KNOW GUTS, KNOW GLORY - PART I

A distant “PHATAK!!!...

...and then “FIZZIT!” a 7.62 mm tracer bullet draws a momentary  streak across the carbon sky, only to get embedded in the darkness of the brush.

 DUBOOMB!”  

A distant thunder burst of 155 mm high explosive artillery shells pounding the  barren wasteland, tells me, war is just an ugly dusk away.

         

          Just this morning a volley of 12.7 mm steel core bullets tore through my post’s best machine gunner. The same round after whisking off tissues and muscle from his right arm, had butchered and burst through his thigh bone. God knows what’s in store for him. GSW (Gun Shot Wound) - that is what they had labelled him. A routine military medical jargon abbreviation that had changed the life of “my best machine gunner”.

          Its 0115 hours, inky black all around, with the freezing January winds piercing with ease through the fabric of my synthetic camouflage jacket and further down through layers of clothing, hitting my skin like shards of ice. My toes are numb & my fingers feel brittle as stabs of pain ripple across my chilled body. My bunker’s been hit by more than a hundred rounds from the enemy post a mile away in the last couple of hours. The day’s incident sure has ignited nerves on the both sides of the no mans land. Already more than a thousand rounds have been spoofed off on the shadows of the enemy tree line.

          “Batta tata-r-atata-a-tak  !” and then “keeeeeneeee!"

 My ears are singing as another burst of cursed 7.62mm copper coated, steel core messengers of death take their flight from the lips of my angst ridden barrel. Seconds later a thumping “bhud- bhud- bhud! Sends an army of 12.7 mm heavy calibre enemy bullets across my bunker, tearing through the sand bags and narrowly missing the 'SOLDIER' brand FM/AM radio that hung to the side of my wall bunker.

I think to myself a bit disgruntled – “the night is still young”

          It’s been just over a week since I’ve been commissioned into the Infantry. Two stars on my shoulders and no moon in my shadowed sky. In living the birth of history as the torrents of war tears through it’s pages leaving in its wake bloody tales written in glory.

          I’m scared, a simple and naive fear, a totally human  stimulus to intangible danger. My thoughts are a hazy conglomeration of questions.

         

Why am I here-destiny or choice?

          Am I cut out for this life? 

          Can I face the horrors as people fall like autumn leaves all around me?       

         Can I, a lieutenant all of 21 yrs, live through this hell of war?  

       Will anyone ever hold my hand, whisper words of dew like solace, share my fears or lend a shoulder? 

         Will anyone ever know what happens here today? Or will they even care?

         

Ha! Alas an officer is a lone wolf. A solitary aura, sans friends. Just a shade of seniors, juniors, followers and our load of blood loyal troops looking upto you for that divine strength. But then, each of them too is living a lonely battle of his own. For some it is the worry of their aged parents hounded by local goons to grab land and property, while for others it is the future of his children and for many the oblivion of what tomorrow brings.

It is in situations likes these, when courage sure does not come easy. Nothing for that matter, stays easy and then perhaps it is only the lessons from your tough times buried  in the past that comes to a humble rescue. It is a painful past that for me had happened only about eight months and seemingly a 100 years ago. As a part of the rigours of military training.

          It’s been five days and we have been conducting exercises on defence & attack on the baked banks of a dry riverbed.  Lack of sleep and too many of the “warming sessions” (the usual load of Army's bundle of physical punishments), had eaten away a couple off kilos off my already skinny body. Sunken cheeks, burnt skin and brutal bug bites, had misery encrypted on me. The sweat and coats of dirt on my skin did not make things any better. The dust had blanketed everything around with a dull brown - the landscape, our green dungarees, web packs, boots and drill rifles. For as far as your disillusioned eyes could see, there lay the same upset terrain and scatterings of that God dammed prickly bush that kept tearing your skin as you moved through them. We looked like ghosts from Mars; burnt, hungry, disgusted, bruised and abused. Zombies in a dull nightmare, very much like tortured prisoners of war. In training’s name, we are roughing it out like blasted dogs. 

This is when the going gets tough…and the tough have to get going.

          The bruised cadets have been walking for hours now. It’s the Runback, a 24 hour route march in battle loads with personal weapons, no water & no food while speeding through miles of rivers, ridges, hills & peaks, only to finish off with the battle obstacle course, which is further followed by rifle firing at 300m and not to forget the never ending disgust of contents and equipment check parades.

          A couple of hours back. The runback had just started as cadet after cadet marched on towards the first check point. The morale high, as the snaking trail ahead of us led to the first stop, a check point atop a 2250m high devil of a mountain. It gazed at us likes a phantom; calm, unshakeable, yet seemingly quite close. Deep inside I gave myself a maximum of two and a half hours to touch the top.

