Ishkhan Aslanyan, a 33-year-old contract soldier, received 12 fractures to his right leg as a result of a projectile explosion during the war. He is still receiving treatment and hopes to be able to stand on his own two feet very soon.

Ishkhan, a resident of Nazrvan village, Aragatsotn region, was at home on the day the war started, and, in the morning, he immediately left for the front line in Karvachar. He performed many combat tasks, but then was wounded on October 9.

“I will not say much, I am a spy… I have done my job, I have returned. We were sitting to rest a bit when the projectile fell on my side,” says the soldier, adding that two soldiers next to him were killed in the explosion, one of them was his godfather. Both the servicemen on the spot and later the friends hid the fact of the godfather’s death from Ishkhan, saying that he was wounded and there still was hope of his discovery. Ishkhan found out the truth forty days after what happened.

“After being injured, I first was in Heratsi Hospital. I had an operation there. Of course, I was in the hands of good doctors. They were very good doctors,” says Ishkhan. He is currently receiving treatment at the Defender of the Fatherland Rehabilitation Center. He says that due to the very good conditions and specialists, he feels much better: although still moving in a wheelchair, he is already able to walk carefully for a couple of hours a day without it.

The soldier has lost many friends during the war. “War is like that. Those who go, know the reason why they go to war … We were thinking that we should fight, we should not think about dying. There is God above us; everything will be as he wishes.”

After being wounded, the soldier could not sleep for a long time. Every time he closed his eyes he saw the images of the war. “Then I was making phone calls, I was in constant contact with the guys [fellow soldiers] to find out what was going on there. But because my condition was serious at the time, they hid a lot from me, they did not say what was happening and what a difficult situation it was.”

Ishkhan also mentions that although the commanders of many military units left the soldiers during the war, his commander and his deputy, Arman Movsisyan, stayed with the soldiers until the end. “He fought and ruled in three wings. I even was wishing that, if I continued to stay in the service, I would like to be under his command… he was like Monte [a national hero of Armenia], he did not say ‘Forward!’; he said ‘After me!’. The troops were following him. That’s how he fought.”

Ani Gevorgyan

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