In Grozny, a Perilous Patrol for Commandos

GROZNY, Russia —  The day we arrive is the day the boys have decided to shave.

The atmosphere is festive. At the end of a chilly hallway, the designated barber strokes a whirring shaver up the back of a comrade’s head. Curls of blond and brown hair drift along the floor. Men in camouflage amble by, carrying automatic weapons and damp towels, rubbing rediscovered chins.

For these troops--a detachment of Russia’s most elite and most feared police commandos, the OMON--the shaving of heads and faces is an important ritual. Soon after starting a tour of duty, they stop shaving. When it nears the end, they shed their hair.

The 30 men in the squad left their home city of Pskov, near the border with Estonia, in mid-December--just before Russia launched a blistering assault on Grozny, capital of the separatist republic of Chechnya. They took part in the battle, which ended just a week before our arrival and barely left a wall standing, let alone a house. They have spent the past four days turning a damaged two-story building into a temporary barracks. Today they built a banya, or bathhouse, and are giddy at the prospect of being clean and cleanshaven.

Besides, they have visitors. There are three of us: me, photographer Yuri Kozyrev and my colleague from The Times’ Moscow Bureau, Alexei V. Kuznetsov. We have been in Grozny for three days but have been told to vacate our bunks in the city’s new field hospital to make room for incoming doctors. Yuri has become friendly with commanders of the Pskov regiment, and they have invited us to move in. The troops are desperate for company. We are desperate for a safe place to sleep.

The OMON is a secretive paramilitary force with a reputation for brutality. Its units are among the troops accused of executing civilians and committing other atrocities as Russia has battled slowly and bloodily to reclaim this breakaway republic. OMON officers from other detachments have told us of beating Chechen men and raping Chechen women. The OMON are among the last people most Russians would approach for lodging.

But the Pskov regiment has a reputation for moderation. And we are eager to observe the OMON’s “mopping up” operations, which are when many abuses allegedly occur. We want to know what they do in these operations and, maybe more important, how they think.

Our understanding with our OMON hosts is simple: They will safeguard us and let us observe how they live and work. In return, we will use only their first names.

“This is a hard time for us,” the commander, Edik, explains as I set up my laptop in the officers’ quarters where I will bunk. “We were supposed to be going home now but were told a few days ago that they’ve extended our tour for another few weeks.”

Without the frenzy of battle, the men are feeling fatigue. The war is growing tedious, though no less dangerous. There are still snipers in the area, along with mines and other explosives. The more weary they grow, the more likely deadly mistakes might occur. To keep their guard up, they need to keep their spirits up. So they have gone through the shaving ritual despite the extension.

Edik is lying on his cot holding a photograph. “My daughter,” he says. “She’s seven.” He pauses. “It is a good thing you’re here. It will mean a lot to the boys.”

The detachment’s deputy commander, Dima, takes charge of my welfare and brings me supper: buckwheat boiled with tinned beef, pickles and raw garlic. The Omonovtsy, as OMON troops are called, eat garlic in prodigious quantities to ward off illness.

It takes a long time for all the men to shave, bathe and be shorn. Those who have finished gather in the main bunk room with a guitar and bottles of grain alcohol.

“I prefer it,” Sasha, a baby-faced 24-year-old who joined the force just a month before leaving for Chechnya, says of the grain alcohol. “By now, vodka tastes like water to me.”

Most of the men take a turn with the guitar. They loll on the metal cots, arms draped over each other, shorn heads shining. Many wear the striped undershirts favored in the military, and for the moment they look more like prison inmates than soldiers.

We are introduced to another ritual--the third toast, which is always silent, in honor of OMON comrades who have fallen in the line of duty.

The men pull themselves onto their feet without saying a word. There is no clinking of glasses. After a pause, they down the liquor. The only sound is the exhalation of two dozen men as raw alcohol seizes the throat and plows into the stomach.

Edik tells me this is the 11th time the Pskov regiment has sent a detachment to fight in two Chechen wars, and the first during the current conflict.

“In 11 tours, we’ve never lost a man,” he says. “We’ve had some serious injuries but not a single death.”

