Only You Could Sculpt Out of It

Only you could really sculpt stoker-boys and Negroes out of it. Judging by the color. Because it was black. Compared to it, any Borodinsky bread would seem like a visitor from Scandinavia sitting next to a stoker from the Ivory Coast.

Being the bread-cutter while on mess duty is prestigious. But thrice cursed be the day he was born for the one who has to slice this black bread. For it sticks to the knife with the entire loaf at once—such is its stickiness and plasticity.

Another quality of this black bread is that it causes wild heartburn. I don't know why, but practically all the cadets suffered from it—and severely.

Well, alright, enough about our daily bread—better to talk about what goes on it. That is, the butter. This butter seemed like manna from heaven and served as the first joy of the long approaching day. Nowadays butter is given morning and evening, 15 grams each; back then they only gave it in the morning—twenty grams.

A soldier spreads butter on one slice of white bread and covers it with a second—so there's more of it. I, honestly, never did that—I enjoyed spreading it on just one piece and trying to chew as long as possible, relishing every bite. Ate your butter—your day in the army wasn't wasted.

After the butter, they drank tea. For some reason, there were never full mugs on the table—only half. That is, a hundred grams of liquid. Apparently, water was too precious.

Sugar came with the tea. Two iron-hard cubes. To be fair, one was enough to sweeten the tea, so that you could later crunch the other one before formation with indescribable delight. Pure rulez. Definitely!

Lunch

For the first course—soup made of "seven dicks." That is, you couldn't call it anything else, since it was neither shchi, nor ukha, nor kharcho, nor anything else known to man. It had no civilian equivalents.

The soup was brewed from beef carcasses. Once, sent on duty to fetch a carcass from the ice cellar, I curiously examined a triangular bluish stamp on the carcass's thigh.

It read—"RKKA, 1935." That is, Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, slaughtered in 1935. Meaning that carcass had lain at a temperature just below freezing for no more, no less, but 52 years! Deep-freeze would be one thing, but in a primitive ice cellar?!

And we ate that. Granted, meat was somehow rarely fished out of the soup.

For the second course was kasha—according to the same schedule. It should be mentioned that for cost reasons, all fried dressings are made with shortening/compound fats, which cause heartburn, ulcers, and are very potent carcinogens. If a guy arrives in the troops with a slight ulcer, it quickly flares up—right up to perforation. Personally, I know of two deaths from this. No room for jokes here. It's death.

And of course, along with the kasha comes "the bacillus." The bacillus is a cube of pork fat about four centimeters on a side, with a single millimeter of meat on one edge. All of this is smothered in a tender-pink slime resembling ichor, meant to represent gravy.

When extreme hunger hits, people try to gnaw on the bacillus. In principle, this is impossible—you can't bite through it, nor can you chew the meat off it. At worst, it slips from your teeth and hits the sergeant sitting opposite you right in the forehead. I'll tell you about the consequences another time.

Of course, attempts to eat the bacillus were made, but owing to its taste qualities, only hereditary coprophages were up to the task.

The third course at lunch was half a mug of compote or kissel.

Dinner

Kasha (oh, that kasha again), if you were lucky—mashed potatoes, tea.

Sometimes—fish. If you were lucky—fried. How fish is cleaned deserves special mention. It's descaled in a machine, with half the scales left behind. Gutting it is dead simple—with a large knife, the head and half the belly are chopped off diagonally. The other half of the belly and guts naturally goes into the cauldron. And into your stomach.

On weekend mornings—on Sundays, they gave two eggs. Why two and strictly once a week, nobody could say. On the other hand, they didn't hesitate to explain to us that a young soldier's organism was incapable of digesting more than 2 chicken eggs per week. Turns out, back in civilian life we had been practically ruining our delicate stomachs with eggs!

In autumn, bigus appeared in the ration—not to be confused with Ibikus!

This is supposed to be sauerkraut with various ingredients. Its production technology is astonishingly simple: a soldier in an OZK (all-arms protective suit) is lowered into a huge concrete pit, poorly washed shredded cabbage rains down on his head, and he tries to stomp it with his feet. In short, anyone who has seen silage being laid into silage pits knows it's the exact same thing.

The other ingredients appear later—on their own accord. At least, I personally pulled drowned rats out of this silage more than once.

