Siachen Story Part 4 - The army moves you by air only to induct in a hurry!

Continuing from my last post on Siachen, Siachen Story Part-3 Life at 20500 Feet, which I wrote in 2015. This one has photos!

I stayed overnight at Thoise airfield, thanks to my course mate from the airforce. It was good to be among friends and recount the ground level stories from Amar post with the flyboys, who would only land there for a couple of minutes. I also opened up the annual confidential report that I had received in mail - the air force officers were very curious about it and wanted to take a look. The armed forces confidential reports are on a scale of 1 to 9, and they were impressed with the number of 9s and 8s in my report for various parameters, till I told them that this was a typical report for a Captain with two years' service. Apparently, in the air force, officers with similar profiles would get 7s and 6s!

     The next morning, I was flown to the company HQ at 'Kiran' in a Cheetah helicopter. I found that the pilot detailed to fly me to my post was a senior from my squadron at NDA.

This post was held by a Parachute battalion. I landed there and met the company commander who was a para commando, and the doctor - he happened to be my squad mate during induction training and it was good that I was in the hands of someone I knew for medical cover! Little did I know that I would be needing his skills very soon! There was a field gun position just behind the company HQ, so I knew my tools were at hand. I spent an hour with them and started my trek up the mountain to my post on a narrow ridge, a two hour climb away. I was to man an artillery observation post(OP) on a cliff overlooking the Gyong Glacier at 19,000 ft. - just three of us in a bunker. Enroute was an infantry mortar position, where I met the mortar platoon commander who was a spirited man.

             

    The previous officer at that post had been evacuated some time ago due to frostbite, and only his OP party was left. They were hill troops and had abandoned the fiber glass hut(FGH), which was perched on the cliff (one half was hanging in the air and held up by ropes tied to the rocks on the cliff). Apparently, a few days earlier, they had been shelled and the FGH was damaged. Being superstitious, they refused to repair the hut and move back in, the idea being that the FGH is warmer and can be lived in, while the bunker is used to engage the enemy or whenever enemy shelling is on. They were also displaying classic low morale symptoms - not doing their military duties, not keeping a watch on the enemy, eating just one meal a day etc, probably because they were feeling abandoned after their officer was evacuated.

    The bunker itself was extremely cold and drafty(being an understatement - imagine a -70 degree wind through your 7ftx5ft room made of piled up rocks!) since one wall was a cliff whose other side was a 3000ft drop(!), using the toilet meant hanging onto a rope to do your job, and the food was tinned and cold. Unfortunately for me, the helicopter ride was not made available to my regiment's OP party, which was now trekking up from base camp, and would take another 15 days to reach.

Two days in that freezing bunker, and I told the men that we needed to repair the FGH and move in. They were hesitant, so I called up the company commander and asked for some help. That arrived in the form of  a working party from the mortar position with two used parachutes(these are left over after the Mi17 helicopter drops supplies; they are collected to provide insulation and cover gaps between FGH panels). In no time they had repaired the hut, and by evening, I moved in. After a couple of days one of them came in(apparently enamored by the princely standard of living that I had achieved for myself!) and asked if he could move in too. I said of course, and he joined me in the warm comforts of the FGH. This was in January, when the outside temperature at that altitude was in the -50 to -60 degree range. Soon the other NCO also joined us, and in a few days my unit team arrived and these two were sent off to base camp.

There was a lull in shelling during this time, since it was 'Ramzan' season for our friends across the line. All was quiet and we got busy improving our defences - I needed sandbags to rebuild the entrance to the fighting bunker which had disintegrated over time. We included this in our daily situation reports (sitrep), but the sandbags did not turn up. So we did the next best thing - plugged the gaps between rocks in the bunker walls with packets of frozen Cadbury's Eclairs toffee and whatever else we could find! There were also routine line(to check the telephone line) patrols and link patrols(to restock rations and kerosene), which we all did regularly. There is no distinction between officer and soldier - I also went on these patrols, since there were only three of us and one had to always be manning the observation post and radio. We also prepared hot water for when we got back from these patrols to warm up our feet, which would be near frozen - this was SOP, and many a soldier who had not followed it had to be evacuated with frostbite.

One day (I think Ramzan ended that day, 16 February 1997), we were on top of our bunker repairing it, when the first shells of our tenure started landing. This was around 4 pm and we quickly got into the bunker in combat mode - binoculars, compass, target list, field telephone and radio. The radio was a backup, all communication was via telephone. I started the procedure to engage the enemy post across the valley in front of us. We started engaging the enemy positions - orders were that I could fire ten shells if I saw enemy movement or was fired upon. While I was passing corrections on line, a shell exploded outside and the splinters entered our bunker through the door(the one that could not be repaired due to shortage of sandbags). One hit me in the head and ricocheted off the steel plates in the ceiling. I fell down and the line went dead.

