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Babchenko, drafted in 1995 at 18, was sent to a transit camp at Mozdok near the Chechen border. There older soldiers beat, robbed and starved new recruits, and conscripts deserted or died from abuse before ever facing the enemy. He then went into Grozny, where untrained teenagers were thrown into urban fighting with little food, gear or command.
In the Russian army, dedovshchina is a system in which second-year soldiers ('grandfathers') dominate, extort and beat first-year conscripts. The officers allow it because it keeps order cheaply. Each abused cohort becomes the next set of abusers, so the brutality passes from one intake to the next with no need for anyone to order it.
For the ordinary conscript, the main daily threats came from his own side: hunger, cold, disease, theft, and beatings from fellow soldiers and officers. Enemy fire was not the main danger. An institution that treats its members as expendable can do them more harm than its declared opponent.
Babchenko reads his return to Chechnya as a contract soldier as proof of damage rather than free choice. War strips life down to survival, comradeship and heightened meaning, and civilian life then feels false and flat. Veterans often cannot fit back in and are pulled back toward the thing that broke them.