Anatoly Lebed was born in Valga in Estonia, joined the Soviet airborne in 1981, retrained as a helicopter flight engineer and flew combat missions in Afghanistan in 1986 and 1987. When the Soviet Union came apart he did not settle: he fought as a volunteer in the Yugoslav wars, then in the Russian campaigns in the Caucasus, and ended up in the 45th Guards Spetsnaz Regiment of the Airborne Forces.
In 2003, in Chechnya, he stepped on a mine. His right foot and part of the lower leg were amputated. That is normally the end of a military career, and in most armies it would have been the end of this one.
He learned to walk, then to run, then to parachute on the prosthesis, argued his way back onto operational duty and was fighting again within a year. His soldiers, who knew exactly what was under the trouser leg, followed him anyway — and he had a habit of going through doors first that he never lost.
He was made a Hero of the Russian Federation in 2005 and collected an extraordinary list of Russian decorations over the following years. Soldiers on the other side of every one of those wars would describe him differently; this catalogue records what he did, not who was right.
He died in Moscow in April 2012, aged forty-eight — not in combat, but on a motorcycle, in traffic, a few kilometres from home.
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