a must for anyone interested in Afghan military history | Afghanistan: Soviet Vietnam

Russian dispatches from Afghanistan. | Afghanistan: Soviet Vietnam | Vladislav Tamarov

books:


	• Afghanistan: Soviet Vietnam Vladislav Tamarov Mercury House, 1992 - 192 pages average customer review:based on 52 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Real Thing

This is the most amazing book I have read all year! It's not just a story, in his own words, from a young Russian soldier in that terrible place, but it is a photo book full of the most beautiful but tragic black and white photos. You see the haunted faces of Vladimir Tamarov (the author and photographer) and his brother soldiers, many of which did not make it back. And as you read his haunted words, how he came back and could not ever be the same, how his friends who died there visit him in his dreams. They were eighteen and nineteen but they look sixteen. The title "Soviet Vietnam" is quite haunting. I believe if I met the author now I would be reminded of our own boys who were damaged by Vietnam. They also were just draftees (conscripts) in a place where they did not want to be. As for our soldiers who are now in Afghanistan, it's true they are fighting the same vicious enemy as Vladimir did! But, don't our men look ever so much better fed, and organized, and equipped, and trained, then those poor Soviet conscripts? I reccommend this book so highly, I would personally buy a copy for all my friends.

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a must for anyone interested in Afghan military history

As a paratrooper currently serving my second tour in Afghanistan (and third in the desert overall), I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the Soviet conflict of the 1980s. The photographs provide insight into Afghanistan's terrain and climate, and I used this book to illustrate several points to my subordinates as we were preparing for this deployment. The author's writing is heartfelt.

Russian dispatches from Afghanistan.

I don't think anybody really supported the Soviets when they invaded Afghanistan in 1979-1980. Most Westerners thought the Soviet action was barbaric. Tamarov in his picture book makes us aware of the human side with the Russian soldiers. Most were following their duty and doing their "international duty". Many were killed in the low grade guerilla war that followed the invasion. Tarmarov was a mine sweeper, and he was constantly exposed to danger. Several of his friends paid the price of their occupation. One wonders about the similarities with American verterans of the Vietnam War. In fact, Tamarov meets some of these verterans at the end of the book, and they have a lot in common.

There is some writing in this large picture book. The writing did not flow smoothly, but the pictures were great. They show the guerrilla war in Afghanistan from the Russian perspective.

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A memoir you will NEVER forget!

Here is a riveting memoir by Vladislav Tamarov. In 1984 men were drafted into the Soviet Army at the age of eighteen. There was no choice. Unless you were in college or disabled, you served. Many men broke their legs to avoid serving. Others, the more wealthy, bribed their way out. Vlad was in college two years when the law changed and he was off to boot camp. Training the men needed, they never received. Training the men did NOT need, they got. (For example, lots of time was spent learning to parachute, even though it was a well known fact that no one used parachutes in Afghanistan.)

Vlad was born January 12, 1965. His "Date of Military Service Application" was April 26, 1984. This memoir really began when an officer walked up to Vlad at a distribution center and asked, "Do you want to serve in the commandos, the Blue Berets?" Vlad kept a tiny calendar where he crossed off his six hundred and twenty-one days, one-at-a-time. Vlad kept detailed records of each mission he participated in. He had his own little code, shown in this memoir. Two hundred and seventeen of those days were spent on combat missions. In addition to Vlad's coded diary, he secretly took many photographs. This book has dozens of the pictures littered throughout, and makes a powerful impact on those who read it.

***** Vlad, a minesweeper, portrays the horrors of war in vivid details. The reader can almost hear the explosions nearby and smell the fear of being shot at. Once you have read THIS book, you will never forget it! *****

Reviewed by Detra Fitch.

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Afghanistan

An excellent book! Lots of powerful pictures. Purchased the book from Amazon while serving in Afghanistan. Lots of flash backs/forwards in the story line, which I could have done without. But all together it's a well written, interesting book, which depicts a Soviet Solders tour of duty in Afghanistan.

Drafted into the Soviet Army in April, 1984 and sent at the age of nineteen to serve in Afghanistan as a minesweeper, Vladislav Tamarov turned in secret to the pen and the camera to chronicle his 621 days of war. Photographs depicting the haunted faces of both soldiers and civilians, the country's rugged yet beautiful mountain terrain, and the banality of daily life between missions are interspersed with Tamarov's unsentimental but passionate prose, in which he reveals his growing disorientation and takes to task his government for a campaign that has been widely dubbed "the Soviet Vietnam".

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