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Among Soviet garrison troops, morale appeared to be high. "We have everything here we could possibly need," a swarthy, French-speaking 2nd lieutenant from Uzbekistan cheerily assured TIME Correspondent David DeVoss, outside his billet. His men were all delighted to be in Afghanistan, he said, mostly because of the perks. "This is a poor country so the only thing we purchase locally is fruit," he said with a smile. "We've brought everything else from the Soviet Union—in our cook tents it's just like eating at home." Best of all, he said, was the special combat pay: 180 rubles on top of his regular 200-ruble monthly salary. "Do you know what 380 rubles is worth? Back home I can live on that for ten months."
Last week a sixth full division of "motorized rifles," as the Soviet army denotes its armored infantry columns, rolled south across the border at Torghondi. It reinforced five other divisions already rooted around every major city in sprawling tent camps that are ringed by 130-mm artillery emplacements. The troops were arrayed around the country in a kind of wheel formation. At its center was an elite airborne division with a main base just outside Kabul, and two mobile units, one stationed due east at Jalalabad and one due west at Shindand. One of the four armored divisions, equipped with heavy T-72 tanks and BMP and BMD armored personnel carriers, was also dug in near Kabul; the three others were fanned out at Kandahar in the south, Herat in the northwest and Kunduz in the northeast. American intelligence experts were puzzled by one facet of the Soviet deployment: each division had a full complement of chemical-biological-radiological warfare decontamination units. The most plausible explanation seemed to be that the decontamination units were regularly assigned to the divisions and, in the methodical Soviet way, had to go with the troops even if there was little or no chance they would see action.
Soviet air superiority in the fighting was complete. The airfields at Kabul, Bagram and Shindand bristled with MiG-21s as well as ultrasophisticated MiG-23s; high altitude MiG-25 reconnaissance planes were also spotted overflying combat zones, though they were believed to be based at fields in the U.S.S.R. The Soviet airfields and some base headquarters were guarded by surface-to-air missiles —an obvious precaution in case of foreign attack, but hardly a necessary defense against the insurgents.
Outgunned and outnumbered, the motley, disjointed forces of mujahidin —the "holy warriors" as they call themselves—were relying mostly on light machine guns captured from Soviet caches, and automatic rifles or other light arms provided by their Chinese backers. Some carried old Enfield rifles from border villages that have long specialized in hand-crafted weapons. Last week, as they had pledged to U.S. Defense Secretary Harold Brown during his recent visit to Peking, the Chinese stepped up deliveries of arms supplies across the Karakoram Pass into Pakistan; even so, the rebels received nothing heavier than mortars or light artillery pieces.