          An hour and a half later, we were still walking. Still walking towards the base of the hill on the same road, gradually sloping towards the enormous mountain. Enroute one of the exhausted cadets, not being able to keep pace with his remaining company had collapsed along the road in exhaustion as his dry lips went about cursing the organization, the merciless  officer instructors who were their ruthless platoon commanders. Eventually he gave up, only to be picked up by his buddy & helped to his feet.

 “Let me carry your rifle for you man, don’t you give up”, were the gung ho words from another cadet. Tears rolled down his cheeks while he fought the shame of crying by belting out hollow abuses.

          The relentless heat is draining me.  There is a fleeting thought when I’m surprised that anybody could sweat like that as torrents of sweat trickle down my brow and into my eyes, momentarily blinding me.  

My mouth is dry; my empty water bottle carries no solace.  Dried, exhausted and tired, we carry on, like POW’s marching to an unknown destination.  The gradient of the climb kept getting angrier and slowly the pace of the dreary cadets simmered to laborious sloth-like records.

          For each it was a battle of endurance versus failing strength. 

The darkness now was complete. Even the stars shied away in the otherwise clear night sky.  The chilly wind tearing down on us, split nerves running down your spine.  To walk on was better than to stop and fall prey to the freezing winds.  The spur emanating from the mountain was like a never ending back of some ancient monstrosity, gloriously splattered with numerous false ridges.   

Each time you thoroughly convinced yourself, as you pettily gazed at the faraway mount, that this had to be the top of the mountain. “Yes! Just another half an hour to the top.”  But alas, it so wickedly turned out to be just another damn false ridge.  A brutal joke on the half alive cadets.  It was easier to fool the mind in that conglomeration of desperate souls.  The heat had snuffed out all traces of rationality and focus from our roasted brain.  All along the way lay the fallen ones.  The ‘Tough’ get broken by the treacherous climb.  For them the pain was worse than the shame of being a ‘Shaggo’.  (Sissy in human terms).

 I overhead someone cribbing in a daze, “There are three types of human - man, Woman and then the lowest of all creations a Cadet”.

One of the younger looking cadets dropped in his tracks, right over his rifle. His breathing was laboured, his sweat - large beady blobs, as quietly tears made way through defeated eyes.  That overwhelming pain and exhaustion was a silent killer.  He lay there, shivering in the vulpine winds, plonked right by his rifle. It was heaven as he lay there. So easy to give up and lie down than to join the masquerades of fools marching up the never ending ghost of a mountain.  Paradise was short lived as a Company Senior Cadet walked up, half lifted the fallen cadet and barbed out expletives.  “Move on you #%$#@ moron, don’t pull the company down”.

 It was an Inter-company competition. Every soul had to live through it. Slowly the lifeless carcass of the grounded cadet lifted itself up, clamping shut all cries of physical pain and out of sheer dignity, he put one limping feet ahead of another.  The shame of letting the company down was more sinful than self mutilation. 

                   

In such circumstances, where misery was common - yet lay hidden within, If someone had devised an easier way to let the soul retire,  then many would have given up and be walking the stairways to providence.

 HA! But life is never easy.  The sun seldom does warm your feet when you are stuck in slush.

         

We have just reached a seemingly dead end.  A 15 Meter cliff where a climb seems like a thread walk over the isles of life everlasting.  The ensuing chaos was a blessing. Finally some rest! As many cadets fall over and put down their 16.5 Kg  and a hundred megaton backpack.  On either sides of the narrow spine of the ridge, lay a roll of almost a thousand feet.   The wind had become even more chillier and menacingly deviant with its speeds making sounds like a banshee.  The sudden halt, let the sweaty cadets have some rest, but soon the single digit temperature started making it a Siberian hell as the hour long wait started a hum of shivering cadets with chattering teeth.

It took some time when after all the shouting and abusing, people finally became too engaged in their own frozen misery to talk.  Time seemed to have frozen as the only sound was that of the wind blowing over the fallen cadets.  The wailing wind seemed to bore right through the sweaty overalls of the fallen ones.

 God why have we been forsaken.

         

           Now and then my torch starts flickering. This was the second set of new battery cells that have reached its grave. The climb over the cliff had been completed almost half an hour ago yet the destination seemed like an elusive giant beanstalk with no end. If we keep going at this rate, it wouldn’t be too soon that we bump into St Peters at the pearly gates.

