So as not to worry his family Zhenya open his last letter to his family with "Hello from Volgograd!". Zhenya had already been in Chechnya for almost a week when, on December 13, 1994, the the Russian government officially acknowledged the fighting in Chechnya.

Even though Natalya Dmitrievna did not know that her son was in Chechnya, "calm, peaceful life ended for us on December 13," she says. "We watched the television news every night, trying to get some information about what was going on there. I just had a bad feeling after the fighting began."

On December 27, the mother of Vitya Timonen called Natalya Dmitrievna with some frightening news: her son, who had been serving with Zhenya in Volgograd, had been wounded while fighting in Chechnya and was recuperating in an army hospital outside Moscow. "She said to me, 'I'm going to Moscow'," says Natalya Dmitrievna. "And she promised to call and let me know if she found Zhenya there in the hospital, too."

But Zhenya was not in the hospital; he was in the mountains outside Grozny, where his young life was soon to end. On New Year's Eve of 1994 -- a night that is rumored to have degenerated into a dangerous, drunken spree when the soldiers were given vodka in celebration of Defense Minister Pavel Grachev's birthday -- Zhenya Mamykin died a violent, gruesome death. The exact circumstances surrounding his death will never be known, but the headless body of the young soldier had to be identified by the tattoos on his hands and an already-existing scar on his chest.