Fallout 4 soviet uniform
Khodzhayev says Tajiks and other Central Asians formed the majority of initial troop deployments - part of "Muslim battalions" chosen in part for their knowledge of dialects with similarities to those of Afghan speakers of Dari, in particular.īut when he arrived with other new recruits, he felt like he'd landed in a strange land. He was 18 in December 1979, when he was conscripted into the Soviet army and deployed at the beginning of the Soviet invasion. Some 2,300 miles south, in Dushanbe, Tajikistan - now an independent country but back then part of the Soviet Union - Rustam Khodzhayev still struggles with the Afghanistan war. Right: Khodzhayev poses before a special operations mission in Afghanistan in 1981. "We were just kids when we were sent there," he says. Left: Rustam Khodzhayev, at age 20, poses for a photograph in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, following two years of fighting in Afghanistan. Opalev was just one of more than a half-million Soviet soldiers who cycled through Afghanistan over a decade of fighting. "Still, those were the best days of my life," he says.
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" His eyes drift to his middle-aged paunch. He was "like a blue-eyed Rambo" when he first arrived, he says. Opalev says his nearly two years in Afghanistan - on mountain patrol until an injury earned him a desk job - was the first time he felt like he was doing something that mattered. "But then there's another generation that thinks that it was completely unimportant." They've always respected veterans and understood why we were there and why the war was in the country's interests," says Opalev. "In Moscow, there are people who follow politics. He much prefers to frame the Afghanistan mission in terms of "fighting the religious extremists of the day" - and what it means to serve. in five, 10 or 20 years.' It didn't work." "Just like the Americans thought, 'We'll build a democracy. "If someone thought we came to build socialism - well, yes, that was the political goal at the time and probably not the right one," says Opalev. Today, Opalev works at the Union of Veterans of Afghanistan's office in central Moscow, where he pulls out the decorated uniform he wears for ceremonies and occasional talks at schools.Įxplaining the Soviet military effort to prop up a communist government in Kabul can be a tough sell, he admits. The USSR propped up its communist ally in Kabul "The main thing was that it was organized," he says. Opalev was among the last Soviet troops to withdraw in February 1989. Sergei Opalev poses with a map of Afghanistan at the Union of Veterans of Afghanistan's office in Moscow. "If you pull out an army of tens of thousands, you need a year."Īs the United States grapples with the fallout from its exit from Afghanistan, former soldiers who fought as part of the USSR's own losing military campaign see echoes in their experiences - similar searing loss - but also evidence of American miscalculation that casts the Soviet experience in a more flattering light.
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"It's just a fact that if you want to evacuate a division, you need a week," says Opalev, who was among the last Soviet soldiers to withdraw from Afghanistan. Opalev served as a captain in the Soviet army as it was gradually humbled by Afghan mujahedeen fighters during a decade of war in the 1980s. It's not the defeat that confounds him - he understands that part all too well. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Sergei Opalev is still trying to wrap his head around the chaotic end to America's 20-year war. MOSCOW - It has been more than a month since the U.S. Among the first deployed was Rustam Khodzhayev, seen posing here (front row, first from the left) with his special operations unit in 1981. Over half a million Soviet troops served in Afghanistan between 19.