10) Kill or Be Killed

"The smell was the smell of death. When you smell man sweat…together with blood… together with the land. I can still remember it in my nightmares."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
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Speaker 2 (00:18):
Warning, the following episode contains explicit language and sexual themes.
Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 3 (00:33):
So you went to your place, you packed up. Did
you talk to your parents at all?

Speaker 2 (00:37):
No?

Speaker 3 (00:38):
So you didn't even tell your dad you were going
to Chechnya.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
No?

Speaker 3 (00:42):
Really, I just.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
I don't know. I just didn't speak with them. We
didn't talk for like quite a long time, for the
whole year.

Speaker 3 (00:55):
Did you tell anyone else or anyone in your family? No,
out of your sister.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
I couldn't speak with my sister. I mean I was
not allowed to speak with my sister.

Speaker 3 (01:06):
You might have died and shash In. Your family just
would have found out.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
I mean they would find out at some point.

Speaker 3 (01:10):
I mean they would find out through like a letter
or someone shut up their door. But you never even
would have told them you were going.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
To the war. Well, they said that I wish you
to be not alive. I was thinking, I mean, it
doesn't manter if I will go, even if I will
be Dad, they don't really care anyway. I felt like,

(01:39):
maybe this is it, this is the end which they'll
give me the relief to kill you. I'm really sorry
that Junyuns suit.

Speaker 3 (02:16):
Suit verses, episode ten, chapter twenty two sent to die.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
So in the morning I arrived at the train station
and we all lined up. I had my backpack with me,
and it.

Speaker 3 (03:07):
Was one of the worst days of a Leah's life
and possibly one of the last. As punishment for rejecting
her new commander's advances, she had been sent away to
die on the front lines of a war five hundred
miles away.

Speaker 2 (03:23):
So first we sat down into the train and everybody
in the car were just young boys. The eyes were
full of fears, and I looked at them and everybody
just had only one thought. Vala survive, Vla come back.

Speaker 3 (03:46):
The train was bound for the border between Russia and Keshnya,
a mostly Muslim region just north of the country of Georgia.
It was annexed by Russia in the nineteenth century and
ever since then has been trying, with varying degrees of success,
to be on an next and independent again.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
And when we arrived at the main station, we were
giving this uniform. It was like a thick jacket. The
color was dark green. Everything was much bigger than my size.
And to they eve as guns, but like sniper guns

(04:24):
VCC and SVD. I didn't have any idea even how
to use these guns.

Speaker 3 (04:34):
Some nine years earlier, Checha had declared its independence, and
now Eliyah and her fellow soldiers were there fighting in
a war for Putin, who was determined to retake control
of the territory for Russia. This was the Second Chechen War.

Speaker 2 (04:50):
And then I had this guy and he was standing
next to me, and he was like from Kyrgyzstan. I
think she probably so like that. I was all depressed
because I was standing there as the zombie. He was
telling me some funny stories and very stupid and I

(05:11):
looked at him, like, can you like stop, and he said,
is it like your first time. I'm like, yes, of course,
it's my first time. He was like, he relaxed, it's
like my second time. So no worries, nothing happened. See,
I'm still alive. I'm still here.

Speaker 3 (05:29):
The newly arrived soldiers, including Aliyah and the man she
was talking to, Rashid, were then ordered onto trucks and
sent to the front lines.

Speaker 2 (05:39):
He was talking and then he started to smoke, and
everybody was smoking, and I just I thought, like, maybe
it will help me out. So I tried to smoke
and then I was coughing and I said, fuck it,
I'm not doing this, like I couldn't. And then he said,
good good. It's better not to smoke if you a sniper.

(05:59):
And it was like why, And then another guy was
sitting next to me. He said, if you smoke in
the night, your enemy may see you, and if they
can just truck or like culculate where your hat is,
they can kill you in your like hat. So it's

(06:21):
better not to get used to the smoke. And they
said like, oh yeah, good to know. Thanks. We were
driving for a couple hours. It became dark and cold,
and we arrived to the place where far away we

(06:43):
could see it was not like even town, but like
small kind of feelings with a few houses.

Speaker 3 (06:50):
Leah and her new squad members were then brought to
a makeshift military base on top of a hill.

Speaker 2 (06:57):
They said, okay, so this is your station. Obviously, no shower,
no TV or anything like that, no computer, no telephone,
no internet of course, no nothing. And the smell was
the smell of death, when you smell man swat together

(07:23):
with blood, together with the land. I can remember in
my nightmares. I mean, there were only guys that was
kind of like a little bit concern me. But you
know what, nobody even thought about sex, because the most

(07:43):
important instinct is to survive. The first night, I didn't
sleep at all, and I didn't hear anything. It wasn't
any you know, bombs or gun shots. And then in
the morning, around like five am, I felt so cold,

(08:06):
was freezing, and I couldn't even hear any birds singing
or anything like that. It was deadly quiet, and I
looked at the guys, they are sleeping click babies.

Speaker 3 (08:22):
Over the course of her first day on the front lines,
Alah's friend from the train station, Rashid, became a mentor
of sorts to her. He showed her the safest corner
of the barracks to sleep in and taught her other
best practices for staying alive that he learned on his
previous deployment in Shshnya.

Speaker 2 (08:38):
I was trying to wash my face. He said, don't
do it, and I was like, dude, are you crazy,
Like this is hygienical things. I need to wash my face.
And he said, now, if you're a sniper, because if
your face is clean, then the color of the clean
skin reflects the light and then the other sniper can

(09:04):
see you and can shoot you really really well.

Speaker 3 (09:09):
Rashid totally and more about concealment and shooting a rifle.
And they were signed as buddies and giving nights lookout duty.

Speaker 2 (09:17):
We were started to talk a lot, and I kind
of like get used to his stupid jokes. And while
we were like sitting there, remember he was asking me
questions like, so where did you study, what was your department?

(09:37):
Who was your commander? And slowly, slowly I just opened
up to him. I said, like, you know what I
can tell him? Why not? So I told him the
whole story from the beginning.

Speaker 3 (09:50):
When Leah got to the part of the story about
turning down the advances of her commander, Lieutenant General Rashid
had some strong words about him.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
Oh like that preck. I heard a lot of stories
about him. He sent many soldiers to the front line,
knowing that they would be killed, he still did it.
He didn't care about the families, about their lives, so
he just basically sacrificed their lives for nothing. He said,

(10:20):
he's a very bad commander, and and they said, well
that's why I'm here. I guess it's just bad luck.

Speaker 3 (10:37):
After a few days, Aliah began to realize the full
grim nature of her assignment, shooting at people who she
didn't know and couldn't see who were also shooting at her,
and wondering at the same time, was she even on
the right side here.

Speaker 2 (10:52):
We were attacking civilians. We were fighting normal families they
will protect in their country. We were attacking them. And
then I heard a lot of stories about cheaching men,
how cruel they are, how do they torture people, How

(11:14):
they would cut you apart just for their pleasure, just
to have fun. They would cut off the head of
the Russian soldiers and they would send it to either
Russian commanders just to kind of like piece them off
and scare them. Call these like stories made me nauseous.

Speaker 3 (11:37):
Alia didn't know whether these stories were true or just
dehumanizing propaganda, but it kept her close to the base
and an high alert in case of attack.

Speaker 2 (11:47):
We didn't have enough food, and one day a small
troop of my colleague soldiers decided to go to the
village to get some food. I mean, not to get
some food. They would basically almost like robe this village, right, So,
I mean the Russian soldiers with guns hungry, So of

(12:14):
course the village population would just give wherever devoted, just
to leave them alone and not to kill their families
and their kids.

Speaker 3 (12:26):
But this time the raid didn't go as planned.

