"Mikhail Evstafiev. Two Steps From Heaven " - читать интересную книгу автора

specialist in the field, how and where to get a three-litre jar of the
necessary medicine. A smaller dose, according to him, was insufficient to
kill the offending microbes.
Unlike Pashkov, lieutenant Sharagin suffered longer, but resorted to
tablets instead of downing spirit. As an educated man, he did not believe
that the disease could be expunged by alcohol alone. Rising for the
umpteenth time in the middle of the night, sweating and sleepy, he hurried
outside.
Trying to breathe as infrequently as possible he studied a scrap of
"Red Star", then crushed it up in order to soften it a little. The central
Soviet press and the regional paper "Frunzevets" were frequently read in the
regiment, and not only during painful sessions in the latrine. They read
about events in the capitalist world, in countries where socialism reigned
triumphant, about Party and Komsomol congresses, laughed at the writers of
reports on Afghanistan. But should any outsider say the same, they would all
rise up as one in defense and swear that every word written about
international help was God's truth, and how, for example, that APC got blown
up because the lieutenant spared the Afghans' crops because he remembered
his own collective farm and the fields of home, the hard labor of the
peasants, how he had once dreamed of becoming a tractor driver but went to
military school instead, knowing that there is such a profession as the
defense of one's motherland: recalling all this, the lieutenant chose to
travel along the road rather than across fields, a road which the spooks had
mined, of course....
In any case, if you look at things squarely, it's not right to
criticize the Soviet Army; any story, any garbage in the press, any feat of
courage, be it true or invented, raises morale.

...let the inventions continue to appear in the press...let people
remember that there is a war on... thought Sharagin.

... one must pretend that the concoctions in the papers are true ...
reporters come here on tours of duty in order to make a name for themselves
... like that one, what's his name? Lobanov ... some writer! ... made up a
truckload of malarkey ... made himself famous but mentioned us paratroopers,
too...

The night, dressed in a myriad of spiky stars, unfolded itself above
the regiment. The paras slept quietly, if you did not count the humming of
the diesel generators located on the edge of the camp, and to which everyone
had grown accustomed.
Sharagin stopped to clear his lungs of the acrid smell of human
excrement and lit a cigarette, enjoying the silky moon and the scattered
multitude of stars. His insides squirmed, he felt like a limp dish rag which
had been thoroughly wrung, no strength at all, he felt weakness filling him.
From time to time, tracers would rise into the sky - one of the sentries
must be relieving the boredom of standing watch.

...like the overburdened souls of people who were sick of war, the
tracers shot silently skyward in order to lose themselves in the skies above