The next morning, Dima has guard duty. Over a green track suit he pulls on baggy camouflage pants. He secures them with a heavy belt that includes a sheath for his knife, a wicked-looking 8-inch blade. He pulls on a gray knit sweater, padded jacket, camouflage shirt and puffy vest bristling with grenades, ammunition cartridges and flares. Finally, he takes out a slick black head scarf, places the long side across his forehead, and ties the ends tightly at the back of his head.

The effect is fearsome. The head scarf emphasizes his cheekbones, sharp as razor blades, and his eyes, pale as the Arctic sky. He hoists his Kalashnikov and leaves.

A couple of hours later, he’s back and bringing me breakfast: bread, cheese and sausage. The scarf is off; so is the camouflage. He bustles like a housewife, sweeping the floor in his slippers.

“Eat. Eat.” Dima scolds. “In Russia, we like our women plump.”

Handling Dirty Work

There is nothing analogous to the OMON in the U.S. military or law enforcement. The men are commandos, trained in combat like Green Berets, but part of the police. Half the time they refer to themselves as “military men,” the other half as “cops.”

At home, the OMON conducts special operations such as riot control and busts of organized crime rings. In Chechnya, it handles some of the dirtiest work of the war: After the army seizes territory, the OMON comes in and “cleanses” the area of remaining rebels, flushing them from hiding places and weeding them from the civilian population.

Human rights groups have charged that Russian forces wantonly toss grenades into basements, killing civilians. But the Omonovtsy describe the basement grenades as a defensive tactic.

“We approach the basement and check the door,” explains “Granny,” a 33-year-old nicknamed for his tendency to nag. “If it’s locked, we kick it in and call out to see if someone is hiding inside. If no one answers, we throw in a couple of grenades. It’s only after the smoke clears that we enter and do a visual search. That’s the only way to do it and keep yourself safe.

“Maybe it’s brutal,” Granny says. “But you have to take care of yourself first. No one has come up with anything better.”

By the time we arrive, the OMON forces are concentrating on cleaning up the mines, shells and other explosives scattered throughout the city, especially in the area near the central stadium, one of the rebels’ last strongholds.

We set out at midday, with Dima in command. Baby-faced Sasha is coming, along with a sniper called Fil and a dark-haired soldier appropriately nicknamed “Cheerful.” There are two sappers, or explosives experts: Andrei, known as Ksyukha, a short form of his surname, and Sergei, called Dzhokar, whose bushy mustache and elongated nose give him more than a passing resemblance to the former president of Chechnya, Dzhokar M. Dudayev.

Dzhokar has tucked baggy camouflage pants into basketball high tops. “It’s because I don’t have boots,” he says, though Dima later explains that it’s to step more carefully through hazardous houses. Dzhokar is short, and even though he’s 30, without the mustache he could pass for an American teenage hip-hop fan.

Ksyukha and Dzhokar do the hard work. They wander in and out of destroyed cottages, eyes to the ground, poking at wires and discarded clothing. The others stroll behind in the street, keeping a casual lookout. After nearly an hour tracing a particularly elusive wire around a booby-trapped house, Dzhokar reports back.

“I’m giving up,” he says. “I’m not going to push my luck. A friend did that in the last war, and he went home in a zinc box.” He carefully lifts a heavy, defused artillery shell and hauls it off for detonation.

We move down the road as the sappers set up the blasts. We encounter a corpse--the second of the day. The first was a woman the squad discovered a week earlier, and they coolly discuss how much the stray dogs had fed on her in the interim. The second is a man who, on closer inspection, is missing his head. They decide the rebels beheaded him.

I ask whose job it is to collect the corpses. Dima says he doesn’t know.

The blasts, when they come, are loud, but it’s the shock wave that’s surprising. The slow rain of debris feels almost as if the air itself has shattered and is falling to Earth.

On the way back, I contemplate the squad’s familiarity with death and destruction. Corpses are just another bit of battlefield litter to be checked for booby traps. Guns and mines are no more mysterious to them than notebooks and pens are to me.

Use of Looted Goods

When we reach the barracks, the officers’ bunk room is cold.

“Do you want to see how we light the stove with plastic explosives?” Dima asks.

