The search for "Spinakalacha" village

On page 66 of "The bear went over the mountain" you will find the vignette "Storming Spinakalacha village by LTC V. D. Vlasyan". This amusingly named village was the scenario for an interesting operation in December 1987. I was eager to see if I could develop a campaign for Combat Mission: Afghanistan based on this operation.

As always, the first step was to examine the terrain. As I have mentioned before, the names used in Grau's books do not always correspond to those used elsewhere. A quick Google search for "Spinakalacha" only showed references to the book "The bear went over the mountain" and, unexpectedly, a couple of threads in the CM forums where a user mentioned he was working on a scenario based on this very vignette. I was unable to find the scenario, so I assume he never completed it.

Vlasyan 's sketch provided in the book.

There is another name on the map provided in the book: "Grakalacha". Another amusing name, both ending with Kalacha, maybe there is something significant about it? By searching for "Grakalacha" translated into Cyrillic, along with key terms like "Afghanistan" and "Kandahar", I was able to find some references. From what I understand, Grakalacha is a suburb of Kandahar. It may have been a village in the 1980s, but as the city has expanded, it has likely been absorbed into the urban area. However, I still found no information on "Spinakalacha", the main subject of the story.

After extensive searching and translating, I decided to take a drastic step. I transliterated both names into Cyrillic and began comparing each village name west of Kandahar with these two names on an old Soviet map of Afghanistan, expecting to spend an afternoon on this task. To my surprise, I quickly identified both villages, and they were remarkably close to Kandahar!

"Grakalacha" on top, "Spinakalacha" below.

The reason I was unable to find Spinakalacha is that the Soviets spelled it Spinkalacha, not SpinAkalacha! I don't speak Russian, and after reading some translated accounts in that language, I've noticed that words can change depending on the context of the preceding words. Therefore, a literal translation of names can be quite challenging.

With this new knowledge in hand, I went straight to Google Earth to locate Spinkalacha. Although I still could not find anything using the search option, the map provided me with a precise location for the village. I overlaid the map and realized that the Soviet map and the aerial images differ significantly from Vlasyan's sketch. This complicated things quite a lot. For instance, there are two potential clusters of buildings—one of which has been completely razed to the ground—that could be Spinkalacha, as neither Spinkalacha nor Grakalacha appears on Google Earth under those names.

A more detailed map of the area. Please disregard the blue rectangle, red arrows, and circle, as they are not relevant to our narrative.

Both villages are supposed to be no more than 500 meters apart, according to the Vlasyan sketch. However, based on the map I am using, the distance appears to be closer to 3 Kilometers.

Another significant discrepancy with the Vlasyan sketch is the elevation in the area. Excluding the region immediately west of the village, the landscape appears to be relatively flat, whereas the Vlasyan sketch depicts numerous hills surrounding the village.

There may be valuable information here, but I will need to thoroughly examine the maps and adjust the actions accordingly if I want to implement this operation in the game.

I must add that searching for Spinkalacha in Cyrillic has not yielded any meaningful results either.