A Quiet Feast

Valentine’s Day in 1989 was spent in the Faryab region of Afghanistan. Senior Sergeant Pankov Larion Konstantinovich sat on a chair that was originally broken until someone fixed it using parts of another chair showing off their ingenuity and engineering skills. Skills his uncle called “handy and useful skills for life”. He was thirty-three years old now after growing up with stories of how his uncle and father fought against the Nazi Hordes that ravaged the motherland. Like them he grew up in the outskirts of Stalingrad. Pankov lit a cigarette from Cuba, a friendly place to any comrade of the Soviet Union. Today was their last day in this mountainous country full of peoples considered backwards, overly religious and in the way of Soviet Expansion.

He puffed a smoke from his mouth pondering how his own father made the push into the heartland of the Third Reich. His comrades compared their invasion of Afghanistan to that of Nazi Germany. Pankov saw no resemblance just another war to expand the ideals of Lenin and for the glory of the motherland. Tomorrow they were scheduled to leave Afghanistan for good. After nine years of fighting they lost more than fifteen thousand, and over thirty-five thousand wounded. That was nothing compared to the losses these Afghans and their Taliban fighters suffered.

For the Soviet Union this was a defeat. Nine years of occupation, and fighting ended in a defeat. That was no thanks to the Capitalist Americans and that one Senator named Charlie or Charles. He might as well have been Charles the II of Wall Street or of San Francisco. Pankov kept puffing on the cigarette until he had to get another and light it. His own team of soldiers resided in a newly built outpost that would surely be destroyed once they leave. Five men under his command, five comrades who will go home with him and their lives. He looked over to where the outpost sat. It had been quiet inside for some time. For a split second he wondered if they had been killed. If they were dead, then the Taliban would have killed him too. He got up to check on them. As he entered he found the room in complete ruin. Blood, and guts painted the walls, floor and the door. On the floor and the beds lay their torn open corpses. Each of his own men had been torn open and were being devoured by several feral looking women with long flowing hair that was now a mess, and long finger nails. Horrified Pankov raced out of the outpost and headed northward towards the border. He kept running to the north in the hopes he would reach the motherland. Behind him he heard screeching as if some ghost or banshee had been woken up. Pankov looked over his should to see four of those nightmarish women giving chase. Screaming Pankov then sprinted for the border of the Soviet Union. He ran well into the night to see the darkness of 3:00 am in the morning of February 15^th 1989 in what is called Turkmen SSR.