“Move fucking forward!” the lieutenant screams, and for a few seconds, I stand there questioning the order to attack with guns and grenades the roaring tons of steel with turrets of fire aimed in our direction. I hear the blood rushing through my veins, protesting, with each pump of my heart, my oncoming death, demanding to preserve this unaccomplished, short-lived life.

But Seryoga and I know better now than to question the commander’s order, no matter how reckless or futile. So we clutch grenades in our sweaty fists, and we attack. There are four of us, four human decoys in the tank shooting gallery. The lieutenant stays behind, and if any of us survives, he knows that he may get a bullet in his back the next time he leads an attack himself. The tanks are creeping forward slowly, as if amused by this pathetic sight: four men walking toward three advancing bunkers of steel.

Then there is a series of explosions and flashes of flames, and I can no longer see Seryoga. I can no longer see anyone. The tank turrets are moving, focusing on those of us who remain standing. I’m still standing, so I pull the pin and toss the grenade. The detonation hits so close that the wave of heat throws me back, into one of the trenches that crisscross the field.

I am not alone in the trench. There is a soldier, one of the four of us, slumped on the bottom against the wall, his chin touching what used to be his chest and is now just a red porridge of flesh and bone. His eyes stare straight ahead, and his hand sits in the middle of the crater in his chest, as if he were trying to stop the bleeding in his last few seconds of life. Only an hour earlier, I saw him reading a letter from home. There is a smell of gunpowder and warm blood, a stench that makes me retch. I am on my knees, vomiting the vile mess onto what’s left of the soldier’s body. Vile on top of vile.

Then there is screeching and roaring, more deafening with every second, and the tank’s caterpillar tracks are hanging over the trench, over the man with a funnel in his chest, ironing him into his grave in the trench wall, a half a meter away from where I crouch, trying to become invisible, trying to flatten myself into the mutilated earth.