He leaves and comes back kneading a fist-sized gray lump. “It looks like Plasticine, doesn’t it? It even comes in different colors.” He forms a knob on one side, holds a match to it, and the lump starts to sizzle. He places it inside the stove, and before he shuts the door, the fire is cackling merrily. Semtex fire starter, I think.

I am becoming more aware of my surroundings, and it slowly sinks in that the barracks’ small comforts--rugs on the walls and floor, clocks, slippers, teacups--were not shipped down from Pskov. They were looted.

I have begun to respect these troops’ expertise, and I’m disturbed at the thought of them carrying off booty. I make a mental inventory of what was likely stolen: the TVs in the bunk room, the stove in the banya, the sheets on my cot, the videotapes in the radio room. Maybe even the barber’s shaver.

Later, I sit up on overnight duty with Dima and Mel, a 23-year-old sniper who decorates his rifle with pornographic stickers. They monitor radio traffic and keep tabs on comrades at two checkpoints. There are shooting incidents almost nightly. But tonight is quiet, and the two men talk nonstop. Mel wants me to understand what makes the OMON different from the army.

“We’re a real team, a company,” he says. “We use the familiar form when we talk to each other, even the officers. The army is much more rigid, more formal. For us, every single person matters. We’re almost like a family.

“What really sets us apart is our commander,” Mel continues. “He doesn’t send us into bad situations.”

He’s not the first to sing Edik’s praises. I have been told many times that the leadership and standards set by Edik and Dima explain why their men are loyal, disciplined and avoid the excesses for which the OMON is infamous.

I ask Dima about the looting. He is uncomfortable with the question but has a ready answer.

“People think we take this stuff for ourselves, that we’ll take it home,” he says. “But we couldn’t even if we wanted to. We pass through a kind of customs on the way home; they will let us through only with what we have in our backpacks.

“The problem is that we have so little to begin with,” he continues. “The government gives us a rifle and a sleeping bag. That’s it. So we take what we need from the population to create the kind of living conditions that make it possible to do our job. And when we’re done, we give it back to the population.”

When I head for bed, I think about his explanation. Most occupying armies feed off the occupied population. Even if the Omonovtsy leave the loot behind, it won’t get returned to the original owners; it will be looted a second time. I’m sure the original owners wouldn’t call it borrowing.

Then I think about all the valuables that would easily fit in a backpack. The Omonovtsy make less than $40 a month. A few pieces of jewelry could make a nice contribution to the family income.

OMON Eyed Warily

The next day, we set out again with the sappers. Dima is leading and has picked Cheerful, Mel, Granny and Yura, a wiry 34-year-old veteran of the war in Afghanistan, for the patrol. We pass a line of civilians waiting for humanitarian relief, and they watch the OMON warily. I ask Dima about relations with the locals.

“What, do you think they look at us as saviors?” he replies. “I understand how they see us. As far as they’re concerned, we’re the ones who came and burned their homes. They blame us for it all.”

Does he consider himself at all to blame? “To a certain degree, yes. What happened here is not good. But the rebels weren’t doing them any good either.”

This is a common line of reasoning among Russians. The first Chechen war of 1994-96 ended in a stalemate and, until Russian forces returned last fall, Chechnya enjoyed three years of de facto independence. But Chechen leaders squandered their chance. They let warlords run rampant, kidnapping thousands, trafficking in drugs and hooking up with merciless international terrorists. Meanwhile, the elected government failed to provide even basic services, and civilians who supported independence in the abstract grew disillusioned with it in practice.

In other words, they say, Russia had to destroy Chechnya to save it.

Today, we head deep into the neighborhood behind the stadium, climbing a hill to an old factory. The rebels turned the administration building, a two-story structure overlooking most of western Grozny, into a highly fortified snipers’ aerie.

Just walking around the yard, we find dozens of live grenades, boxes of unused cartridges, gas masks and grenade launchers. Something crunches underfoot, and I look down to see grenade pins and spent cartridges coating the ground as thickly as gravel.