          The darkness is pierced only by the beams of torches scanning the boulder littered track to the top. All along there are shouts from those ahead in the human chain, that water is available on the top. Some call out with conviction that lemonade is being served  on the top.  For most the idea of a little water was the only motivating thought,  else many would surely have let go & wait for the chopper to pick up what was left of them the next day. The stronger fear was of being left behind enroute without water and left facing the cold.                    

 

LOVE STORY OF A SADDER KIND: PART I DOUBLE KILL

He was a little under 20 when I first bumped into him,.... with his perpetual smile and boyish innocence. Athletic and well built, he was previously a student in his village and basked in local popularity for his exceptional football talents. He was also a member of the Cadet Corps, an offshoot of the army for the youth. He had once dreamed of joining the Army and used to travel halfway across the district just to attend the Army recruitment preparatory course that I was running at my Company Operating Base.
Who would have ever thought that this same unassuming kid was once toting an assault rifle and walked tall as part of ULFA, a banned militant organization in a state which was treated like Congo for its resources of timber, oil and tea,...... a state which cradled a behemoth of a river the Brahmaputra, which was everyone’s excuse of not sending fruits of civilization to it. No electricity, bad roads and bridges later someone decided to change the demography by dumping the influx of Bengali Muslim refugees from a nation just freed from the clutches of an enemy state, Pakistan-the ‘bin laden haven’.
Soon, what started with a fight by the youth went on to graduate into a Chinese supported proxy war within a state… the weapons were high grade Chinese unmarked AK 56 assault rifles shipped from the Tibetan plateau via the teak laden jungles of Burma. The training camps were in nearby reserve forests of Bhutan, Bangladesh and Burma, and the funding was the hordes of outsider business class floating there since eons before the independence saga. A state where the natives were now a minority was given birth… It was a victim to British imperialistic strategy of shipping in cheaper labour, mainly tribal’s from states of Orissa, Bengal and Bihar in thousands. The audacity and blind ruin was so evident that an impending threat from the red dragon to the north made the nation build refineries deep inside the subcontinent by pumping crude oil through pipelines running thousands of miles like a railway track.


The grudges were numerous and once a popular movement started, it was too late to tranquilize a sleeping goliath seeking loopholes and bias in governance from the capital of politics and mainland India. That was ages back before a peaceful struggle went onto become an armed struggle which changed names from militancy to finally in its present form of terrorism.
Lalit Moran- I faintly remember his name get highlighted when I heard of the list of new recruits who had joined the banned militant org by a methodical framework of indoctrination. He was selected by the terrorists for his Cadet training Skills, physical abilities and popularity in the area where he was a football “Ronaldhino”.
I find it difficult to recollect how I first met him, though I kind of remember bumping into him soon after he surrendered and dropped at my office for introductions with another lady cadre Momi Baruah. His story was simple. He was never for the ideologies of the hardliners or their barbaric methods. He met Momi when they were together in their temporary militant hideout in a riverine island, about a thousand square kilometers of marshy dense forests, which were so impregnable and remote that army operations there were rare and useless. She was in her late teens, though a smarter and tougher version of Lalit. Together in the wilderness they fell in love and had decided to get married. However the oath of allegiance they had taken while joining the underground organization forbade them from such luxuries till the age of 35years and thus began the desire to quit militancy to live life like a normal couple without the constant fear of military operations or the days spent hiding in brutal leech and mosquito infested forests.
The Army had started spreading the welcome mat for them almost six months ago before they finally had the courage to flee the clutches of terrorism, walk days through marshy jungles, wade dingy flimsy boats and surrender to a covert Army team waiting across the expanse of the Brahmaputra River.
That was a fortnight ago.
Today he smiled and joked in utter innocence as he charmed us with their great escape and jungle romance. Momi was quite as she showed flickers of doubt and a suspicious glint in her judgmental look at her fiancé, as Lalit poured his entire story out like a jigsaw puzzle finally getting some shape. After a couple of hours I left him and moved on to my busy day of loads of coffee, 40 cigarettes, a thousand signatures and a billion phone calls on the four different phones I played with. Soon I forgot the little kid who charmed his way into our hearts.