Speaker 2 (12:30):
There was an old guy, old enough to fight, but
he still had a gun in the house, and he
tried to kill my colleagues, but they shot him first.
So it was it was terrible, you know, it was
terrible because they're like old people in that village who

(12:52):
were just killed for nothing.

Speaker 3 (12:59):
It's unclear whether one man in the village was killed
or several people. But this act of senseless brutality shattered
the quiet on the base.

Speaker 2 (13:09):
When the broad of food, it was the feeling that
this food had like blood, you know, like it's just
you couldn't just even eat it. It's almost like poisoned
by the blood of innocent people.

Speaker 3 (13:29):
The next day, snipers began shooting at the base. Evidently
the villagers had informed the Chechen militia about what had happened,
and now they were taking revenge, a revenge that in
some respects Leah could understand.

Speaker 2 (13:44):
It really peaceed that mercenaries off. That's why they came
and they started to basically kill us. If he wouldn't
do it, or if they wouldn't go to the village,
you wouldn't have this problem.

Speaker 3 (13:55):
Despite Elia's empathy for what the Chechens were going through,
she was also a Russian soldier target of these mercenaries,
and she had her orders.

Speaker 1 (14:03):
Well.

Speaker 2 (14:03):
Our commander wanted to terminate them by killing them.

Speaker 3 (14:10):
So that night Aliah and Rashid went to their lookout location,
knowing that this time they might not come back. Chapter
twenty three, Aliah's prayer.

Speaker 4 (14:42):
Flahood.

Speaker 1 (14:45):
Russia has waged a brutal war against Chechen separatists since
the nineteen nineties. The violence began when a former soul.

Speaker 5 (14:53):
We have fought against the Lastian occupations for centuries. We
even had our own Holocaust. Stallion deported the entire book.

Speaker 6 (15:02):
The Minister for a Defense provided a report on Zechhniya.
Let me quote from the text. In Russia's interest, this
region must be rendered devoid of life.

Speaker 4 (15:18):
The Chechens were pretty formidable. They were a strange mix
of volunteer, local militias, ex military and foreign fighters.

Speaker 3 (15:28):
This is doctor Mark Gailiadi, who is one of twenty
nine British journalists that the Putin regime banned from Russia
in twenty twenty two. He's also the author of several
books on Russia, including Putin's Wars.

Speaker 4 (15:40):
The Chechens themselves think of themselves as wolves, but they
regard the wolf as being essentially something to live up to.
But on the one hand, absolutely ferocious in defense of
the pack, but one that ultimately depends on and protects
the pack.

Speaker 3 (15:57):
Because this region and the Caucasus Mountains and the Chechens
who lived there are very little understood, I've called doctor
Gailiadi to help explain the war that a Leo was
fighting in.

Speaker 4 (16:07):
Of all the various parts of the Soviet Union, the
one that was probably the most unruly, the most reluctant
to be under Moscow's control was Chechnya. It had been
finally annexed by the Russian Empire back in the mid
nineteenth century, and essentially, whenever the central government looked weak,
the Czechen's rebelled.

Speaker 3 (16:28):
Doctor Gailiadi explains that when the Soviet Union dissolved, Chechnya
took the opportunity to declare independence, and though the Russian
army tried to stop them, they didn't succeed. This was
the first Chechen War.

Speaker 4 (16:40):
And in effect, the Chechens fought the Russians to a
draw at that time.

Speaker 3 (16:45):
Then Putin came to power and decided to finish Russian
business in Chechnya, but first he needed a reason to
go back to war.

Speaker 5 (16:54):
A few weeks later, there were several terrorist bombs in Russia.
Over three hundred were killed. It wasn't clear who had
done it, but most Russians were ready to blame the Chechens.
But some now say that these events were orchestrated by
the spies inside Putin's power base, the FSB successor to

(17:16):
the KGB.

