Poor devils

Девятая рота (Devyataya rota—Ninth Company) 2005 Russia/Ukraine (139 minutes) directed by Fedor Bondarchuk, screenplay by Yuri Korotkov.

Ninth Company is a very good war movie: seven young men are ground in the maw of Soviet airborne training then spit out into the hellish quagmire of the last year of the war in Afghanistan.

It also is a very good paradox. While its images do all the things that make war movies great to watch, its words tell us that war is hell, that the lives lost are wasted, and that this was nowhere truer than in the last Soviet war in Afghanistan.

The seven young men—‘Lyutyi,’ [fierce] (Artur Smol’yaninov), the group’s natural leader; ‘Chugun’ [cast iron] (Ivan Kokorin), a bully with something to prove; ‘Dzhokonda’ [Giaconda] (Konstantin Kryukov), the artist; ‘Ryaba’ (Mikhail Evlanov); Vorobei (Aleksei Chadov); ‘Stas’ (Artem Mikhalkov) and ‘Pinochet’ (Soslan Fidarov)—have volunteered for two-year hitches in Afghanistan. They report for duty in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, where they stay long enough for an army sour baldy.

As in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), the first half of the movie shows this group of boys being broken down and remade as combat troops; the second half places them in an intense combat zone and shows us what they are made of.

The boys are flown to an airborne unit’s training camp in Uzbekistan’s Ferghana Valley near the Soviet Union’s border with Afghanistan. There they meet their drill sergeant who, in their young lives—as in the lives of most men (and now women) entering military training anywhere—must seem like the devil incarnate.

Like Full Metal Jacket’s Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Erney), this devil breathes sulphurous smoke and packs a right like a sledgehammer.

Starshii Praporshchik ‘Sashka’ Dygalo (Mikhail Porechenkov) is an intense blonde and blue-eyed fireplug of a Ukrainian non-commissioned officer and seasoned Afghan veteran. This is of course a stereotype; but anyone else in this role would be like an American drill sergeant without the starched fatigues and southern accent.

Dygalo’s view is that the better a job he does of beating the civilian nonsense out of his ‘klouny’ [clowns], the harder a time the enemy will have trying to kill his soldiers—surely an attitude taken by every drill instructor, at least from the time of the Romans. Naturally, this is not quite the way it looks or feels on the receiving end after one hears the words ‘ehto zalyot,’ or ‘that’s a breach of military discipline,’ which the subtitle simply renders, ‘that’s a fuck-up.’

This cauldron once more produces a band of brothers from a disparate group of boys. Porechenkov is compelling in this role, and the film portrays the process well, touching lightly upon the abuse and hazing chronic in the former Red Army.

The second half of the movie shows the seven as part of a group of replacements flown to Bagram Air Base near Kabul. A soldier named Kolya (Mikhail Efremov), on his way home after ‘four extra tours of duty and 28 firefights’ without a scratch, passes on his lucky amulet to arriving fellow Krasnoyarsk paratrooper Lyutyi.

What follows is a completely different kettle of fish.

            The narrative and soldiering from this point are gripping and look terrific, but they seem more informed by the conventions of military action in films like Full Metal Jacket and Saving Private Ryan (1998) than what we see in the documentary Restrepo (2010).

The boys are assigned to or end up in Ninth Company. This was a company of the 345th Independent Guards Airborne Regiment that did a lot of the heavy fighting during the Soviet Afghan war, like Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, the American unit portrayed in Restrepo.

Their new praporshchik, or company first sergeant, is Khokhol, a Russian epithet for a Ukrainian on order of ‘redneck’ or ‘cracker.’ Khokhol is played by director Fedor Bondarchuk, son of Soviet director Sergei Bondarchuk (to whom he dedicated the film). The company commander is Captain Bystrov (Alexei Kravchenko), another intense fireplug whom the boys are told the Afghans call ‘Korgaman,’ a local word for ‘Evil Giant.’ In one striking shot, the camera holds this officer’s steady stare.

The movie’s combat climax is based very loosely on a legendary battle that Ninth Company fought to hold Height 3234, an elevation overlooking a stretch of road between Gardez and Khowst in Paktia Province, secured to protect convoys. Paktia Province is south of the Korengal Valley area in Kunar Province portrayed in Restrepo, but has much the same terrain and is also adjacent to the insurgent-friendly tribal areas of Pakistan.

However, this battle was fought during the final Soviet ‘surge’ in the last year of the war (January 1988)—not in the last days (January 1989), as the film portrays. (The last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan on February 15, 1989.) In the event, the unit fulfilled its mission, taking heavy casualties from a nearly overwhelming enemy onslaught.

Nevertheless, the movie looks great. Its Afghanistan is actually in Crimea (Ukraine), with long mountainous vistas and enough hardscrabble rock to give it the right feel. The credits thank the Ukrainian armed forces and a large body of Ukrainian military personnel. There are thousands of military extras and the authentic equipment—BMP and BTR-60 armored vehicles, T-72 tanks, batteries of BM-21 multiple rocket launchers and squadrons of MI-24 Hind helicopter gunships, make the movie look like pictures from the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda of the period. Unfortunately, the music tends to overswell, feeling at times a bit more heavy-handed than necessary.

Soldiers make reference to ‘foreign’ enemy elements in both Ninth Company and Restrepo, but the indigenous people clearly are the main problem and danger. These people seem not a lot unlike those in the film Winter’s Bone (2010): they are all kin, they have a violent and complex dynamic of their own, and no outsider is welcome. Just replace the crystal methamphetamine with Islam.

The English subtitles have Soviet soldiers calling their enemy ‘muj’, short for mujahid (ﻤﺠﺎﻫﺪ), the Arabic word for ‘holy warrior’ best known in the West. What they actually say is dukh/dukhi, Soviet military slang for dushman/dushmany, a word for ‘enemy’ common to all the languages of Afghanistan and its neighbors, which Soviet soldiers adopted.

This is a good war movie. Restrepo would give one a better sense of what foreign soldiers are up against in a very violent corner of Afghanistan. Best of all is Sebastian Junger’s War (Twelve, 2010), his carefully researched, thoughtful, insightful, and well written reporting during the year he and cameraman Tim Hetherington spent with a platoon of Bravo Company in Korengal Valley in 2008.