It was some weeks later that I was tasked along with my Commando Platoon to undertake a search and destroy mission in an interior village close to the banks of the mega river, Brahmaputra. My senior subaltern, a brave boisterous, gung ho style operative had been diligently tracking radio intercepts for over a week now and had latched onto a general location of their base. We had our dinner, took skimpy naps and in the middle of the night went out in strength for the operation to seek and kill the originators of the radio conversations.
By early morning 0340 AM, when the sun bore down on the eastern part of the country, we hit the target village and started tactically searching for any traces of hostile elements. We had been up the entire night and now we were getting exhausted with the running around and bush whacking as slush and leeches greeted us everywhere.By morning 0730h, I married up with my senior subaltern, now a Canadian Citizen and concluded on the futility of the exercise, as we had mopped every inch of outhouse, teagardens, bamboo and wooded patches and were getting only ten degrees more exhausted and delirious than getting any leads. Lalit had been moving with my subaltern and I had another surrendered cadre who was from a different part of the district. Somehow as we sat there in a local village heads house and chewed on cucumber and salt to quench our thirst, I made a random decision to go ahead and visit the neighbouring notorious village, of which I had heard and mapped a lot, but never seen on ground. I split my team into three and decided to take Lalit as my guide as we treaded onto the village through the less frequented path through teagardens and dense bamboo patches.
We started off and I could see the boys with their sagging morale as they dreaded the beginning of yet another futile, humid and exhausting search. I halted the patrol and mouthed orders replete with foul words and cusses that were stinging at the patrol to gear up their killer attitude, range their assault rifles at 200m and move like trained soldiers. Seeing my anger the boys straightened up, weapons ready and senses alert as they trudged along.
Lalit tagged along quietly after my outburst, as we moved on, in one seemingly futile ops. All I wanted was to see this part of real estate first hand. All that the others wanted was a warm bath, hot meals, chilled water and the loving embrace of their beds- simple pleasures in an unearthly world. It would have perhaps been 10 to 15 minutes of moving stealthily through the grain of the country when we hit an ‘L’ junction. I saw two civilians a kid and a teenage girl approaching from one end and I started trying my broken local lingo on the poor souls, basically asking directions and a layout of the village. The sun was blistering and beating down mercilessly on us as my scouts moved ahead in a bid to scan the bamboo hutments about a stone throw away and more importantly get some shade from the sun.I broke off from the civilian duo and started moving ahead towards the hutments, ensconced within bamboo and jungle, as a thought flickered through my mind…..
…. Wasn’t the girl dishing fear in her eyes as she spoke to me, that look sure couldn’t just be the fear from an Army that had left behind a legacy of high handedness and ‘tough on the locals’ attitude. Over the years the concept of velvet glove and people friendly ops had seeped in and our unit had created a rather positive rapport with the locals despite the militancy situation there. ‘Not likely’ I said out aloud….just when,
RAT!...TARATA!...TAT!....RATTAT!...TAT.!
The unmistakable burst of AK fire pounded my ears from the location of the bamboo huts. For a fraction of a second I froze. Fear of losing my scouts, whom I could not see due to a right turn into the huts, made me sprint with my head under cover towards the target area, weapon cocked and shoulder ready. I saw my first scout generally the toughest of the lot, shaking vigorously with fear balking through his eyes as he muttered, …”fire came from inside the huts….. there are militants inside”,

The scene was ‘chaos incorporated’. Women and children screaming and running helter skelter, the gunshots being fired by a lady terrorist single handed with her left hand, who was fleeing using the group of ladies as shield…
My patrol was blood shot with excitement as they saw no fear or danger and went about cordoning the group of three huts with an intervening tea garden. I stood behind an 8 inch thick tree hardly three meters from the bamboo hut from within which the bullets were fired onto my first scout. My mind worked like a super computer and I assumed the hut to still be holding two to three terrorists.
The next couple of seconds is a blur and I just remember the incidents without actually recollecting the seniority of what happened when. First, I spotted one terrorist running almost 150m too far and using quick reflexs, took aim and did a double tap to bring down the bugger. I couldn’t make out if he was hit but assumed he must’ve made a dive into the tea bush to try and escape using cover. Was too far to do shit, so I just shouted and field signaled to my second scout to keep a watch for the terrorist in the tea bush.
As I am about to move to a better position of advantage onto the right side of the hut, I see my buddy jumping inside the four feet bamboo hedge right in front of me and spilling his magazine clean… one meter ahead of him in the bamboo and mud splattered wall of the hut, I could see the holes he made as he opened fire to kill the occupants of that unlucky hut. I shouted abuses to my buddy to take cover, fearing the lack of cover costing us more than bargained for……to my dumb shock I then saw holes being made by bullets on the same wall as they flew onto both of us. Bullets that came from within the hut…

