One Soldier's War in Chechnya by Arkadii Babchenko

This is a great book. Information on Russian modern war conflicts is hard to come by. This book gives a reader an understanding of what life is like in the modern Russian army. The Chechnya conflict was one of the most horrific modern wars ever fought. Hair raising accounts the author provides of his day to day life where hard beatings, starvation, dysentery, desertion and knowing that your life is worthless was part of army life.
Babchenko took note of everything that he saw, heard and thought during this horrific period and for the first time leads the reader into his world of what was war like, the emotions felt and the hardship of loosing friends in battle, thinking you could be next.
Lets not forget this is not WWI or WWII accounts, this is something that happened not even a decade ago. The events descried in the book will make the reader to stop and think and eventually come to grips with what has been written. Coming from an ex Soviet Union I felt a personal attachment for this book also the Author being only a year older than I'm.
I would recommend this book to anyone interested in military history especially Russian modern wars.
The reason for giving four stars instead of five is that I found the text is a little hard to follow as it is written in a journalist format. The book is a collection of notes and was not meant to be a book as Babchenko stated, however besides this small problem I think the book was put well together and quite readable.
I give this book 4 out of 5 stars.