About the book: 2010 / If you can say “lucky” about a person who was seriously wounded and completely discharged, then Mansur Abdulin was extremely lucky. He was lucky that, having reached the front in the fall of the bloody 1942, he began to fight in a battalion 82-mm mortar unit, the crew of which was located 100 meters from the front line. He was lucky to survive, having fought for a whole year, although the average life expectancy of an infantryman ranged from two weeks on the offensive to a month on the defensive. He participated in such key operations of the Red Army as “Uranus”, “Ring”, “Rumyantsev”, Kursk defensive, going from a mortarman to a battalion Komsomol organizer and from Stalingrad to the Dnieper. He was lucky that, having been seriously wounded, he was quickly evacuated from the battlefield, and highly professional doctors saved his leg. This book is a real “trench truth” of the Great Patriotic War, an amazing memoir of a front-line soldier about the people who shared with him the joys of victories and the bitterness of defeats, about the trials that befell them, about the hard and bloody work of soldiers.