transmissions from a compromised antenna

I was leafing through the new Harpers last night and came across something that really threw me for a loop. A set of little vignettes about Russian soldiers stationed outside of Grozny in Chechnia. Harpers titled the section "The Things They Ate," in dark allusion to Tim O'Brien's Vietnam memoir "The Things They Carried" and each of the three sections details an incident of eating something you wouldn't have wanted to eat unless you had to. If you thought the U.S. treated its soldiers like shit, just have a look at this.

The work has a combination of hardness and sensitivity that can only come from experience. But he takes control of the material by off on key bits of information until just the right time, sculpting the stories into the shape of jokes, although the horror of the scene transmutes the humor into a more existential sort of sensation. Memorable sentence: "He was well fed, but not as well fed as the other Grozny dogs that went out of their minds as they gnawed on corpses in the ruins."

Probably it's the first time in years I've read a selection of someone's writing, looked at the writer's name, and known I would remember that name for the rest of my life.

Arkady Babchenko's novel One Soldier's War will be published in February by Grove Press.