This book is a gut punch. Millions of women served in the Soviet Armed Forces, and unlike other militaries, which tried to keep women in auxiliary roles like nurse, clerk, or ferry pilot, Soviet women were on the front lines as snipers, machine gunners, pilots, field medics, and partisans, as well as behind the lines. And once Victory, glorious Victory was achieved, these Soviet women soldiers were asked to forget their role, their heroism, their trauma, and return to being wives and mothers. The official narrative of collective sacrifice didn't easily allow for women soldiers.

Alexievich spent decades conducting an oral history project, no easy thing in the Soviet Union, when going against the official narrative didn't just have the weight of Greatest Generation social pressure, but also could provoke official censorship. This book is stitched together out of hundreds of interviews, a quilt torn full of holes, yet big enough to cover the entire front.

The experience is harrowing. Themes stick out, volunteering in the first flush of patriotism, losing womanhood to become a soldier, seeing such intense death and destruction, the privation of life in the trenches, attempting to seize some form of normalcy (these were after all young women), and then coping with the aftermath.

I thought I was handling it well, but one story hit me like a lightning bolt. This woman fought with a partisan band near her village. The Nazis would gather the women who remained (the men were dead or in the army) and have them walk ahead of their patrols to set off mines. As the partisans lay in ambush, they would see their family members pass by, "There goes my mother. That's my sister," and pray that in the firefight no their family members would survive. That's the stuff of nightmares.