Well, that's basically the whole ration. Oh, right, about tea. It's made like this: into a 50-liter tank, they toss 4 tiny packs of tea, each the volume of 2 matchboxes. Then this stuff is boiled for about an hour.

This entire diet could later be detected by nose. Low-quality food continues to ferment and decompose in the stomach, and then in the intestines. This causes the production of an impressive amount of intestinal gas, which has a habit of escaping.

Marching in formation beyond the second squad in the company was impossible—it stung your eyes. Farting strictly in cadence with the drill step. Everyone, always.

Entering the barracks from outside at night took your breath away.

How Meals Are Taken

Food in the army is eaten the army way.

That is, the folks—sorry, personnel—take their places by pre-assigned tables. The command rings out: "Remove headgear, proceed to eat." Five minutes are given for breakfast, ten for lunch, seven for dinner.

Food is consumed in stages. That is, first everyone must eat the soup. Only then can you take the main course. And again, everyone must finish it. Only then are you allowed to drink tea.

In other words, a single sluggishly eating soldier could deprive the entire squad of part of their lunch if he ate too slowly. Education through the collective.

On major holidays, the ration was spiced up with two cookies and two hard candies, plus—a full mug of tea!

This diet did very little to boost a serviceman's muscular strength. Those who could do fifteen pull-ups before the army could only manage five after three months of service!

And that was with 5–6 hours of physical exercise a day. Soldiers quickly grew soft—torsos rapidly became covered in fat, while muscles shrank. All this despite constant training. Turns out, normal nutrition is pretty damn important!

Gradually, the hunger subsided, and the habit of not shoving every piece of trash into one's mouth kicked in (c) Prof. Preobrazhensky. Money appeared for the soldier's tea shop, along with passes to the city. People slowly started getting the hang of service...

__________________________________________-

Dmitry Ibikus 2:5004/16.111 21 Sep 97 17:30:00

About the Railway Troops

Picture Ten — "About Yurochka"

Punching the "play" button on my favorite Technics, I begin the tale of one of the most remarkable personalities fate brought me together with on the battlefields of the railway host against countless cubic kilometers of shifted soil, graded trackbeds, laid rail-tie grids, and broken spruce trees and lives.

At that time, our battalion was stationed near a small Siberian town—not all of it, actually, but that part which the battalion veterans call the "line."

Ending up on the line is both bad and good. The food is better there, it's warmer, but there are far more difficult life situations from which you might not emerge alive.

It happens that a newly arrived lieutenant has a star pulled off his shoulder board by the local insolents—"you haven't earned it yet, walk around with one for now, since you're a rookie goose."

And that lieutenant digs ditches alongside the other geese—the ones from the ranks.

And all this with the silent connivance of the battalion commander. Command cares about the work quota, not discipline.

The line is the line. In the swamps or out in the taiga, the mechanized battalion must clear the right-of-way, grade the trackbed with local soil, then with ballast. After them will come the nimble Uzbeks of the track battalion with spike mauls, huge screw jacks, and tie-tampers that warm you up in any freeze. But more on that later.

On the line, the battalion lives either in tents or in boxcars—old passenger wagons well-known to all of us from war movies.

At one end of the car is the stove. Its exhaust pipe is at the other end of the car. Between the stove and the pipe—running through the entire car—passes the so-called "driveshaft": a steel pipe half a meter in diameter. It serves as the radiator. It's a truly wonderful invention, since the heat doesn't immediately fly outside, but is conditionally evenly distributed throughout the car. Conditionally—because at the top you can't breathe, while on the floor there is ice.

Such a stove has only one downside: leave it unfired for half an hour, and the car turns into a freezer. And so firewood had to be gathered and the stove fed constantly, without smoke breaks.

And without sleep.

The stoker for this stove was our famous Yurochka. That is, there wasn't actually anything particularly famous about him. But he was a notable figure.

Picture a rachitic kid of about thirteen, with a potbelly sticking out, bulging gray eyes, and light-red hair. He stood maybe a meter and a half tall, or maybe all of a meter fifty-five. A giant.

In his eyes was the expression of perpetual starvation; his gait was purely rachitic, hobbling. Apparently, nature had also gifted him with a congenital dislocation. His clothes were pathetic—in other words, Yurochka was the company punchbag. And therefore his job matched—in the company he was the eternal orderly and cleaner, on the line—the stoker and, again, cleaner.