.. I half dived- half ran to get towards my right…as I saw the burst from inside make a path towards me on the mud walls, as the terrorist tried to make a break for it while firing onto his invisible enemy… just as the bugger got out of the house my third scout only a meter behind him, who was painstakingly trying to take cover behind a five inch by five inch concrete construction pillar, got trigger happy and sprayed cold steel core bullets all through him. In a split second I saw a mist of pink spray as blood and tissue ripped through the terrorist. Almost a millisecond before, the terrorist assuming more soldiers in his direction of escape fired his Kalashnikov assault rifle and in the same line of fire, I saw a lady scurrying from the kill zone, get hit and drop down like a sack near a grove of banana trees on the edge of the tea garden.
I froze at the thought of having collateral in a bloody encounter. No one would believe it was the terrorist’s fire. Like all such incidents it would have to be my word for the media’s assumptions. I was already stumped when I turned towards my buddy and saw him still standing behind the same wall. Anger filled me and in uncontrollable fury I screamed at him to get the hell out of that area and move to cover,
… he looked at me, while holding his right leg and muttered in pain,, “sir I can’t, I’ve been shot” and took his gaze to his thigh where a bullet had torn through, his bullet proof jacket has taken three more rounds.. His combat trouser was wet with dark blood that seemed blackish due to the red of his blood mixing with the green of his uniform. I can’t say if I thought of the dangers or not, for in the next jiffy I just moved towards the hut and tried pulling my buddy out. His body weight was too much to handle so I reconnoitered to the left and broke the fence and dragged him to safety to a tree stump about 25 feet from the house, I was puffing and panting as I half carried half dragged my buddy and made him lie down,… I made a bandage for him, put another soldier with him and consoled him with words that were more of ridiculing his wound and calling him a tiger than anything close to conventional movie style pity bombardment. I could make out from the bleeding that no major artery was ruptured and neither had his bones taken the shot, .. He would be okay..

Right from the time the bullets were fired till I evacuated my buddy to safety, it would have taken about a minute and a half. The tremendous adrenaline flow made everything seem like a slow motion, matrix style firefight…
It was another twenty minutes when my senior subaltern reached the spot and took charge of the situation. First things first, we coordinated the arrival of our doctor, a rather lively and realistic chimney who was rushing in to evacuate my injured buddy. Then the battle began for confirming the kills and collaterals began as we opened covering fire to let our team close in to the house…

As we fired in a trigger happy spree, I saw the injured lady get up from under the banana stumps and in delirium trudge towards the neighbouring hut for shelter. My senior subaltern then called out in the local dialect for the occupants to move out before we blow the damn place down… just as we were about to start thinking of a house entry we saw a shriveled up scared old lady come out of the hut and in bewilderment walk towards us in shock. We escorted her and comforted her before asking her about whether there were any terrorists inside. When she confirmed there were none… my subaltern along with his buddy then lobbed a few grenades in and carried out house entry, only to further substantiate the lady’s statement.

A few more hours later, the search for the terrorists started. We had eliminated two terrorists both identified by Lalit by name with one of them part of the terror outfit’s enigma group, a secretive underground guerilla force tasked with the most gruesome acts of violence and political killings. On the downside my buddy was shot and the civilian lady had a gaping gunshot wound in her chest as big as a large fist. I immediately got a wooden bed improvised as a stretcher, bandaged her wound to stop bleeding and evacuated the lady first towards the ambulance at the road head, approximately half an hour’s walk away.


Soon the Doctor reached the site and had my buddy evacuated, after offering him a cigarette …. Through all this our friend Lalit was a silent witness as he ducked and hid in one of the drains near the tea bushes. His eyes were filled with fear for he sensed that the villagers would squeal about his involvement in the operation. I got him dressed as one of my boys and quietly evacuated him through the forest route lest someone recognize him. The lady too was in safety in a nearby district hospital about three hours drive away. It felt good to know she would survive.
That day went on from 0800 hours in the morning, when the first bullets were fired, till about three in the afternoon. We fell back to our post, debriefed, freshened and thanked heavens for pulling us through one more of many such days to come. Cheering and shouting was soon followed by beer guzzling, cherishing the operation in which we had been a hairline away from getting onto the other side with angels and puffed clouds.
Dual kill… a messy yet clean sweep. My buddy walked soon and started running in a couple of months. The injured lady survived with a couple of pounds and half a lung less. The weeks went by as the boys relived the moment of shock, fire and chaos over and over again.
Lalit’s life moved on too. He married Momi soon enough and was kept at the army camp for security reasons. They would be under our umbrella of help and protection for some time. As days went by and operations faded into each other, the din of existence took over and normality continued.

LOVE STORY OF A SADDER KIND- PART II HEAD ON COLLISION

Lalit and Momi became our rather close friends. They were part of our celebrations, we a part of theirs, as we danced and laughed with them. Soon normalcy drugged itself into each of us. Lalit was now looking for a Job and soon decided to stay at his own house a few kilometers away. We helped him set up his house and looked for some kind of employment for him from Security related to business contracts. Lalit tried his best to be responsible and fulfill the duties of a husband and bread winner.

