Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25125
The fighters call the rockets "Russian telephone calls." The Russians are calling us. After a week in rebel-held Chechnya I can identify the different munitions they drop. The flat bubbles of 500 pounders, the violent wham of 1,000 pounders, the double whumps of the Grad rocket barrages and even the Scud missiles that shake the earth and send up angry orange pillars of flame. Tonight they are using Grad or Hail rockets. Normally, each barrage is used to destroy half a square mile of artillery but here they kill houses, chi ldren, dogs, old people and trees. I lie and listen to them move closer towards me and further away as if looking for me. Like a confused giant's footsteps crushing the land with each thunderous step. What wakes me up in the morning is the dead silence. This morning is quiet- too quiet. My host tells me the neighborhood was hit by very heavy bombardment during the night and says we are leaving the city. He has been up al l night. The Russians advanced to within one and a half miles of the house, stra ight through the Chechen lines. I had met a captured Russian spy who blamed the Russian secret service for blowing up the apartments. I had watched the rockets kill and injure children. I had been in the dank basement hospitals, the bunkers stinking of kerosene and dirty socks. I had seen the 40-foot-wide craters. I had dinner with terrorists wanted by Interpol and the Russians. I had seen the elderly people huddling in their basements and apartments. I was here, where you can't f lip the channel or turn the page. Where spin doctors, media blackouts and waffling words can't hide the deaths of innocent people: helpless noncombatants deliberately trapped by false promises and ki lled by end less indiscriminate barrages of rockets, bombs and missiles. I felt that every timid journalist and every high-minded government officia l was to be held accountable for not seeing what was happening under the Russian hammer. Waiting for the Lada to be readied, I walk through the deserted streets of Grozny. I am surprised by two well-dressed, middle-aged Russian women walking by me, heading out to do their morning shopping like nothing was going on . It's important for the people trapped here to ignore the war. If they didn't they would go mad. They stop and ta lk. It's the same story: "We live here, where should we go?" Before we leave, the commander decides he wants to dance. His men start clapping in rhythm, he flails his arms and kicks his feet. Slapping his heels with his hands, thrusting his arms into the air. It is a happy, defiant dance. It is accompanied by the firing of AKs, but not too many bullets are fired : they will need them later. When he is finished, he tells me that he recommends that his men dance every day. He is worried that people here have not been dancing as much as they should be. I escape Grozny one hour before the Russians surround it. THE FRONT LINE They tell us it is safe in Shali-but safety in Chechnya is a relative concept. What they mean is Shali is less dangerous than Grozny. It is the civilians who are dying in this war. Seventy people were killed by a bomb in the main market. Who knows when more will die? I don't turn down an invitation to visit the fighters on the front line and slide into the back of the commander's black Volga, complete with tinted windows. The fighter in front radios the front line. The on ly word in Chechen I recognize is "normal. " But it is uncomfortably phrased as a question , not a statement. I guess it's reassuring to know they don't want to get ki lled either. The commander pulls over and stops. There are casual and then more urgent exchanges on the radio. Not once but many times I hear the question, "Normal?" He waits listening carefu lly to his radio. It appears that things are calm. We leave the center of Shali , drive past the arms market, the food market, then out into an open field. There is only one other track in the gooey mud. The sun blasts a deep yellow light through the cracked windows of the Volga. We skirt the tree li ne. Seven miles to the north is Grozny. The city is marked, as always, by lazy black columns of smoke from burning oil fields. The black pillars rise up and flatten when they hit 1,000 feet as if trying to escape. As we head out to the front lines I sense something is very wrong. I try to hold on to my sense of direction using the giant black pillars of smoke and the setting sun as indicators. I am having a hard time believing what I am calculating. We have traveled no more than a mile east of the town center and we are just ahead of the advancing Russians. The Russians are already surrounding us! It had never dawned on me to ask just exactly what was going on at this front line. I was told there was shooting and Russians. The driver I istens, scans the sky for gunships and moves forward. He drives faster and faster. He is staring hard at something, spending more time peering intently out the cracked window than at the road. Damn, that makes me nervous. Gunship? Russians? False alarm? He doesn't answer. As we turn left along the edge of the stubble field. I see a tiny head popping above the brush on the side of the road. Russians? Chechens? The driver slows down. Chechens. Relief. But wait! They are facing the direction we just came from. Why are the f ighters facing towards the center of Shali? What are they defending? When we arrive we fi nd eight fighters here- not even enough for a good football game, let alone a war. The fighters are not their cocky selves, as I had experienced when we first met in the main market of Shali. They are nervous. A nervous Chechen fighter is reason enough to make me very nervous. 47