How he did it, I don't know, but he took to sleeping while standing by the orderly's post desk with his eyes wide open. Once, walking into the company and passing by him, I noticed that his eyes weren't moving. At all. That's the impression given by the eyes of a completely blind man. I walked up to him, waved my hand in front of his eyes. No movement.

I grabbed a needle from the office. Walked up to Yurochka, slowly brought the needle to his eye. No movement. Slowly stuck the needle into the tip of his nose—zero effect!

The man was in a total coma, yet standing on his feet with his eyes open.

Just then, the company commander walks in. "Attention!" gasps Yurochka, awake in an instant.

Dumbfounded, needle in hand, I stare at the company commander. He stares at me.

I get summoned to the office. We discuss the trick.

A decision is made: the CO goes out, puts on an enlisted greatcoat and ushanka. Walks into the company—Yurochka is sleeping on watch.

We step out, the CO gives me his officer's coat—as soon as I enter, Yurochka bellows—"Attention!"

Laughter erupted across the barracks. How's that for a conditioned reflex—to shoulder boards.

Generally speaking, being a perpetual orderly is tough. Sleeping two hours a day—it'll drive you crazy. By the second week, a guy resembles an asylum inmate—passing out at any moment, and afterward completely unable to remember what happened before.

Once, one of the demobs had his watch go missing. They searched everywhere—couldn't find it. And right then, Lieutenant S. walks into the barracks and asks Yurochka, oh so gently: "What’s that in your shoulder board?" And Yurochka has a lump in his shoulder board. In the left one. Yurochka says, "Nothing," calmly pulls the stolen watch out of that shoulder board, and shoves it into the right one. Right before everyone's eyes!

I had never seen a man get beaten like that. The lieutenant, in mid-leap, nailed him right in the snout with a hobnailed boot. Yurochka flew about five meters, no less, like a rag doll. Anyone else would have spent three months in the maxillofacial surgery ward, but this one just got up and stepped back onto his orderly post by the bedside table.

This character was also married. Right before he was drafted, his wife gave birth to a baby. She had the second one about 13 months after Yurochka left for service—naturally, he wasn't granted any home leave. His wife hadn't visited, either.

The favorite question to ask Yurochka was: "Yurochka, how did you get married?"
"Well, how? Just went and got married!"—proudly resting his hands on his hips.
"And how did you make a baby?"—"How? Kissed her and made it!" Yurochka would answer proudly.
Upon further questioning, it turned out that this fellow simply had no concept of what the corresponding male and female organs were for. That is, he genuinely believed children came from kissing.

All of this would be funny if it weren’t so sad. By all rights, this guy not only shouldn't have ended up in the army—he needed medical treatment. Though, to be fair, he didn't suffer much: you need brains to get a concussion.

You run into a great many characters like that in the army. And, one must assume, there's a great many of them in our society as well.

Dmitry Ibikus 2:5004/16.111 21 Sep 97 17:30:00

About the Railway Troops

Picture Eleven: "Once Upon a New Year's Eve"

I happened to wind up in the Omsk military hospital once. In principle, that wasn’t bad at all—my hometown, after all. Visitors all the time, great grub, girlfriends dropping by. In short, just like pioneer camp during parents' visiting season. Only better.

Our surgical ward really did resemble a pioneer camp. Ward Four, which housed mostly chronic cases and long-term convalescents "under treatment," served as a sort of local service detail—some worked in the mess hall, some in the carpentry shop, some acted as orderlies.

Soldiers with chronic inflammatory diseases often spend nearly their entire term of service in the hospital—and since that's the case, they get assigned as orderlies, and sometimes even male nurses.

After lights out, guys in the ward would recap foreign movies, listen to the radio and the wall-socket broadcast. We'd go to sleep around two in the morning. Sometimes a few of them fooled around with the nurses—and quite successfully, too.

For some reason, the overwhelming majority of the ward’s population consisted of soldiers from the railway troops, engineering troops, and the construction battalions. Probably due to the high number of switchmen in the former, and soldiers struck down by acute corrugated malingering among the latter.

To tell the truth, among the goldbricks there were often characters worthy of a freak show. One guy's knee bent forward just as easily as backward. Another was missing fingers on both hands and had none on his feet at all. A third fainted every half hour. And as for guys with hernias, don't even get me started—they stood in line for the knife.

