And never forgetting.
DANEgerus has a pictoral rememberance of September 1st, 2004 and the Beslan Massacre you should be interested in.
And if you’ll excuse me for a moment, I have a story I love to tell whenever talking about Chechens.
One of the drivers who occasionally works the late shift, Eduard, was born in 1969, three years before me, and was raised in the Belarus capital of Minsk. Shortly after his 18th birthday, Eduard was conscripted into the Soviet Army.
During his ‘basic training’, he was shuffled off to learn how to drive the Soviet troop and equipment carrying trucks. As soon as he was done in truck driving school, Moscow decided that the perfect place for Eduard to go was, you guessed it, Chechnia.
He only has three sentences worth of words to say about the Chechen muslims: “The lazy bastards. All they do is sit around smoking opinum and bitching about Moscow. When I bitched about Moscow, I had to be working.”
Another anecdote Eduard told me about his ‘basic training’ was that when they taught him how to shoot, he and another recruit were paired together and given one magazine worth of ammo. He blames Ronald Reagan. So do I.Â
Eduard is a really nice guy. Because Eduard and I are so close in age, I’m very glad that Ronald Wilson Reagan came along and crashed the Soviet beast. I would have hated to have to shoot him.
A couple of years ago, during my first tour in the Navy here in Bremerton I met a Russian who used to get pretty liquered up and tell crazy stories about his Artillary unit and the second Chechen War. We were pretty sure he was full of shit, but one day he was talking about getting shot by a Moscow cop. He pulled up his pant leg and showed us a small entrance scar and a massive exit scar, pretty ugly. We asked him what he was doing, he said “the cop thought I was trying to steal a car.” Then, what were you doing? “ehhh….trying to steal car.” Later his stories went on about turning Gotzny into a parking lot, pretty realistic stories, but definately inflated by alcohol.