The Bear Went Over the Mountain

Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan

By: Les Grau

Narrated by: Luis Ayala

Length: 5 hrs and 39 mins

Publisher's summary

The Bear Went Over the Mountain was written by Soviet officers, who had served in Afghanistan and returned for the extensive Command and Staff course at the Frunze Combined Arms Academy in Moscow. While they were at the Academy, the History of the Military Art Department had the Afghanistan veterans write vignettes of their experience. They analyzed these, edited the best and added commentary as lessons learned for future war in mountain-desert terrain. The department published them as an in-house a book in 1991.

The book was intended for internal use only, and, as such, shows both the good and the bad. Mistakes and successes both illustrate the hard lessons learned in fighting guerrillas on rough terrain. It is not a history of the Soviet-Afghan War, rather it is a series of snapshots of combat as witnessed by young platoon leaders, company commanders, battalion commanders, staff officers and advisers to the Afghan government force. It is not a book about right and wrong, rather it is a book about survival and adaptation as young men come to terms with a harsh, boring and brutal existence punctuated by times of heady excitement and terror. This book was part of a US/Russian military exchange following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

©1996 Les Grau (P)2021 Luis Ayala

Good book, horrible reading

Excellent book for any SUT in COIN. Lessons are directly applicable to small unit leaders. Hard to follow without maps, but still worthwhile.

Don’t get me started about the narrator. He was terrible. Tempo was non existent and I’m pretty sure certain words or phrases were overdubbed by at least one other narrator. Was painful.

fascinating history.

I am andilotory student of history and found this to be a very interesting work.

Very Insightful

Learned a lot about the Soviet way of war and recentish Afghanistan history. The presenter sometimes struggles with the more exotic words, making me feel like it was a lecture from a war collage instead of a professional theatre performance, which I preferred. If recent events have you in an Afghanistan state of mind or you're a military weabu or you're a soldier needing something to listen to over a CQ shift, here you go. warning, not an inspirational children's story about a bear climbing over a mountain, with the mountain representing obstacles in life.