There were malingerers who acted like Indian fakirs. But since there were no swords around, they swallowed needles. The needles came out on their own.

The hemorrhoid patients were a total circus. After surgery, a guy is laid stomach-down across two beds, with a tube the thickness of a garden hose inserted into his anus—to vent the gas. In my Niva, a pipe like that vents exhaust from the engine, and here—from a human being. The gas, however, was plentiful. Once, a guy begged: "Guys, I can't take a piss—I just don't have the strength!"

They pushed the beds apart and set down a basin. He couldn't go. The whole ward was like a madhouse by then, chanting in unison: "Psssss, psssss"—still nothing! They found a solution in the end: turned on the faucet, and the flow started.

So there we were, getting ready to celebrate New Year's Eve. And it should be mentioned that the night before, Ward Four had messed up—the crowd had huffed ether swiped from the operating room. The whole floor reeked of ether so bad it would blow your mind, and wild, frantic laughter was echoing out of Ward Four. The head of the department, Colonel D., who looked uncannily like the turtle from the cartoon "I'm Lying in the Sun," complete with identical glasses, walked around the ward but couldn't find the bottle of ether. He just waved it off.

That same night, another incident occurred—a cadet who had undergone an appendectomy just twenty-four hours earlier was caught climbing back up to the second floor using a bedsheet; the man was returning from a romantic rendezvous.

So, there we were, quietly talking about demob—then came a knock at the door. In rolled a gurney covered with a fur coat. Under the coat was a soldier hooked up to an IV. Or rather, two halves of a soldier—a torso and legs. If he'd been a woman, you might have called it a waistline.

Except no, it wasn't a waistline at all.

Basically, his unit commander had decided to test the unit's combat readiness and found no better day for it than December 31st. Naturally, the soldiers couldn't have cared less, so they were thinking about anything other than improving their combat and political training.

This soldier was standing there, counting down the days until his demob—and to be fair, he had very few days left, due to be discharged in the spring. And he just had to pick the spot right next to the bumper of a "Ural" truck to indulge in this fascinating activity.

Out of nowhere, a hunter leaps out and shoots right at the rabbit. Except it wasn't a hunter, but a fully loaded ZIL-131 flying out of the garage bay, slamming its bumper into the Ural's bumper.

Right through the soldier. And the height of those bumpers is right between the pelvis and the stomach.

In short, it was minced meat. They rushed him onto a stretcher and into surgery. The outcome was deplorable: the pelvic bones crushed to powder, not a single organ below the stomach left intact—the insides were on the outside. That is, the skin had burst, with bone shards and crushed intestines protruding from underneath.

The saddest part was that the guy lived for another day and a half, and was conscious almost the entire time, albeit heavily drugged. During that time, they pumped four liters of blood and saline into him. Since his kidneys weren't functioning, death came from toxic poisoning—he swelled up terribly; his face was horrifying to look at.

On the evening of New Year's Day, the scrub nurse came down—the guy had died. And right then, a knock on the window—his mother had arrived. The kid had missed her by just fifteen minutes. What a waste.

That's when you realize the futility of human existence, and you're filled with rage at the madhouse called the army. If only that commander hadn't gotten a wild hair to test "combat readiness," the guy would still be alive. But no, you've got to bust your ass, trying to prove something to someone. To whom, and what for? You only get one life—no one's going to hand you another, and once it's gone, you can't get it back.

All in all, the army might be fine as a school of life, but it's best to graduate early.

Dmitry Ibikus 2:5004/16.111 21 Sep 97 17:30:00

About the Railway Troops

Picture Twelve: "On How Rails Are Laid"

I have an acquaintance. His job involves constant travel, often sent on all kinds of distant business trips. And always, everywhere, he travels strictly by rail. And never by plane. Never.

The explanation is simple: this gentleman used to work as a test pilot, and was also involved in the manufacture and quality inspection of aircraft engines.

I, on the other hand, always fly by plane and never take the train.

How are rails laid? When asked, people immediately picture sturdy broads with Schwarzenegger-esque shoulders and biceps, dressed in oil-stained orange vests so stiff with age and layers of grease they could pass for bulletproof on the black market. But that's only a rough misconception, because those broads handle track maintenance, not construction.

First, whether in the taiga or the desert, the mechanized battalion rolls through—building up the roadbed embankment. This work is among the most massive in scale, but heavy machinery does most of it here. Next comes the track battalion—they're the ones who actually lay the railway itself. Then, without fail in the dead of winter, the signal battalion installs its poles and traffic lights and strings up the wires. In winter, precisely so that come spring they can dig up the leaning poles, take down the snapped wires, and do it all over again—commanders will earn their next rank for "overcoming hardships," while the demobs will knock out their final chord.

Well, let's say the roadbed is already laid—bring in the tracklayer and go! But no, not everything is that simple. On long stretches, tracklayers really do save the day. They come in large sizes—powered by a diesel locomotive, and small ones that hitch to tractors. I remember a small tracklayer on freewheeling crawler tracks was hitched to a KrAZ truck and dragged across the entire city—and the city thought military exercises were underway. The roar was worse than a whole tank division.

A completely different picture emerges when the straight section ends and you need to cut in a switch, a curve, or, even worse, a classification yard.

Here, everything is done manually. That is, ties are laid down, tie plates on top of them, then the rails. The rails are spiked to the ties with track spikes—for this, there are special spike hammers: a long and narrow sledgehammer weighing about five kilograms. My old man used one for slaughtering pigs for a time. He'd step out from around the corner toward the pig—wham on the forehead! Pig's off its feet... The narrow hammer shattered the skull—the pig didn't suffer at all. Instant and painless death. Later that hammer vanished somewhere, and now he uses an ordinary ten-kilogram sledgehammer—from a blow like that, the pig's skull just splatters.

There's a motto among track workers: "Drive a spike in three blows"—what three blows, you'd be lucky to drive it in five.

For pulling spikes, there's a huge, meter-and-a-half-long crowbar—a claw bar, nicknamed mashka.

Separately, about the ties. Ties come in different types. There are concrete ones, and then for manual labor—good old wooden ties soaked in creosote, so they last longer and don't rot. If you ever have the good fortune to eat a meal in the heat next to stacks of ties, and manage to suppress powerful urges to vomit, along with the vomit itself—consider yourself lucky. Creosote is about ten times stronger than kerosene, judging by Jerome K. Jerome's description.

Ties come in different lengths—from 2.5 to 4 meters. A normal tie weighs about eighty kilograms. However, you also run into ones weighing 120 kilos. Ties are carried with tie tongs—it's most convenient with four people to one tie. However, there are exceptions. I personally saw a platoon of young Uzbek soldiers unloading a flatcar with ties. The Uzbek kids were tiny, about a meter and a half tall, skinny—as if plucked straight from the sixth grade.

Two beefy guys would heave a tie onto a soldier's shoulder, and he would run (!) carrying it for about a hundred meters. The weight of such a soldier was hardly more than 50-55 kilograms, the tie was 80—turns out to be more than one and a half times his own body weight! Forget ants—this is a whole new race of humans! Carries one and a half times his weight, eats jack squat because they don't feed him. Only problem is, he croaks fast :$( — (that face isn't mine, it's that general's.)

Now about the rails. Rails used for track are R-50 and R-65. The numbers indicate the weight per running meter in kilograms. Standard rail lengths are 12.5 and 25 meters.

It's not hard to calculate that a 25-meter R-65 rail weighs 1,625 kilograms. When we hauled such a rail with a crew of all of 12 people, it was truly breathtaking—after all, that's 135 kilos per brother.

For this, rail tongs exist—a kind of pincers for two people. When carrying, your hands are right at groin level, no other way. The gloomiest part is when the ground is uneven and you're climbing up a hill. On the other hand, step into a dip—what a bliiiiss!

It's worse when you have to haul a frog (crossing)—only eight people can grab onto it, and even then awkwardly. And it weighs a whopping 800 kilos.

Despite all these horrors, it's both pleasant and a bit terrifying to watch a track platoon at work. This platoon is staffed with a formula—a couple of Chechens, a couple dozen Uzbeks. The Uzbek boys move only by running all day long, something the "overseers" convince them to do quite successfully. At least, that's the closest definition. Besides carrying ties, it's wild to watch a tiny soldier grab a huge, bigger-than-himself, bright-orange screw jack, run with it, quickly shove it under the track panel, and quickly raise the panel by cranking the enormous handle. I once turned that handle for about five minutes and almost lost my arm, but here—all day long. Day in, day out. Month after month.

Miiiissserrrrryyyyyyyyyy...