Speaker 3 (17:18):
I'm going to tell you without any doubts that the
second war was initiated by FSB as a provocation they
provo Jitchu. This became the second Chechen War, the one
that a Leah was now caught up in. Here's doctor
Gailliardi again, who also hosts the podcast in Moscow Shadows.

Speaker 4 (17:38):
So essentially, yes, this is very much Putin's war, and
also this was his opportunity to essentially demonstrate to Russians
across the country that things were going to be different now.
It gave him a chance to pose with tough guy,
macho rhetoric, but also make the point that Russia was back.

Speaker 3 (17:58):
Even by the low standards of war. The Second Chechen
War was a brutal and horror filled conflict on all sides,
which included torture, assassination, mass murder of civilians, and suicide attacks.

Speaker 4 (18:11):
All civil wars have a tendency to be deeply unpleasant,
but in this case, brutality was mobilized as another weapon
of war. I mean, there were at least forty thousand
civilians who died. We have cases of cities like Grosny
being leveled even when their civilian populations within, But we
also have a huge range of everything from outright atrocities

(18:35):
to just simply heedless brutality. Looting, for example, was widespread.

Speaker 3 (18:45):
This is audio of a Chechen fighter returning a laptop
that was looted by Russian forces. How he got it
back we probably don't want to know. In the end,
Houtin ultimately won his war, but at what cost.

Speaker 4 (19:01):
What happened is essentially Chechnia was brought under control. But
it was brought under control firstly by massive levels of brutality,
secondly by promising the new Chechen elite huge amounts of
money and considerable autonomy.

Speaker 3 (19:20):
With this context, now let's return to Alah at her
fellow soldier Rashid as they walked their lookout point on
the Russian Chechen border. With the looting of Russian troops
has led to a retaliatory attack by the Chechen militia.

Speaker 2 (19:35):
So we we went to our location with Russia at
the small hill. And while we were laying there, like
I was just looking at the vauge all the time.
One am, two am, three am, four am. By five am,
I noticed that I was shaking. I was called as well.

(19:58):
But you know, like this feeling when you scared so much,
it's like your heart is shaking and it gives this
shake to all your body. So six am, we've heard
some gunshots from outside. It wasn't that long for a
few minutes and Rushet he touched me with my shoulder

(20:22):
and he said, okay, now like now, and he pressed
the trigger and he shot them the enemy. He said
to me, it's simple. Now it's your turn. And I

(20:44):
saw through the scope. I saw the face with the
beard and with the hat, and I stop breathing at
that moment, but I waited. I felt like the blood

(21:07):
and the heart beatings through my ears, like I could
feel that my heart is beating so loud, or she
told me, like do it now. I pressed the trigger

(21:31):
and it was the silence pressed the trigger. I didn't cry.
I didn't feel anything that time. That moment, I just
didn't feel anything. I felt the metallic, you know, metallic.
I don't know how do you say it. I just

(21:52):
felt the strength of the gun and I didn't look again.
I just close my eyes like that. And then Raschid
told me, good job. Was it a good job? I

(22:12):
don't know. I laid there for maybe an hour in
the silence. Raschett also didn't talk. And then in the
morning later we returned to our pace. I didn't want
to talk to anyone. I drank a little bit water,

(22:34):
but I couldn't even I couldn't even eat anything. When
you experience something like that, it's just so much stressed.
It was like almost like nauseous to even think about
the food. I fell asleep. When I woke up, it

(22:54):
was already dark and only Rashid came to me. He
said to me, do you feel like okay? Like yeah,
and he said, well, let's go, Let's go back. We
need to, you know, to go back to our position.

(23:15):
I said, like, yeah, let's go.

Speaker 3 (23:19):
As Aliyah and Rashid walked together, he spoke to her
about his own challenges and come to terms with a
horrible act of killing, trying to help her feel better
about the events of the day before and likely the
day ahead.

