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

guessed Sharagin.
"Comrade senior lieutenant!" squeaked the political officer. "Enough of
your fu ... '' he cut himself off. ''Enough of these emotional outbursts!
They're our military allies!"
Chistyakov bit his lip, scowled at Nemilov and burst out:
"What do you fucking well want, more than anyone else?"
"Bloody hell, will you stop that?!" interrupted Morgultsev. He gave the
platoon leaders their instructions and ordered them to their vehicles.
"I won't leave it at that," fumed the political officer. "I don't care
if he's due for replacement! What kind of an example is he setting others?"
"Leave him alone," advised Morgultsev.

Sharagin's BMP bounced across a trench, the armour slicing through a
corner of a house, and raced away from the village.
They penetrated deeper into the valley and the "greenery", breathing in
the unhealthy, greasy dust of deserted houses, the treads of BMPs churning
up the spooks' former land holdings, driving them away and pursuing; their
advance drove the spooks back from their bolt-holes, squeezed them out of
the valley, pointing them toward other hunters, even though they knew that
once the operation was over and the companies went back to base, the spooks
who had managed to break through would return and bring others with them,
return and take up residence once more, and revolutionary power would never
be established in these parts.
Unruly and defiant, condemned as treacherous or subversive, at times
due to errors inevitable in war time, the villages were methodically pounded
by Soviet air power and artillery. Heavy arms fire felled and destroyed
Muslim gravestones, flags fluttering in the wind. Shells disemboweled
cemeteries and homes of the heathen, cleared Afghan mountains, plains and
deserts of the spooks, of the unclean, making way for the builders of a new,
bright future. The shuravi hoped the time would come when they would finally
wipe all treacherous villages from the face of the earth. Villages fell,
burned, disintegrated, but for some reason never disappeared completely.
Like scabbed-over sores they lay on mountain slopes, in the "greenery" and
along roadsides - a blind reproach, malignant and unforgiving of what was
done to them, ready to wreak revenge for the cruelty with which, free from
doubt and hesitation, the people from the North, the shuravi, who always did
whatever they wanted, had dealt with them.

A lone, stunted tree stuck out above a long, partially ruined wall,
chunks missing from it like bites from an apple. The tree had lost its crown
in the shelling, but it still lived. It looked out fearfully at the
surrounding world after the artillery storm.

... just like that old man behind the house ...

The familiar, relatively safe passage of life, accompanied by the roar
of diesel engines and shuddering armour, suddenly broke off. A grenade
launcher opened up on the first BMP from behind the wall.