While Dzhokar and Ksyukha pile munitions in the yard, Dima inspects the inside of the building. It’s littered top to bottom with the garbage of war: not just spent cartridges but empty tins of buckwheat, boiled beef, half-eaten jars of pickles. All the rooms have sandbagged windows, with small openings for snipers’ rifles, and human feces speckles the floors. A tiny sleeping room is strewn with fetid mattresses.

We walk around the side of the building and find another heap of abandoned gas masks, canteens and boxes of cartridges. If the rebels discarded this much ammunition, I wonder, how much did they hide?

A rusted gate carries a message scrawled in chalk: “Allah is behind us, Russia is beneath us, Victory is before us.”

Suddenly, I hear the sharp rattle of safety catches releasing and ammunition cartridges sliding into place. Yura and Granny are kneeling in combat position. Someone has fired at us.

“Take cover,” Dima says, and I sink against the wall. “No, the basement.” I feel like a character in a cheap action film as I clamber down the steps. My colleagues Alexei and Yuri are already there, looking anxious. Ksyukha is still doing his job, collecting bullets off the floor.

We listen to Dima on the radio, trying to figure out what’s going on. Minutes pass and no new shots are fired. “There’s another sapper patrol in the area,” he says finally. They seem to have spotted us and considered us a threat.

We leave Dzhokar to set up the detonation and move to another area on the hill. Outside the former offices of a construction company, we find an even bigger haul: not just boxes but crates of bullets, pointy antitank grenades and antipersonnel grenades called “pencils.” Dima radios to say we’ll need a vehicle to transport it all.

A few minutes later, an armored personnel carrier trundles up the hill and three grubby youngsters in soldier uniforms get out. The soldiers are conscripts, 18 to 20 years old, still learning the basics of war. They seem in awe of the Omonovtsy.

The men pile munitions onto the APC, and I sit on the crates during the short ride back to the first building. In the basement, Dzhokar has prepared to explode the grenades and shells that are too damaged to transport. After piling more crates and boxes onto the APC, the men say it’s time to take cover.

Dima, Yuri and I ride the APC downhill away from the blast site; the others trail behind on foot. We’ve traveled just 200 yards when we hear the explosion--too soon.

As the shock wave ebbs, I see Alexei, Mel and the other walkers running back uphill toward the cloud of smoke. But I don’t realize something’s wrong until Dima jumps down and tears off at top speed. Yuri and I follow.

The smoke is clearing. We see a tight group of men kneeling on the ground, then spot Dzhokar lying flat on his back in the middle, basketball shoes sticking out. Blood is flowing from his head, trickling into his eyes and ears.

Dima is on the radio. “Urgent, urgent. We have wounded. Yes, serious, serious.” Dzhokar is inert. Yura is giving him an injection. Cheerful is holding up his head, cradled in the bloody scarf. Ksyukha and Yura start wrapping bandages around his head and neck.

The young men in the APC try to back it up the hill; but the vehicle, clumsy in forward, is nearly uncontrollable in reverse. They plow into the side of a house, then a fence, before getting close enough. The men lift Dzhokar onto the APC and arrange him awkwardly on a thin mattress.

The ride is swift and surreal. We pass places that have become landmarks in my mind: the headless corpse, the booby-trapped house, the stadium. We tear past the barracks, through checkpoints, and pull up to the field hospital where I was staying until a few days ago. Medics carry Dzhokar inside.

The hospital staff is not happy about a bunch of Omonovtsy prowling the grounds, bristling with weapons. The director tells us to leave. “He might be a friend of yours,” he says, “but we get 400 sick people here a day.” The Omonovtsy only stare in reply; they are going nowhere.

They stack their rifles against a table and sit on the ground on wooden boards. I take a seat next to Dima, and he gives me a wan smile. We stare at the ground. A minute later, he begins shaking softly, and I realize he’s crying.

Granny takes Dima in his arms. The two men crouch together, weeping into each other’s camouflage. I wonder what it looks like to see OMON officers in full battle dress cry. Then I decide it’s none of my business and keep my eyes on the ground.

A call goes out for blood. Dima radios the barracks, and half a dozen men arrive within minutes, along with Edik and my colleague Alexei.

Alexei describes what he saw of the accident. Dzhokar seems to have made the fuse too short, and the cache detonated before he could take cover. He flew into the air--Alexei saw him somersault several times--and was hit in the back of the head by a flying sheet of metal fencing. A brick landed on his forehead as he hit the ground.