Speaker 2 (23:34):
We're walking and he talked to me. His eyes were
always warm, you know, like he was really kind and
he loved nature. He always was like looking at the
sun and telling like it's so beautiful and leaves and
trees and and he was a perfect sniper and killer.

(24:00):
Told me about the wolf. He was a young boy.
His father took him for the hunting and he said,
I saw a big wolf and he said his eyes
were so beautiful, and he said he looked at me,
and father said, like, don't hesitate pressed the trigger and

(24:22):
he said, I I couldn't do it because the wolf
was so beautiful, like just beautiful animals, just like strong eyes.
And he said he felt really bad after. He made
me to feel a little bit better. I told him, listen,

(24:45):
it's still human being, and it's still someone's son, perhaps father, brother, husband.
And he said to me, never think this way, he said,
when I hunt animals, they also have families, but you
are the hunter. Never think that these people are somehow

(25:09):
cescated to anyone else, because if you will start to
do this, when you hesitate to press the trigger, that
exactly the moment when you will be killed. You said,
you just don't think like you aim it you press
the button. We came to the position that night. It

(25:32):
was quite I could hear how the wind was going.

Speaker 3 (25:37):
As they set up their guns, and they waiting in
this irrequiet. Elia's dreads soon came back. Despite Rashid's talk.

Speaker 2 (25:45):
That smell and that coldness, and that disgusting feeling of
the metallic cold weapen in your hands constantly, where your
finger is just stuck closer to the trigger, and you're
always in pressure, waiting.

Speaker 3 (26:17):
Even after several more nights of stillness broken by gunfire,
Alah never became comfortable with the horrible task required to survive.
The constant terror. Sleeplessness and discomfort made away at.

Speaker 2 (26:28):
Her like I came to the point where I just
was thinking that I don't care what will happen. I
just want to get out, Like you don't care anymore even,
you know, like at some point you're so scared, you're scared,
You're scared, You're scared, you're scared, and then you at
some point you're just like so tired to be scared
that you like, fuck it if I will be killed,

(26:50):
I don't care anymore, Like I'm so tired, you know,
Like it's like you're just so exhausted. You just feel like,
even if it will happen to me, it's okay. I
saw enough, it's fine. I just want to go to
somewhere else, maybe in another world.

Speaker 3 (27:11):
But instead it just got worse. One night in particular,
just before a big mission, Aliah was plagued by nightmares
and found herself praying in her half sleep.

Speaker 2 (27:23):
Please God, please just get me out of here, please.
I don't want to be here. Do something so I
can leave this place, and I want to go home.

Speaker 3 (27:42):
She slept fifthully, and then suddenly she woke to noise
and chaos all around her.

Speaker 2 (27:50):
When I woke up, I felt like something was going
wrong and people like running, and it's some kind of
like tension, but I didn't know exactly what happening.

Speaker 3 (28:00):
What was happening is that our base was being pounded
by grenades and waters.

Speaker 2 (28:07):
Behalf of the base. It was just bombard like that,
and the holes like land and sun and everything just
with all this, you know, like soil. It just flew
under my on the top of my head, like just
with a how do you call it, like with the

(28:32):
with the bomb like pup pressure. And because I was
laying in the corner like rush, it gave me that.
He gave me that. He gave me that corner because
it was the most safest place, he said, And he

(28:53):
gave me that safe place. They all were under the
not all of them, but like eighty percent of my friends,
they who killed. Parts of bodies were everywhere. I couldn't
stand because my left she had something fall on it,

(29:17):
like the wooden a huge stick which was next to
my place where I slept. It's like it falls on me,
but it falls exactly on my leg and it broke
my bone. And I didn't know exactly what happened, but
I couldn't stand up. And when I took this like
leant out and all this stuff I saw the bone,

(29:39):
the white bone, which was like out of my chin,
through the through the trousers, which I was worrying all
the time, and I couldn't do anything. I started to scream,
like like help, help, but I couldn't hear anyone, the lieutenant.

