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Old 03-05-2013, 17:10   #1
Richard
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Soviet War Veteran Found In A'stan After 33 Years

Is this like the movie "Hell in the Pacific" with Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune or that episode of 'Gilligan's Island' where the Japanese submariner was still fighting World War II?

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Soviet War Veteran Found In Afghanistan After 33 Years
BBC, 5 Mar 2013

A Soviet soldier who went missing in Afghanistan nearly 33 years ago has been found living with Afghans in the western province of Herat.

The soldier is semi-nomadic, has the adopted Afghan name Sheikh Abdullah and practises herbal medicine, Russia's RIA news agency reports.

An ethnic Uzbek, he was found by ex-Soviet veterans of the war.

He was wounded in battle in 1980, only months after the Soviet invasion, and was rescued by local Afghans.


The head of the official veterans' committee, Ruslan Aushev, said Sheikh Abdullah - real name Bakhretdin Khakimov - was tracked down in Shindand district after a year-long search. He had served with a motorised rifle unit.

The committee lists 264 Soviet soldiers as still missing in Afghanistan, half of them Russians. In the first decade after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 the committee found 29 missing soldiers - and 22 of them decided to return home, while seven opted to stay in Afghanistan, RIA reports.

The committee says it is determined to track all of the missing men down.

Sheikh Abdullah was married but his wife died and he has no children.

The committee's deputy chairman, Alexander Lavrentyev, said Sheikh Abdullah bore the scars of his war wounds - a shaking hand and shoulder and nervous tic. The ex-soldier, from the city of Samarkand, was able to name his former place of residence in Uzbekistan and the names of his relatives, Mr Lavrentyev said.

He understood Russian but spoke it very poorly.

In 2009 the BBC's Lyse Doucet interviewed two ex-soldiers from Ukraine, now Muslims and living with Afghans in northern Afghanistan.

Some 15,000 Red Army soldiers and more than a million Afghans were killed in a decade of fighting between a Soviet-backed government in Kabul and mujahideen fighters armed by the West and Islamic neighbours.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21668541
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Old 03-05-2013, 21:48   #2
Wiseman
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There has been a number of documentaries on Russian TV about Soviet soldiers that were captured and started families in Aghanistan . For instance, this guy returns to his homeland 20 years later and tries to live there but his Afghan wife gets sick, he brought her to lots of doctors and when that didn't work she decided to leave because she started to believe that her own mother put a curse on her and if she wants to live she has to return.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RPB6-ysrdY

Unfortunately there are no English subtitles available.

Last edited by Wiseman; 03-06-2013 at 00:23.
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Old 03-06-2013, 00:04   #3
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Ah yes. The allure of Afghan "herbal medicine".
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Old 03-06-2013, 18:38   #4
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and we stopped looking for living American MIAs a lot sooner than 33 years after Vietnam.

I was a kid living on the Air Force base in Guam when a Japanese soldier was "captured" in 1972. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoichi_Yokoi
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Old 03-06-2013, 18:58   #5
Richard
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Divemaster View Post
and we stopped looking for living American MIAs a lot sooner than 33 years after Vietnam.
Our files in JCRC/JTFFA were much better by then.

Richard
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“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)… There are just some kind of men who – who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.” - To Kill A Mockingbird (Atticus Finch)

“Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.” - Robert Heinlein
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