The doctors tell us Dzhokar’s condition is not good. They are removing a section of his skull to relieve the pressure. They hope he can be stabilized and helicoptered to the military hospital in Mozdok, 60 miles northwest of Grozny.

The wait goes on and on, long enough that dusk threatens, which would ground the chopper. Finally, the chief doctor calls on the Omonovtsy to carry Dzhokar to the ambulance. His head is wrapped in gauze, a monitor is balanced on his knees, IV drips sway. They move slowly across the yard, looking unnervingly like a funeral procession.

Edik and Ksyukha, who will accompany Dzhokar to Mozdok, squeeze into the ambulance. The rest of us hike back to the barracks as night falls.

Supper is buckwheat and beef. The boys want to drink, but there’s nothing left. Someone bought a bottle of vodka from a peddler, but everyone is skeptical; they shake it, swirl it, dissolve sugar in it and, finally, taste it before deciding it’s fake. Dima has a small bottle of grain alcohol someone gave him at the hospital. He pours it into a large orange teacup, which the men pass around like a communion chalice. Then it’s gone.

Everyone heads for bed. They settle for the stupefaction of sleep.

The morning dawns inappropriately sunny and cheerful. It’s a scheduled rest day, which is fortunate because the men don’t feel like working. A few hand-wash clothes in the backyard. The squad’s fitness champ, a ranked boxer also named Yura, strings up a sandbag and practices punches.

We’re sitting outside when Dima brings us the news. “Dzhokar’s dead,” he says simply. “We got a radio message from Mozdok. They said, ‘Regarding the 300 you sent yesterday, it’s now a 200.’ ” In military slang, 300 is code for wounded, 200 for dead.

The Pskov regiment has just lost its first man to Chechnya.

I walk inside and see Yura the boxer. His face is stricken. “Sergei’s dead,” is all he says, and he wanders off. That’s what most of the men seem to be doing, going off to be alone.

As Tensions Rise, a Decision to Leave

Yuri, Alexei and I confer. Our hosts have treated us with nothing but kindness. They say they still want us to stay. But the atmosphere in the barracks is raw and tense. How do men armed with guns and trained in violence deal with grief?

We decide it would be prudent not to find out. We have begun to fear that war can make even good people vulnerable to bad impulses.

It’s time for us to go.

Grozny is still a closed city, and leaving is complicated. Dima has picked two men to travel to Mozdok and escort Dzhokar’s body home, and he agrees to try to send us out with them.

It takes several hours to find a jeep and collect the series of military passes needed to drive across Grozny to the air base. It’s only seven miles, but the trip takes nearly two hours; the number of checkpoints has doubled in the four days we have spent with the OMON, and documents are checked meticulously at each.

At the air base, it becomes clear that Dzhokar’s death is a priority for no one but us. We watch several helicopters come and go without gaining permission to board. The guys chain-smoke. One of the escorts, a 38-year-old former sailor named Kolya, grinds a butt into the dirt.

“Two extra weeks,” he says. “Two extra weeks and it killed him.”

Eventually, Dima convinces a group of army generals to squeeze us onto its chopper. They are going to survey an airfield in northern Grozny where they plan to hold a victory parade. Then they will head for Mozdok.

As the helicopter lifts off, I watch Dima’s jeep speeding toward Grozny. I doze off, and when I awake, lights are burning in the houses below. I realize we have reached a place where electricity works. We have left Chechnya.

Sergei N. Vasiliyev, aka Dzhokar, was buried in Pskov on Feb. 20.

A day earlier, the detachment learned that its tour of duty in Chechnya had been extended to March 15--yet another two weeks.

Yura, a ranked boxer, top left, Dima, on guitar, and Granny, far right, celebrate a fellow soldier’s birthday in their bunk room in Grozny, the Chechen capital. The men are members of Russia’s elite OMON police force. Left, an OMON group from the Pskov regiment patrols the central stadium in Grozny. Below, a soldier tends to Dzhokar, a sapper who was severely wounded in a munitions accident during “mopping up” operations.