minesweepers

Someone once said that a minesweeper makes only two mistakes: the first is when he decides to be one. The second _

When I was drafted into the army in April 1984, I was a nineteen-year-old boy. The club where they took us was a distribution centre. Officers came there from various military units and picked out the soldiers they wanted. My fate was decided in one minute. A young officer came up to me and asked, __o you want to serve in the commandos, the Blue Berets?_ Of course I agreed. Two hours later I was on a plane to Uzbekistan (a Soviet republic in Central Asia), where our training base was located.During the flight, I learned most of the soldiers from this base were sent to Afghanistan. I wasn__ scared. I wasn__ surprised. At that point I didn__ care anymore because I understood that it is impossible to change anything. __o serve in the Soviet army is the honourable duty of Soviet citizens_ _ as it__ written in our Constitution. And no one gives a damn whether you want to fulfil this __onourable duty_ or not. But then I didn__ know anything about Afghanistan. Up until 1985, in the press and on television, they told us that Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan were planting trees and building schools and hospitals. And only a few knew that more and more cemeteries were being filled with the graves of eighteen- to twenty-year-old boys. Without the dates of their death, without inscriptions. Only their names on black stone _At the base we were trained and taught to shoot. We were told that we were being sent to Afghanistan not to plant trees. And as to building schools, we simply wouldn__ have the time _Three and a half months later, my plane was landing in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan _ We were taken to a club on base. A few minutes later, officers started to come by and choose soldiers. Suddenly, an officer with a smiling face and sad eyes burst in noisily. He looked us over with an appraising glance and pointed his finger at me: __h ha! I see a minesweeper!_ That__ how I became a minesweeper. Ten days later, I went on my first combat mission.