But I guess things were not what both he and I expected. No one was dishing jobs around which he wanted, nor was the army throwing money on luxuries. Basic support yes, but the remaining was a slow battle of me trying to fight the system to get him his due. The best I was doing was giving him brotherly treatment. Whenever he was with me, he stayed at my place, ate with me, slept there, watched movies together and well we just were like the best of buddies who went for operations like one bloody maverick team.

Momi too had her ways and had slowly started settling as a house wife. From a fiery warrior she had mellowed down and used to keep her house clean and neat and attended social and cultural obligations like a good wife. She was hospitable and courteous whenever I went to their house to pick up Lalit for some work or just to catch up on some intelligence that I wanted. There was this unmistakable admiration that I had for her. I guess it was her qualities as a guerilla and fighter that I appreciated. To top that she was clever and considered the army useless and poorly trained and had a tendency of teasing me with challenges that if she were still with the organization, she could’ve given me hell and bullet fire. She once told me quite blatantly that she could bet that I would never get any success in her village. A village so remote and surrounded by forests and water bodies, that Army had never had any successful operations against the militants in 25 years of militancy. I had never been to her village to comment, as it lay in a different unit’s area of responsibility. I had however heard of previous fiascos the army had suffered in that area and about the godforsaken terrain with a zillion escape routes.

It was sometime during this phase of time when the army had raided a Temporary militant hideout in the forest island and eliminated twelve militants in a month long operation in the worst of weather conditions. The camp had provided tones of intel which took days to decipher. To make things easier the HQ had sent sets of similar intel material to different units. From matrices, to codes, radio telephony details, training manuals and other documents, we had a treasure trove of stuff to play around with. It was then that we bumped into certain land and financial documents, from fixed deposits, insurance policies, to bank accounts in the name of a person from a nearby area. It took me some time to put together the truth behind the entire episode and prompted me to dig deeper. It was a brutal story, painfully recreated using inputs from newspaper cuttings, police records and civilians staying close to the area.

The owner of these documents was the same person who about eight months back had helped the terrorists bury close to Six million of extortion currency in the middle of the forest somewhere close to Momi’s village. Greed got the better of him and a few months later he exhumed the booty and stole half the amount and fled his village. As a security measure he bought a new house very close to the colony where the military base was. He then went on and purchased bonds, insurance and land in his family’s name. It wasn’t long before his family was hounded through relatives and soon a death letter was issued in his name. This was handed over by Lalit when he was a militant cadre, personally to the man’s wife. Finally, as a last resort the militant organization requested him to bring all the financial documents to their camp in the middle of the Brahmaputra and they would let him live for old time’s sake. This individual took the dire measure of going to meet the militant cadres, who bound, tortured and shot him in the head. Lalit was witness to the entire episode and shuddered when narrating the barbaric methods of torture used on him before he was killed and buried close to the camp. I felt like a detective digging out a crime scene with only the evidence lying around. It was further corroborated when we recovered the skeletal remains a few days later from the forest with Lalit leading the way for us. It was a jack pot of sorts which could have highlighted the evil side of the terrorist organization. Somehow we needed a witness apart from Lalit. We just didn’t want him to get involved in all this and so we went knocking at the dead individual’s family staying at Momis village. It was on the second trip early one foggy morning when I had been tasked to escort the wife and village head back to base for questioning that things got bloody ugly. Out of some tactical insight I inadvertently split my team in two. One team was tasked to hit straight for the ladies house through the village while mine would reconnoiter from the east and decided to approach the ladies house from the forest side.

Weapons ready and senses tense we half ran half scouted through the edge of the forest towards the ladies house. Somewhere in between I saw a clearing in the twenty feet high foliage and decided to cut across into the village from there. I halted my team and field signaled them to move into the village using that clearing. My scouts would have just moved thirty or forty meters to a clearing when they bumped head on into a fleeing terrorist making way for the jungle after having spotted the other team entering the village. The next instance was a thunderstorm of bullets whizzing past with both my scouts and the terrorist getting trigger happy with just about twenty meters between them. By the time I could understand what happened, the terrorist was dead and writhing in pain. The bamboo hutments behind which were horrifyingly in the line of fire of my scouts, had hordes of ladies and children crying and screaming like banshees. We had been served the first success for the military in 25 years of counter terrorism operations in the most hostile and impossible area. Though the rather easy operation made me feel good, it created a suspicion in the terrorist organization that this success would have happened only if Momi had leaked inputs about the village.

