We Are Forsaken: A War Novel

By Trygve Rasmussen

Russian men's stomachs burn with hunger. Their bladders freeze as they sit in Chechnya's bellicose, frigid forests. They suffer dysentery and the deaths of comrades. They smoke and laugh. They watch and listen to the torture of innocents and combatants. They are ambushed and curse their fool commanders. They behold sights more gruesome than they could have dreamt of. They grumble as APCs slowly deliver them hither and thither. They prepare to die.
Meanwhile, Chechen men watch their comrades wither and die. They march across Chechnya's mountains, suffering ambushes in mountainous villages and upon the barren slopes. They reach the great, ancient capital of Grozny. They, too, prepare to die.
One witnesses the burdens the war placed upon Chechnya's citizenry and their quarrels with the Russian invaders and Islamic extremists as both march towards Grozny, eventually reaching and disfiguring it together.
Vadim is a Russian serviceman. Ramzan is a Chechen Islamist. All their struggles during the war are recorded in We Are Forsaken, which tells the story of the Second Chechen War in its entirety. The corruption and destruction of the countryside by invading forces, the brutal street-to-street fight for Grozny, its collapse, and all that led to it are witnessed herein.

May 24, 1998
A view of cloudy, snow-peaked, coarse mountains behind them, down which blew fresh spring air, and, level with their eyes, welcoming, aged homes running in ranks on either side of the dusty main street of Urus-Martan,1 the group of burning men-radicals-were strolling, each wielding a piece of the Hammer of Fate, which they intended to bring down with great strength upon the final nails of a coffin, within the bounds of which they had agreed with bureaucrats from a foreign land to lay the remains of something called "Chechnya."
Soon, then, those streets would not look the same. Like the men, they will burn, and all the peacefulness will flee from them.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0FSKJK19S
• ISBN13: 9798266953130
• Release Date: September 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 460 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.0" x 8.0"