(30:00):
It was a light, but wherechid wasn't I just remember
Rashid's face laying just next to me, and he didn't

(30:21):
have half of his body. It was just his head
and arms and just his shoulders. And he was joking
the last time. He said, Hey, why don't you marry me?
You know you would be such a good couple. I'll

(30:41):
take it to Syberia to introduced to my mom. She'd
love you so much. I was laughing. I said, you
said he did. I wish I would never say it
to them. I wish I would say yes. I felt guilty.
He cared about me, you know, not like others. He

(31:01):
really did. He never tried to like even touch me
in a way where he would like hit on me
or something like, not like any other man. He was
really noble.

Speaker 3 (31:12):
These thoughts flashed through a Lea's mind as she lay
under the rabble, unable to move.

Speaker 2 (31:17):
Everything was like in a dream, my commander lieutenant was
like screaming and calling like is anyone, is anyone anyone
can hear me? And I screamed like here here, like
I'm here. He came with another guys. He looked at
me like like you know, like what's going like what happened?
Like where depends? Like you injured?

Speaker 4 (31:37):
What?

Speaker 2 (31:38):
And I showed him on the leg like yes, yes,
I broke my leg. They helped me from my arms
to get me out. We went out from the from
the base a little bit further like under the hill,
and we sat over there from about like forty soldiers.
There were only ten people left on the ten all

(32:05):
these boys, the boys view like twenty three, twenty two,
even twenty five, they're just little kids. They've didn't seen
anything in this life. And they were killed just in
front of me. They were just killed. And that that's
And when you see like these young kids like dying

(32:27):
for nothing, how do you feel like is it fair?
Even like where is the justice?

Speaker 5 (32:34):
Why?

Speaker 2 (32:34):
Like what's the reason of doing that? You know, like
even like it doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 3 (32:50):
A support team eventually showed up in a military truck
along with two medics who examined a Leah.

Speaker 2 (32:57):
They said to Lieutenant, I mean, she's like pointless soldier
right now. She can't do anything. She can't to properly.
So when they started to untie the bandages, I started
to scream and they gave me. I think it was
more for or something like that. I don't know, because
I remember that feeling. I was laying just in front

(33:19):
of the car and I looked at the sky and
the sky I remember exactly clouds and it was blue,
so blue that you felt like it was like I
haven't and I just closed my eyes and I like

(33:41):
passed over, and in the car, I remember I woke
up and I started to scream, and then my commander said,
like relax, rest, rest, it's gone too stressed in Nicholas

(34:02):
Mayus again.

Speaker 3 (34:20):
The Leah's story continues in episode eleven. If you're experiencing
a post traumatic stress, mental health or suicidal crisis, you
can call her text nine to eight eight for immediate support.
Veterans can press one to be connected with the Veterans
Crisis Line. To Die For is a production of Tenderfoot
TV in association with iHeart Podcasts. The show is hosted

(34:43):
and written by me Neil Strauss. With additional writing assistants
by Tristan Bankston. Executive producers are myself, Donald Albright, and
Payne Lindsay. For iHeart Podcasts, executive producers are Matt Frederick
and Alex Williams. Lead producer and editor is Tristan Banks.
Additional editing by Miles Clark and Christian Brown. Supervising producer

(35:05):
Tracy Kaplan. Consultants include Nushin, Valiza day, Chelsea Gooden, and
Jamie Albright. Artwork by Byron McCoy. Original music by Makeup
and Vanity Set, mixed and mastered by Dayton Cole. Our
theme song is Killer Shangui Law by Psychotic Beats featuring Pattiamore.

(35:25):
Special thanks to Orren Rosenbaub and the team at Uta
Beck Media and Marketing, Aarren Siegel, Becky Jensen, the Nord Group,
Meredith Stedman and Alex Vespustaed