Afghanistan is remembered less as a described landscape than as the war some men carried into their later service at Chernobyl. In these accounts, it is a point of comparison: a place where danger and death had seemed intelligible, set against the invisible exposure and unanswered questions that followed them home from the nuclear disaster.

Afghanistan as a prior war

One speaker had only just returned from Afghanistan and hoped to marry and begin civilian life when a red-bannered special call-up ordered him to report within an hour. His mother began to cry, believing he was being sent back to war. The destination was initially withheld: the men changed clothes and received equipment at Slutsk station, then traveled to Khoyniki and onward to a village where a wedding was underway. There they were ordered to remove the topsoil to the depth of a spade. The abrupt passage from hoped-for private life to another mobilization made Afghanistan the immediate background to his Chernobyl experience, even before he knew where the new assignment would take him.

Another speaker measured his service in both wars: two years in Afghanistan, followed by three months at Chernobyl. At first, the work there seemed ordinary and people did not appear indifferent; only later did he notice emptiness in their eyes as they grew accustomed to the situation. The consequences became legible after a delay: about three years later, one man fell ill, another followed, someone died, and another went insane and killed himself. Afghanistan and Chernobyl remained the most memorable periods of his life, but the latter’s effects were not immediately visible to the men who had served there.

The contrast becomes sharper in a different veteran’s account of death. After nine operations and two heart attacks, he said he no longer feared death itself but did not know what form it would take. He described a friend who became enormously swollen and a neighbor who turned black and shrank until he wore children’s clothes. Against that prolonged, uncertain dying, Afghanistan seemed easier to comprehend: there, a person was simply shot. His comparison does not make Afghanistan safe; it distinguishes a death with an apparent cause from the bodily changes and uncertainty associated with radiation exposure.

A further recollection makes the comparison physical. A man wounded in the stomach in Afghanistan lay in the sun, overwhelmed by heat and thirst, and thought he would die there like a dog. He remembered that blood and pain were the same in humans and animals. Afghanistan thus enters the book not only as military history but as an experience through which a speaker measures bodily vulnerability—a direct, immediate wound recalled beside the less visible danger of Chernobyl.

Mobilization and its aftermath

The memory of Afghanistan also shaped how men understood the call to Chernobyl: not as an assignment they could weigh from a distance, but as another demand to prove themselves. One veteran explained that he had been a Communist and therefore felt he could not refuse to go. Two paratroopers did refuse, partly because their wives were young and they had no children; they were shamed and punished, and their careers ended. He later said that, after nine operations and two heart attacks, he no longer judged them. Yet he believed he would still have gone, because another man’s refusal had made the decision feel like a test of manhood. Afghanistan thus belonged to the moral history of the later deployment as well as to its chronology: the habits of military obedience and masculine honor helped make volunteering seem inevitable.

That ideal of service met a mission whose danger was difficult to see and whose terms were withheld. One veteran recalled that, before the men returned, they were warned that it would be better, in the interests of the State, not to tell people what they had witnessed. He said they had not understood everything, but had seen it all; the warning left the men who had been there with knowledge they could not readily communicate. Another described signing a nondisclosure form, then hauling buckets of graphite from the reactor with ordinary shovels, changing masks as many as thirty times in a shift. The work contributed to the sarcophagus over the ruins, which contained the body of senior operator Valery Khodemchuk, trapped there in the first minutes after the explosion. The veteran was twenty-two when he returned from the army and was classified as a second-group invalid. His unit still had three months to serve, and the men went about in the same trousers and boots they had worn at the reactor until demobilization.

The passage from Afghanistan to Chernobyl also altered what counted as a comprehensible death. The veteran who had served in both places later contrasted the direct violence of Afghanistan with the delayed illnesses and deaths among the men from Chernobyl. For another, the aftermath became a conflict with the institutions that had sent him: at the factory where he worked, his boss threatened to reduce his work because he kept getting sick. He appealed to the director on the ground that he was a Chernobylite who had helped protect others; the director answered that the factory had not sent him. The reply denied the bond of obligation the veteran believed his service had created. Afghanistan could be recalled as a war in which death had a recognizable cause; after Chernobyl, the men returned with exposure that was hard to name, records they said were hidden or destroyed, and little assurance that their sacrifice would be acknowledged.

Service, manhood, and the cost of return

Afghanistan also stands behind the later deployment as part of a military culture in which going was treated as proof of character. One veteran said he volunteered for Chernobyl although he did not need an apartment, a car, or a country house. The work exerted what he called a masculine appeal: men were leaving to do something important, while those who stayed could be mocked as hiding behind women. Some of the men who went had pregnant wives, newborn children, or burns; they cursed inwardly but went anyway. The account makes service less a simple choice than a test shaped by comradeship, shame, and an ideal of manhood.

That ideal endured alongside a sharp awareness that the danger was obscure. A veteran who had served in Afghanistan recalled that, at Chernobyl, the men initially saw the work as work; the consequences became apparent only years later, as colleagues fell ill, died, or took their own lives. The two deployments remained among the most memorable periods of his life, but they occupied different places in memory: Afghanistan belonged to a recognizable war, while Chernobyl’s harm emerged belatedly, without a clear moment when the men could understand what had happened to them.

Afghanistan as a remembered frame

Afghanistan’s presence extends beyond the veterans’ own recollections. One man’s mother heard the sudden special call-up and began to cry, assuming her son was being sent back to war; he had only just returned and hoped to marry. Her reaction shows how the earlier deployment remained an active expectation within family life, so that an unexplained summons could reopen the fear of another departure before its destination was known.

The book gives no continuous portrait of Afghanistan as a country or battlefield. It reaches the reader through brief, sharply bounded memories and through the meanings later Chernobyl service acquired beside them. That restraint makes Afghanistan a frame of comparison rather than a second, fully narrated setting: remembered military danger has a recognizable shape, while the danger that followed at Chernobyl was difficult to see, measure, or explain.