The author served in Afghanistan in 1983-1984 as part of the 201st Division, stationed in the northern province of Kunduz. A journalist by training, he describes the war with documentary precision; in his prose there is nothing invented, inflated to please the reader’s preferences and the “laws of the genre.” But it is the truth that makes the picture of those long-ago events terrible, which is why the heart painfully contracts and the soul suffers. The heroes of the book are officers and soldiers who died and are living today, who fulfilled their military duty to the end in a distant Muslim country.