One Soldier's War is a visceral and unflinching memoir of a young
Russian soldier's experience in the Chechen wars that brilliantly
captures the fear, drudgery, chaos, and brutality of modern combat. An
excerpt of the book was hailed by Tibor Fisher in the Guardian as
right up there with Catch-22 and Michael Herr's Dispatches, and the
book won Russia's inaugural Debut Prize, which recognizes authors who
write despite, not because of, their life circumstances.
In 1995 Arkady Babchenko was an 18-year-old law student in Moscow when
he was drafted into the Russian army and sent to Chechnya. It was the
beginning of a torturous journey from naïve conscript to hardened
soldier that took Babchenko from the front lines of the first Chechen
War in 1995 to the second in 1999. He fought in major cities and tiny
hamlets, from the bombed-out streets of Grozny to anonymous mountain
villages. Babchenko takes the raw and mundane realities of war--the
constant cold, hunger, exhaustion, filth, and terror--and twists them
into compelling, haunting, and eerily elegant prose. Acclaimed by
reviewers around the world, this is a devastating first-person account
of war by an extraordinary storyteller.
