Free Zinky Boys by Svetlana Alexievich Page B

he knew we’d have to take him with us — but I did think of him when we got our demob papers.
    Dum-dum wounds from exploding bullets were the worst. My first casualty had one leg blown off at the knee (with the bone left sticking out), his other ankle ripped away, his penis gone, his eyes blown out and one ear torn off. I started shaking and retching uncontrollably. ‘If you don’t do it now you’ll never make it as a medic,’ I told myself. I applied tourniquets, staunched the blood, gave him a pain-killer and something to make him sleep. Next was a soldier with a dum-dum in the stomach. His guts werehanging out. I bandaged him, staunched the blood, and gave him a pain-killer, something to make him sleep. I held him for four hours, then he died.
    There was a general shortage of medication. Even the iodine ran out. Either the supply system failed, or else we’d used up our allowance — another triumph of our planned economy. We used equipment captured from the enemy. In my bag I always had twenty Japanese disposable syringes. They were sealed in a light polyethylene packing which could be removed quickly, ready for use. Our Soviet ‘Rekord’ brand, wrapped in paper which always got torn, were frequently not sterile. Half of them didn’t work, anyhow — the plungers got stuck. They were crap. Our homeproduced plasma was supplied in half-litre glass bottles. A seriously wounded casualty needs two litres — i.e. four bottles. How are you meant to hold them up, arm-high, for nearly an hour in battlefield conditions? It’s practically impossible. And how many bottles can you carry? We captured Italian-made polyethylene packages containing one litre each, so strong you could jump on them with your army boots and they wouldn’t burst. Our ordinary Soviet-made sterile dressings were also bad. The packaging was as heavy as oak and weighed more than the dressing itself. Foreign equivalents, from Thailand or Australia, for example, were lighter, even whiter somehow … We had absolutely no elastic dressings, except what we captured — French and German products. And as for our splints! They were more like skis than medical equipment! How many can you carry with you? I carried English splints of different lengths for specific limbs, upper arm, calf, thigh, etc. They were inflatable, with zips. You inserted the arm or whatever, zipped up and the bone was protected from movement or jarring during transportation to hospital.
    In the last nine years our country has made no progress and produced nothing new in this field — and that goes for dressings and splints. The Soviet soldier is the cheapest in the world — and the most patient. It was like that in 1941, but why fifty years later? Why?
    It’s terrible being shot at when you can’t fire back. I never sat in the first or last armoured carrier in a convoy. I never had my legs dangling in the hatch; I preferred to sit over the side sothere’d be less chance of them being blown off by a mine. I had German tablets with me for suppressing fear, but I never took them.
    We’d come back from battle looking very unlike Soviet soldiers. We looted enemy boots, clothes and food. Our flak-jackets were so heavy you could hardly lift them. The American ones were preferred — they didn’t have a single metal part. They were made from some kind of bullet-proof material which a Makarov pistol couldn’t penetrate at point-blank range, and a tommy-gun only from a hundred metres at most. American sleeping-bags we captured were 1949 models, but as light as a feather. Our padded jackets weigh at least seven kilograms. When we found mercenaries dead we took their jackets, their wide-peaked forage caps and their Chinese trousers with inner linings which didn’t wear out. We took everything, including their underwear (yes, there was a shortage of underwear too!), their socks and trainers. I picked up a