But I arrived on Bessarabian soil among the rear units of the 25th Chapayev Rifle Division in the middle of utter chaos. There was no time for proper training or measured appreciation of the different moving moments of my initiation; there was barely time to gulp a dish of buckwheat porridge to the sound of far-off machine-gun fire. Mud squelched underfoot, and trees looked down like silent sentinels on the dirty tents, the rattling trucks, the soldiers rushing back and forth like ants. I changed into the uniform that was flung at me, rattled my oath off, and signed my life and body away to the Red Army, absorbing the information that I’d become a soldier of the 54th Stepan Razin Rifle Regiment, 1st Battalion, 2nd Company.
“Goodbye, civilian life,” said Lena, cramming her new forage cap over her hair. “Not very many of us, are there? I wonder if that’s because it’s early days, or because they’re sticking the women behind desks or into the hospital battalions?”
I knew there weren’t many women in the Red Army, but I hadn’t expected to be the only one in 2nd Company. I’d always got along well with men; most of my friends growing up were boys, and they accepted me as one of them without question. But it’s one thing to run with a pack of boys through a world that was still half women, and another thing to find yourself the lone woman in an entire company of loud, boisterous, overexcited young men, hardly any other females in sight. “Cut my hair,” I asked Lena suddenly, pulling my new cap off. “Chop it short at the neck.”
“It’s nice hair,” she objected as I unpinned my thick plait.
“We won’t have time here to keep long hair washed and combed.” I stamped down the regrets—I was a middling sort of woman, not tall or short, not fat or thin, but the heavy chocolate-brown hair that rippled to my waist was beautiful. Hair grows back, I told myself. “Just hack it off, Lena. It’s not only the washing—my father said once that the women who get along best in the army are the ones who don’t draw attention to being female. Short hair. All business. No flirtation.”
“One of the boys.” Lena began sawing at my thick plait. “Right. Whack mine off next.”
We sheared each other, hurled our severed braids ceremoniously into the nearest campfire, and traded rather grim smiles as they sizzled and stank. “Look after yourself,” I told my new friend as she was shunted toward the medical battalion. “Eyes in the back of your head until you make yourself some friends who will watch your back.” We didn’t have to say why. All women know why.
“You too, Mila.” Lena waved over one shoulder as she departed, and with her gone, the officers in my battalion seemed even less certain what to do with the only remaining female in the batch of new recruits. I found myself standing in front of a lieutenant barely old enough to shave, trying to explain that I already knew how to shoot—news he greeted like a mortician confronted by a corpse that had arrived on the slab already embalmed.
“You know how to shoot?” he repeated for the third time. “Well, maybe you think you do. War isn’t women’s business. I’ll petition the battalion commander to transfer you to a medical battalion.”
“I would be wasted as a medical orderly, sir.” But I was waved off to the command post of the 1st Battalion, where I had the same conversation all over again, and then again when I fetched up—exasperated and stamping in my khaki tunic and new trousers—at the desk of a long-faced, lugubrious-looking captain. “You can shoot?” He looked at my various certificates. “Are you any good?”
“Try me, Comrade Captain,” I replied. “A rifle with telescopic sights—”
He pushed his cap back on his thinning hair. “We have no sniper rifles.”
“A standard Three Line, then?” Thinking back to the scarred instructor and his lessons handling the Mosin-Nagant rifle.
“We don’t have those either, Lyudmila Mikhailovna. Not enough for the new arrivals.” I could have been annoyed at the captain’s use of my name, but he didn’t curl his tongue around it the way I’d already heard some of the officers do. Captain Sergienko was gray, stalky, perhaps thirty years old and looking fifty, and he spoke my name like a man who was two weeks into a war and already felt like he hadn’t slept in a year.