impressive is in the lack of suppleness and honing of their tactical units and subunits. The gap between soaring aspirations and limping reality has long been manifest in many fields of Russian, then Soviet endeavor, such as philosophy, politics, economics, science -- and the military. A Russian is rarely short of fabulous ideas -- and Soviet “military science and art” dazzle us with their intensity and incisiveness. But between those brilliant theoretical constructs and the muddy boots lies a range of operational question marks that only combat could satisfactorily answer. Were a war to occur in Europe “tomorrow,” the Soviet military
could
conceivably pull off the victory related in the book -- but the luck of the battlefield would have to be running almost entirely on their side. The Soviet military system seeks methodically to reduce the impact of “luck,” of chance, of friction, and even of what they term “native wit” -- the individual human talents of which
we
are inclined to make so much, rightly or wrongly. Yet the overall military balance in the European theater is such that luck in its broadest sense would have a great deal to do with the outcome on the battlefield: who would be “lucky” enough to have the right men in the right positions; whose analysts would properly assess the disparate bits of intelligence information appearing amid impressionistic conditions of confusion and evident disaster; who will have figured out the most acute employments for modern battlefield technologies; who might take the proper risks at the decisive times; who would get to the good ground first . . .

This book is hard on NATO, because everyone else is so anxious to handle it with exaggerated delicacy. I am personally firmly committed to this most successful of all alliances, but I also believe that we have allowed NATO to evolve into something of a spoiled child at an unacceptable relative cost to the security and economy of the United States. NATO has tremendous latent combat power that may fail to show to full effect on the battlefield simply because we have all been so anxious to avoid sober self-criticism in peacetime. As a citizen of the United States, I place a value beyond words on the preservation of western civilization (with all its discontents), yet I cannot rationalize the sacrifice of a single American soldier’s life because we acquiesced to folly in fear of an ally’s tantrum.

This book does not presuppose that a war is either imminent or inevitable -- indeed, the declarations of Mikhael Gorbachev offer grounds for careful optimism -- and it should be clear from the events described in these pages that war is not becoming any more attractive an option for the solution of our problems as military technology improves. Authors are marvelously privileged in that they can kill tens of thousands without shedding any real blood, but the paper war in which the reader engages is only a comfortable shadow of the potential horror of modern land warfare. This is ultimately a work of fiction; a cautionary tale on one level, an effort at creative investigation on another, it frankly means to entertain. If there is a conscious message between its covers, it is not that there
will
be a war with that differently uniformed collection of human beings east of the Great Wall of Europe, but that, should such a war occur, we will be opposed by other men of flesh and blood, with their own talents, ambitions, and dreams. Thankfully, I believe that the great majority of them resemble the great majority of us in their desire simply to get on with the business of living.

Ralph Peters is a veteran U.S. Army intelligence officer, with extensive tactical experience in Europe. A Soviet analyst and linguist, he has published widely on military affairs, and his work has been translated into various foreign languages. An earlier novel,
Bravo Romeo,
appeared in 1981.

“RED ARMY is
about the men behind the Soviet guns,” he writes. “My fundamental goal was to bring those men to life, in their rich human variety ... to see how they might respond in the context of modern battle.”