Momi on the other hand was surprised at our success. I could sense that after this particular operation she started silently giving me my due as a soldier. It sure was a treat to get acceptance for ones soldiering from someone as tough spirited and rebellious as her. It felt all the more satisfying as it just wasn’t her to admire the army or appreciate their abilities. She acknowledged this operation along with the one I had been with Lalit and the numerous others she had heard of and started treating me with more respect than before. It was a silent mutual admiration for soldiering abilities that only soldiers would know of. She had slowly started confiding to Lalit that she was comfortable of him going for operations only with me. She trusted me with her husband for reasons she knew best. It could have been the brotherly affection we shared, the tactical acumen I might have had or just plain faith that I would take care of him. Lalit more than once disclosed of his wife’s trust in me and more than often I had him skip dangerous and difficult operations in blatant contravention to my orders, just to keep him safe. Kind of never wanted him to get exposed to the same evil he left. I wanted him to start a new life and live away from the influence of the army.

Lalit and Momi were living their own lives and our interactions now were only as friends. I had out rightly stopped taking Lalit for operations and saw him as a lifelong buddy. I adored the couple which fought, made up and fought some more like children and were pure and simple at heart.

To the dismay of certain factions in the army who were finding Lalit obsolete as a good source, I continued as a good friend, helping him find jobs and helping him in whatever way possible.

This was a phase of my life where I had proved my bit in the face of bullets and odds and stood strong before the men I led as a true military leader. It was a period of mythical proportions, the locals adored us and we them, the popularity charts in local circles was soaring with random people one met miles away telling you that they have heard about you. It was a period when I sported a devilish beard and a clean shaven head making me look like a psychopath. I danced the local way, sang their songs, spoke their tongue and loved every bit of being with them. Life was a high.

LOVE STORY OF A SADDER KIND: PART III TILL DEATH DO US PART

It was somewhere towards the beginning of the year, the first quarter was almost getting over. We were in the middle of a state wide unrest following custodial death of a local Tantric priest who stayed close to Momis village. The Strikes and demonstration got ugly when a mob of a hundred thousand and more assaulted and hacked three soldiers of the Central Police Reserve and injured the district Commissioner and Police heads.

The same day I had planned and conducted an operation of epic proportions and eliminated one terrorist using a multi pronged covert operation. We waited for the civil administration to take over the body after inquest and necessary formalities. The operation was conducted in the afternoon and by 1300h we had the militant in a heap of bullets with blood oozing from all over his body.
When there was no news from police or the Magistrate till about 0200h the next morning, we started evacuating the now half decomposed body through the dark expanse of the hinterland towards the nearest police station about an hour’s walk away.


It was sometime around 0330h that we reached the police station. The Police station was a battle zone. The Commissioner, and police heads were bandaged from stone pelting and mob lynching. There was an eerie quite as these men who hours back ran an entire district were caught in the middle of a storm. I guess they were replaying the evening’s incidents to get some solution on whether their actions were justified. The story was that during the demonstration when the policemen were hacked to death, the remaining policemen in a bid to save themselves had opened fire killing almost 10 civilians including women and children. More embarrassing was that the crowd had managed to rob the police of a few weapons and radio sets in the chaos. To top it all, during my operation there were almost 10 more terrorist who were cornered in the area where we conducted our operation. In a bid to escape they used a human shield of over hundred local villagers and escaped towards the south. This mob in its wake burned the railway station and post office in the main road axis down. Things were real bad when the district commissioner started working out a solution on curbing further chaos by declaring curfew in likely flash points in the area. As a young officer I too was there and advising them on the strategic requirement of enforcing curfew in a pattern more likely to be effective.

