The book "The Lead Soldiers" is a revealing chronicle of the decade-long war of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, through the voices of its unknown martyrs. They speak: Soldiers and officers who fought there and returned, most of them disabled, in a homeland that promised them the reception of heroes and reserved for them the treatment of traitors and scapegoats. Mothers who sent their sons to this war and received a sealed metal coffin, never sure if it contained the body of their child or bags filled with sand. Widows of soldiers who wonder if their men were ultimately heroes or criminals. Women who were sent to Afghanistan as political officials of the USSR army and were treated almost as prostitutes.