My operator, Dharamvir tried to get the phone working but couldn't. I was wearing a balaclava, which was now torn and there was blood all over it. The Technical Assistant(TA), Gyanender tried to stop the bleeding while Dharamvir got the radio going and passed "OP officer is casualty". This is a very open ended message and people at the company base and mortar platoon started imagining the worst, since an officer casualty is a big event - and is reported all the way up to army HQ. I was concerned that the enemy could probably hear these messages(ANPRC radio set was used without encryption due to reduced ranges in mountains). The company commander came on radio and said that he was sending a stretcher party to evacuate me. The shelling just got worse and now it was continuous. By this time, I checked myself and found that my head was still screwed tight to my neck, and passed a message that I was okay and did not want a stretcher party, as they would get caught in the shelling too. I also ordered fire to continue on the enemy post. Then I told the operator not to pass anything else on radio without asking me. Around 1830h, the shelling stopped, and when we checked up, we found that the cables had been ripped off the telephone when I fell. We patched it up and called the company HQ, reported that we were okay.  The doc wanted to examine and patch me up, so I decided to trek down to company headquarters. Mortar platoon sent me a link patrol, with whom I went down, leaving my operator and TA holding fort. It took me two hours in the dark to reach through 2 feet of snow.

    The doctor checked me up - it was a superficial wound, which needed to be stitched up. He didn't have anasthesia so I told him to just sew it up. I spent the next day under medical observation at company HQ, while my post was shelled. I got frantic calls from my team and I managed to get them a couple of shoots(engaging targets using artillery) from the gun position nearby. The doctor wanted to call for a helicopter to evacuate me for further medical treatment, but I refused, since I had seen what happened to the previous team when the officer was evacuated. So I decided to go back to my post.

By evening, I reached the post and my men were truly happy to see me. We decided to teach our friends across a lesson. The next morning, I passed orders to the gun position to engage a target. The Gun Position Officer (GPO), a JCO was hesitant, as firing was not common in the sector at the time, but he fired. The orders were that if the OP officer saw a target or was fired upon, he could engage with 10 field gun rounds. I decided to engage a second target, and the GPO now wanted clearance from his regimental command post. I talked to the company commander, who had become friends with me by then, and since the telephone exchange was controled by him, I 'asked' him to 'cut' the line to the rear. The GPO now said that he could not fire since he did not have clearance from his command post or communication(radios were not the primary means of communication). I ordered him to commence firing on my orders, since I was his superior officer in location, else I would have him shot for disobedience! I had a little more than 2 years service when I did this, but that was the need of the hour in my mind. We fired almost 70 field artillery shells that day, in addition to countless infantry mortar bombs on a number of targets. In the evening, the field regiment CO called me on telephone(we had 'restored' line comunicaction with the rear by then) and threatened me with a court martial, saying the ammunition was brought up and dumped via helicopters and I did not have permission to fire so much. I replied that I saw enemy movement 7 times and did what I had to, and he could do what he wanted to. That was the end of the matter.

We spent the next few days engaging various enemy posts. Since I had not yet done my Advance Gunnery course, I improvised some shooting methods in the mountains. For those who understand ballistics and gunnery, distance from OP to target was between 1500 to 2000m, height of target was about 5000 to 5500m, temperatures were -40 to -50 degrees below zero. We spent almost every day rushing into the bunker on hearing the whistling sound from the shells headed over us(if you can hear the sound, those shells will miss you and fall beyond you).

An interesting anecdote on the Yeti - we used to sleep in the FGH and most nights there would be fresh snow all around us. When we woke up and came outside, we could see undisturbed snow on all the slopes around us. One day, we saw footprints on the snow, which were too big to be that of humans but too similar to a human footprint going cross country on the slopes from near our post. Was it the enemy or the abominable snowman, we don't know. My camera did not have the resolution to capture it in the glare of sunlight on snow, so I let it go.

The infantry battalion came to know of our actions and they started sending me requests for fire on enemy posts that they were unhappy with, alongwith gifts of sweets(made on their posts, wrapped in newspaper with half the print mixed with the food). Once, the company commander and the doctor trekked up to us with a supply of tinned milk and sweets. Since doc had never seen an artillery shoot, I did one live for him on the enemy. Its very difficult to see the fall of shot in mountains and to help him see, I must thave fired the only 'smoke, orange'  ammunition in the sector, ever! He managed to see a couple of shells falling on target and also sat through a heavy counter bombardment that day.

     I was nearing the end of my tenure there when I got a call from the base, saying I was being relieved in a couple of days as I had to go to Dehradun for my Pilots Aptitude test. I had applied for this before coming to Siachen and had forgotten about it. This was to become an army aviation pilot. My reliever landed up in the next two days and after a short handing over program, I started my journey back. Since I had three days to reach Dehradun, I and my party had to complete the three day trek back to base in two days, and then I had to take an air force transport plane to Chandigarh, and a bus to Dehradun to appear in the test.

     Like everything else, the trek back was eventful - I had to carry a secrecy device as big as a suitcase on my head since the Yak earmarked for the load misbehaved and ran away(apparently, my rucksack with a short wave radio was loaded on the it. The radio switched on and the sound of static scared the yak)! The porter was very apologetic, but since I was the only one without a load, I had to carry this one. The good part of the story is that the air force plane was piloted by my course and squadron mate from NDA. He insisted that I travel in the cockpit and pointed out all the instruments during the hour long flight, to help me pass the pilot's test. Thanks to him, I did pass the test, but couldn't join army aviation. That's another story.

A couple of years later in the deserts, wearing all the medals collected during my Siachen tenure: