Soon after our visit to the 'OP Baba' temple, we started our induction process. Amar Post is part of the Northern Glacier and situated off the Bila FondLa(18,000 feet) on a very high ridge, which is practically impossible to climb from the Indian side. And it was 14 to 15 days of walk and acclimatisation away.
The induction involved four days walk to 'Kumar' at 16,000 feet followed by four days acclimatisation; three days to 'Bila' followed by another four days acclimatisation (I may have got the days wrong, but that's memory!). Last leg was a short helicopter ride to the post.
We started early in the morning as part of a link patrol with all our stuff loaded into our oversized rucksacks. Every day, we walked about 5-6 hours to reach the next staging camp, where we would rest for the day. We were walking on the glacier itself, so the early morning marches - to reach the destination before the sun came up, along with which cracks and crevasses would start showing up on the Glacier surface. Of course, we were roped up, and were newly trained in shouting "Crevasse", hitting the ground and burying our ice axe in the ground as an anchor, and holding on tight, should someone fall down a crevasse...
A couple of hours walk on the moraine is enough to make you regret the day you joined the Army. You start sweating inside your mountaineer clothing (imported at great cost by the government), breath starts freezing in your nose and around your mouth and you get tired of slipping and falling on the ice surface, in-spite of the crampons on your boots. This was repeated for the next four days till we reached 'Kumar' Post.
The three officers posted here promptly set up a bridge table and taught me the basics in their fibre glass hut, which kept warm with the perpetually burning kero heaters. We spent the next four days in this 'luxury camp' and I picked up a fair bit of bridge, and watched a couple of movies on a CD player, though, even this became monotonous after some time.
After four days we moved on to the Bila glacier, and immediately, we could sense the effect of altitude and snow - we were walking through more than 4 feet of snow most of the time. We also crossed a number of huge crevasses, some 15 - 20 feet wide. We would sit on the ladder laid across and pull ourselves across, rung by rung. And its difficult when you're tied to 6 other people by rope!
Another three days of endless walking (distances were not that great, but at 17,000 feet, they do feel huge because of the lack of oxygen). Well, we reached our last transit post before getting on the helicopter for the short hop onto Amar Post. We had to stay here and again acclimatise before going up. This was also the place where many a man ( and officer) had succumbed to the horror stories from the posts ahead and feigned a well timed 'chest pain' to return to Base Camp.
A Garhwal battalion was also inducting at that time. In the middle off the night, someone woke me up (I was the only officer on the transit post on that day) and said that one of the soldiers had seen a man near a crevasse where a soldier had fallen a few days back. I met the soldier who reported this and found him to be disoriented and delirious. The others probably couldn't see that he was suffering from HAPO (high altitude pulmonary edema), being the simpletons they were. So I told them to quietly slip him one of the tablets for the symptoms. The next morning, we checked and found that he was better and did not remember seeing any 'ghosts' near the crevasse.
After three days, we were told that a helicopter would come and pick us up for Amar. It was a sunny day and sure enough, at 0800h, we saw the Cheetah helicopter come in and land at the helipad (I was very keen to join Army Aviation Corps and had put in my application, was waiting for my pilot aptitude test). The first few sorties to Amar carried only a Jerry can of kerosene each.(The helicopter could not carry a heavier load till its own fuel weight came down, since they were operating much higher than their operating ceiling of 17,700 feet). I got in on their fourth sortie and got the helicopter ride of my life! The chopper kept shuddering as it climb up and up till it could no longer, and then it flew along a ridge till I could see a couple of soldiers sitting in shallow trenches next to an 'H' at a gap in the ridge. That was it. The pilot set the helicopter on the helipad, which was on a slope. The door was opened by one of the guys on the ground, I was pulled out, and shoved into a small hole in the ridge along with my rucksack. The helicopter lifted off, and dropped into the valley from where it had come. Within 30 seconds, I felt the 'boom' and 'crump' of the first mortar bomb landing.
That was also the last sortie of the day, thanks to the shelling, and yet again, my men had been left behind! There was nothing much to do the rest of the day, except wait for the next bomb to fall and hope it was not on my bunker. And try to find out about life on the post from the two bearded, dirty soldiers in their blackened clothes who had stuffed themselves into the bunker with me. To help matters, I had a very bad headache(welcome to 20,500 feet) that had decided not to go away.
The party welcoming me to Amar post had just begun
Next Up: Life at 20,500 feet
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