The current army youth was only born when "porridge was being made" in Afghanistan. And today's 18-to 20-year-olds, at least many of them, find it difficult to understand their peers of the early eighties. How they were really eager to go where it was hot, where it was possible to challenge fate, to confirm the inner impulses of youthful maximalism. In reality, the guys beat the doorsteps of military enlistment offices with the only request-to send them to Afghanistan. Those who were already in the ranks also pestered their commanders with the same thing. There is now a widespread belief that Afghanistan was a mistake. For whom and what exactly? I want to know more about this, of course. And not from the lips of politicians. The price of their "true word" is now known. Our current interlocutors - Igor Urazaev and Vladimir Kolybabinsky-were there when they were twenty years old, were, as they say, at the cutting edge. Urazaev finished his military service in Afghanistan in the intelligence company. Kolybabinsky served as a lieutenant there. How did they perceive the events then, and what has changed in their assessments now? I. Urazaev (time of service in the Limited contingent of Soviet troops in the DRA from December 1979 to June 1980): "If it wasn't for the Afghan, my career as an officer might have been different. At least the first stars on the shoulder straps received two years earlier. In 1979, I was enrolled in the 1st year at the Sverdlovsk Military School. There he entered after a year of military service in the Vitebsk Airborne Division. Shortly before the first official reports on the entry of troops into the DRA, the Soldier's telegraph reported on possible serious events near the southern borders of the country. Almost all of our training platoon, as well as a large part of the guys from our course, wrote reports with a request to send them to serve in Afghanistan for a while. Such naivety, and most importantly, the activity and mass character of th ... Read more