One Soldier's War by Arkady Babchenko A Globe and Mail (Toronto) Best Book of the Year 2008 ISBN: 0-8021-4403-9 / ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4403-4 US $15.00 - 5 1/2 x 8 1/4, 416 pp - Feb. 2009

Excerpt:
We are strange boys—we have grown-up eyes and grownup conversations, many of us already have gray hair, and our eyes no longer light up with glee, even when we smile. Yet we are still boys.

But as soon as the fighting starts the tomfoolery vanishes in an instant and all that remains is the need to survive. We cease being human and become killing machines. Boys? We have the same arms and muscles as adults, and although we are still weaker than a fully grown man we are just as good at placing the crosshairs on a moving figure and pulling the trigger. . . .

In war a person is basically not himself at all but some other kind of creature. We don’t have just five senses; there is a sixth, seventh, tenth even, growing from our bodies like tentacles and grafting themselves onto the war. And through them we feel the war. You can’t talk about war with someone who has never been there, not because they are stupid or slow-witted, but because they don’t have the senses to feel it with.

A heavy red sun descends on the horizon. We are dying together with the sun. We have no age—our life is but one day. We are born as babies at dawn, reach maturity by midday, and die in the evening. We hustle and bustle as we live out our lives. Now we are already old men. We are twenty-two hours and fifteen minutes old.