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

was due to his unwillingness to give one iota that Panasyuk lost a front
tooth during his first months of service.
The people on the hilltop wilted from the burning sun and inactivity,
becoming dull and stupid. In this kind of heat, anybody's thoughts become
scattered. Even in the shade you toss around as in a fever, sweating out
every drop of moisture and waking up stupefied by the stifling heat, with
spittle on your lips, your head like a chunk of lead, sticky with sweat and
mind fogged with fragments of restless dreams.
... Sharagin wove around in his half-dreams, and although his thoughts
remained perfectly clear and consistent, coordination disappeared: the men
would run out to line up, and all Oleg could do was mumble something,
drunkenly trying to pull on a pair of socks which, for some reason, were two
sizes too small, so the heel was too far down and the sock wouldn't fit; he
hopped around on one bare foot, lost balance and tumbled backwards, luckily
onto his bunk, avoiding injury ... Soldiers' voices reached his ears through
a thin, silken veil of slumber: "...took fright, that greenhorn!...shit
himself when the shooting started!...well, it's true, isn't it?", "a rocket
exploded just five meters off, and not a single splinter hit us, would you
believe?", "and fuck me dead if I didn't kill three spooks right then and
there," "I'd rather walk into someone else's shit instead of going up there
on the slope. We already had one stupid bastard who went out into the field
for a crap ... we found his arse about twenty meters away, ha, ha, ha..." ,
"remember that warrant officer, Kosyakevich, how he rolled around on the
ground when that, well, when them spooks had us holed up in a ravine and
opened up with a fucking heavy machine gun? Kosyakevich copped it in the
stomach... the first aid instructor bandaged him up, but we knew that it was
curtains for the poor sod!", "death's a bugger, always catches you
unawares..."; and in his dreams Oleg also heard the soldiers bitching about
their details, and the lousy rations, and that "you always have to put down
your own cash to get a decent bite of something," and the curses the
soldiers aimed at the merciless sun of Afghanistan.
Finally Sharagin could not stand this monotonous and stupid chatter,
which would not let him sleep properly, and barked: "Stop that fucking
noise!" to shut them up. Then he took a gulp of water from his canteen and
turned over, hoping to fall asleep until dinner time.
One lot of voices was replaced by another, distracting him from his
attempts to sleep, and, if truth be told, Sharagin didn't really want to
sleep, and all kinds of thoughts went round and round in the lieutenant's
head.

... when you get down to it, soldiers are nothing but rabble, the
dregs of our society, they're ... hell, how quickly they've become
an uncontrollable wave away from home! ... nothing but trivial,
idiotic thoughts in practically every head that's why they
talk such rubbish ... but if our soldier is so dumb and useless,
what about the "diesel-heads"? All the mototrised infantry are
Morons!...

"I tell you, those flies weren't fucking!" cried someone, as though in
confirmation of Sharagin's thoughts.