The story is dedicated to US citizen Efim Yankelevich, whose ingenuous memories of the war years and everyday soldier’s front-line work made it, as the author noted, “almost documentary.” The Second World War (1939–1945) lasted so long that the boys who met it as children managed to grow up and take up arms to replace those who died. Their destinies turned out differently. The story of Leo Yakovlev tells about one such pre-war, war and post-war fate of an 18-year-old “fighter of the 1943 model”, the epigraph to which the author took the words from a forgotten song: