"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your Gawd like a soldier."
-Rudyard Kipling
In 1980, the United States boycotted the Olympic Games in Moscow. Reason being, the Soviet Union had sent an invasion force into Afghanistan to subjugate that country and turn it into another Soviet satellite state. They did have local sympathizers who despaired at the backward state of their nation and saw the Soviet Union as a power that could bring them into the realm of advanced nations. Naturally, NATO was alarmed at this action. The action was controversial to the rest of the world, seen as an act of aggression. But despite the Russian resolve, Afghanistan for ten years proved as difficult to tame for them as it had for many powers before them. Later on, some media observers began calling the Russian conflict in Afghanistan the "Russian Vietnam". Despite the mighty Soviet war machine and the use of experienced, skilled warriors, Afghanistan, a dirt poor, primitive nation no where near united in government, culture or pretty much anything else, was having success in stymiing the military might of Russia. Again, as it had all other mighty powers who had come before.
Afghanistan is a huge, desolate country, with it's population scattered, hidebound and traditional in their ways. A nation controls a country by invading and governing it through a puppet regime, traditionally. But what if that puppet regime, just because of local logistal and cultural considerations, simply can't? Do you just keep your army there and watch your nation's finest slowly die? Or do you cut your losses and bug out?
Well, the Russian's version of the Afghanistan ordeal had just gotten going in 1981, but already, the soldiers on the ground were cursing this land and wishing they were somewhere, anywhere else. They were earning their reputation as skilled, efficient and brutal warriors, but this was getting them nowhere. The people resented their presence and fully resisted any changing of their ways the Russians were trying to impart to them. Every foray into the Afghan hinterlands was definitely a surreal journey into Indian Country, the Heart of Darkness.
Which is what the film The Beast opens up staring into. We witness a Russian tank platoon staging a brutal, merciless attack on a remote Afghan village. They are quite thorough in their taking of lives, their machines leaving the villagers little chance to resist. Or so it appears. One tank, commanded by Daskal, insists his driver, Koverchenko, run over a village man as an object lesson to the villagers. This act, rather than breaking the villagers, proves to harden their hearts. And it begins driving a firm wedge between Daskal and Koverchenko, whose cracks would further develop as the tank flees across the Afghan countryside, separated from it's platoon and hopelessly lost, pursued by determined guerillas out for revenge.
What is The Beast of the title? Obviously, one reference is the Russians' T-62 tank, an armor plated firebreathing behemoth, a killing machine that is very difficult for the Afghans to stop. But not impossible and they know it. They call it the Beast and they are determined to slay it. The actions of the tank and of the Russians elsewhere in Afghanistan, such as poisoning their water sources and leaving traps on bodies, rather than break the Afghans, only steels them and sets their minds further to murder.
Is it the country itself? Humble appearing Afghanistan, she has laid low so many of history's mightiest powers. She eats their finest and is never sated.
Or is it the dark heart in all of us? Is it a perversion of the fighting spirit all warriors need to survive and do their job, but if steered wrong, devours all that is good and decent in a person and leaves only a soulless killer in it's place?
The Beast touches on all of this and (Stephen Baldwin not quite convincing as a Russian aside) takes us on that journey at a safe distance.
Pray for those with boots on the killing grounds.
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