Remembering Our Heroes: Lieutenant-Colonel Ashot Chobanyan

Ashot and his brother Arman lived with their parents Alik (Aleksan) and Haykush on the top, fifth floor of an apartment building with no elevator. As many families did at the time, Alik installed a wood-burning oven in their apartment that served as a heater and a stove to cook food in winter. Early fall was the season when all close friends of ours, five or six people, would gather on weekends at one of our friends’ apartment buildings to chop wood for winter with two-man crosscut saws and axes. The work was hard and physically demanding, especially at Ashot’s place, where after the chopping was done we all had to load our hands with as much chopped wood as we could carry and climb the stairs up to the top fifth floor. Exhausted from work, we were happy, however. The work was usually followed by a social gathering and a small feast around some modest meal cooked on a wood burning oven.

It was during the years of war, when Ashot, Hayk, Armen (another mutual friend of ours) and I began playing rock music at the local music school in Yeghvard. My father was a teacher at the music school. He taught students how to play various instruments — drums, electric guitars, and synthesizers. The best of them played in the band my father had started, composed of youngsters between ages 13 and 18. With his encouragement and support, we used the outdated Soviet-era instruments in his rehearsal room to play our own rock compositions loud enough to often annoy the refugees from Baku who were temporarily placed in some of the rooms at the music school. Ashot took accordion classes for five years. He had also learned to play the piano, but he became the Jason Newsted of our band. He loved the heavy metal of Metallica and loved playing the bass guitar, although at the time we had only a few tape recorded songs by Metallica, and their full albums were nowhere to find in our small town. Not a very gifted singer, occasionally he would also try his dull and funny voice alongside our singer Armen.

Ashot was a happy, positive, and funny young man with a wonderful sense of humor. He was the soul of our social gatherings, who would tell jokes, do silly things and act to make people laugh. I can still recall one of his jokes, told many years ago. A really drunk person in Yerevan waves for a cab. A cab stops, picks him up, and the driver asks: “Where to?” The drunk person goes: “To China,” and falls asleep. The cab driver decides to play a trick. He turns the ignition on, revs the engine a couple of times, then turns the ignition off and wakes the passenger up: “Hey, wake up, we arrived!” The drunk dude, surprised and apparently impressed by how fast they arrived, turns to the driver and, wearing a serious expression on his face and raising his finger, expresses a rebuke: “Dude, don’t ever drive that fast, you’ll get yourself into trouble sometime.”

I still remember that day vividly – Ashot acting as a drunk person, the expressions changing on his face and his voice, as he made the switches between the roles of the driver and the passenger. He was a good joke teller, but he never considered becoming an actor or a standup comedian. At some point, he was preparing to become a musician. But life had other plans for him.

Ashot was drafted to compulsory military service at the age of 18. Armenia’s Military University, established a few years before, in 1994, had been actively recruiting students from among the new army conscripts. I remember those days when Ashot discussed with family and friends the offer he received from the Military University, and the prospect of starting a career in the military. It was a hard decision, but Ashot made the choice, entered Armenia’s Military University, and successfully graduated as a lieutenant in 2001. Since 2001, Ashot served in various military units in Artsakh and Armenia, mostly in commanding positions, and continued climbing up the military ladder.

Ashot got married in 2002. Ashot and his wife Marine grew up in the same neighborhood in Yeghvard, and knew each other from a very young age. I remember their wedding party, my brother Hayk being the kavor (godfather), and the good time we all had that day. Ashot’s daughter Haykuhi was born in 2003, in Yeghvard, and his son, Alik, was born in 2007 in Goris, in the Syunik region of Armenia. Ashot’s military career moved his family from one place to another, wherever his services to the homeland would be most needed. They lived in the apartments reserved for military personnel for many years. Occasionally, when Ashot visited his parents in Yeghvard, we all would have a reunion. We would catch-up and chat for hours, usually about families, children, and world politics, but rarely about work. Then, as usual, Ashot would start telling jokes and endless engaging stories from his time in the armed forces. He was a very entertaining and interesting person, but also very humble. He never boasted of his achievements, promotions or awards. After a few hours spent together, we all had the feeling as though we had said goodbye yesterday and we were going to see each other the next day, and this would continue every day.