What followed for the next couple of weeks was a dawn to dusk curfew, enforced in and around our base by my team. We were an effective lot and left the colony adjacent to our base free to move around while we cracked down heavily on the other important township nearby by sending regular patrols in and by using psychological means of enforcing curfew. The funny thing was we didn’t even touch a single person. It was sometime during this period that the army took a back seat in operations and my interaction with Lalit and Momi dwindled.
Lalit mistook this two month long break and felt as if the army was leaving him on the lurch to fend for himself. He was going through depression. Somewhere in the market he was threatened not to go back to his village. He had started drinking at local shops. Something he never did.
I remember him coming over to my place one day sloshed and in tears and pouring his heart out. He was crying on everything from the militants threatening him to why I wasn’t calling him. He felt as if a life line was missing. I took him to our Commanding Officer, an officer with vision and true grit. He was asked to come over the next day with his wife early morning to the unit’s temple.
Even I was surprised the next day when he came over with his wife to the temple and our commanding officer coerced him to give up drinking completely and take care of his wife. He was made to take an oath at the temple altar. Lalit broke down and took the oath and Momi wept when she saw her husband’s resolve and determination. For us it was almost childlike innocence and the beauty of it all as I admired a simple step my CO had taken to bring back the essence of their marriage.
Everything seemed to work like a dream. Momi and Lalit came a few days later with garlands and homemade sweets for our commanding officer who had saved them both in ways only they knew. Lalit Momi seemed back on track. The honesty evident in their eyes made me feel good on how things had turned out.
It was the festival season there. There were drums being played through the night, Cultural dances and singing spread love and joy everywhere. There were only a couple of more days before we were getting posted out and we were celebrating our raising day with pomp and show.
It was sometime in April.
It was sometime during this phase of revelry that we went all out to live the last few days at an unreal place of good and evil. It was one such drab evening while we were at the badminton court. We were playing vigorously under focus lights illuminating the court, when I got a phone call from one of Lalits relatives whom I had met at one of the festivals dance and singing shows. I was trying to be courteous and was greeting him with my broken local dialect when his words horrifyingly registered.
Lalit was shot when he was on his way to hi mothers place to give them sweets as per traditions in vogue. Lalit was shot, I asked him if he was still alive. I asked him where and when, as emotions and angst slowly took over. My commanding officer saw all this and came over worried. I was thinking of how to break the news of Lalit’s incident to his wife Momi, when his cousin broke down on the phone and said Momi was also shot with Lalit,... They were returning together from his mothers village on a motorcycle.
The next few moments were a blur and daze as I shouted orders to get a quick reaction team well equipped for a little war to get geared and mounted on vehicles. My CO and I along with the doctor started for the location where the incident had occured in three vehicles and an ambulance.
It was a dry and dark evening as we reached the spot. Lalit and momi were lying about fifteen meters apart in a gruesome scene. Both had bullet wounds all over their bodies and both were very much dead. Momi had been five months pregnant, made it so much more painful. An entire family wiped by evil. The motorcycle lay at one end with their belongings strewn all over.
There were over sixty or more women and a few odd men there silently mourning. They were sitting along the muddy road and crying silently as if in fear that their sobs would not be taken properly by the militant cadres in the area. I was holding my wits together just like an officer was meant to before his troops. In a calm and composed way I went about the site recreating the scene and discussing with my CO on what course of action to follow. The cops soon arrived and were going through their rigmarole of recording a homicide. I slipped towards the civilian crowd standing there and spotted Lalit’s elder brother. I took him to a side and very calmly asked him in the local dialect as to who had done this. He was sniffling but kept shaking his head in ignorance. I was holding his shoulders as my black Bulgarian assault rifle slung towards a side. I looked into his eyes and said slowly,
“this will Not end like this. I will not leave whoever did this”…
My voice trailed as involuntary tears welled up in my eyes and I broke into breathless sobs. I just couldn’t control myself as the pain of the episode drenched me in misery. In some hysterical way Lalits brother too broke down like a baby and in that darkness we were both holding each other like brothers and letting go of emotions. The womenfolk soon started crying as they saw an otherwise seemingly invincible soldier breaking down. The night was illuminated by only our vehicle headlights and torches, while the bodies were removed by friends and family for final tributes before their cremation scheduled the next day.
It was the evening of the cremation. Lalit and Momi were in stretchers, their Jaws tied with bandages and cotton stuffed in their noses.
I saw the bodies and shivers went down. I just couldn’t believe all this was happening. I wished it was all a nightmare and things would be better when I woke up. But the truth was me standing next to their combined funeral pyre as the flame caught on and in a blaze brought absoluteness to their death. As I stared at the leaping flames my resolve to get the perpetrators pay hell, built with a passion and fury I couldn’t fathom.

Nothing was the same again, or ever after. Nothing could change the gruesome way life played a joke on us. Just when things were working out, everything was snatched in brutality.
Three days later I had apprehended the chief perpetrator of the killings and held a public meeting in Lalits village to let him confess of his devilish intent before Lalit and Momi’s relatives. At the end of the speech I saw the anger and pain in people’s helpless eyes as they silently thanked what the army had done in days. For weeks after, I was drinking in my room and crying to myself as images of the couple flashed in my mind in overlapping sessions of cheerful living and brutally mutilated dead bodies. I could just think of them and I would break down as I felt I was to blame for their deaths. I was the closest to them. My successes had cost them their lives.
The actual perpetrators were still at large. I knew their names and their faces but within the next three weeks we were off to different lands. Till date if I speak to someone from these lands, I ask of these terrorists and what happened to them. The good news is not yet in. Maybe someday I will get to go back and finish what was meant to end ages back.
Until then, may Lalit and Momi’s souls Rest in Peace