by Shiv Aroor
With the blue ice threatening to crumble and bury them inside the shafts any moment, the men began carefully excavating a horizontal tunnel to follow the cable they had found. Night arrived quickly, bringing with it the most vicious winds the men had encountered that week at the site. Rappelling up the shaft, they rushed to their tents, with no choice but to suspend the search for another night. The team knew it had found something that could lead to the buried soldiers. Few slept that night.
At first light on 8 February, shaft work resumed. They were chilled to the bone, but members from the team remember an unusually calm morning bringing with it a palpable sense of hope in the shadow of the fractured ridgeline. They trudged to the shafts, lowering themselves once again to continue tunnelling, carefully following the communication cable through the icy darkness. Special halogen lamps on their helmets cast a grim glow on the featureless, solid ice they were cutting through. It was not until noon on 8 February that the team had its first big breakthrough.
Through the dark portal, created by ceaselessly drilling horizontally through the ice slab, they spotted a piece of tent. They did not hear a sound, but they knew they had to be very close to the men they were looking for.
The excavation continued for another 5 hours until they had gained access right into the snow-filled tent. As the shaft groaned once again with the shifting of ice, they spotted the first body. After 6 days in the snow, this was the first of the 10 men they had seen. Carefully, the body was removed from the tent. It was cold, stiff, unmoving. Another 3 hours passed before the rescuers reached the next body deep within the tent. But as they took hold of the body to move it through the shaft, the rescuers realized something that stopped them in their tracks.
The soldier was breathing.
Calling for an emergency evacuation, the body was quickly prepared and eased out through the horizontal tunnel, and then carefully up the long shaft to the surface, strapped to one of the mountaineers.
The man was L. Nk Hanamanthappa Koppad. Far from his home town in Karnataka’s Dharwad district, the soldier had been pulled out alive—and conscious—after 144 hours under nearly 25 feet of murderous ice. The disbelief among his rescuers had to wait—they needed to get him to safety as quickly and delicately as possible.
‘We immediately rushed him to the medical tent that had been set up with 3 doctors. He was provided humidified oxygen, warm intravenous fluids and passive warming from the outside. We could not risk anything else at that point, as he was clearly in shock,’ says one of the rescuers.
L. Nk Koppad was as medically critical as it was possible to be, but his body had sustained itself for 6 days under the avalanche debris. Not a soul slept that night at Sonam Post. Inside the medical tent, the Army doctors took turns to watch over L. Nk Koppad to help him survive the night. Now in an open space, they feared his body would sink into further shock. If he did, it would be impossible to revive him.
By midnight on 8 February in Delhi, the news of L. Nk Koppad’s survival had broken on social media, rapidly becoming an overnight sensation. It would be the biggest story the following day. Across newsrooms, journalists were designated to track the rescue operation and feed the news machine as rapidly as possible. On the Internet, L. Nk Koppad was instantly hailed as a miracle man and a hero. A soldier from the hot, tropical South, selflessly deployed at death-defying altitudes and temperatures in India’s extreme north, had survived while standing guard in the service of his country’s sovereignty.
In equal measure, L. Nk Koppad had stunned, shamed and captured the nation’s imagination. Shamed because his survival had come as a shattering, unexpected reminder of how little public or political attention was ever paid to soldiers who stood sentinel at the country’s most dangerous forward areas.
Late that night in Betadur village, the Lance Naik’s home town, L. Nk Koppad’s family would learn about his miraculous survival from television news. His wife, Mahadevi, had spent the week in mourning, hopeful but quite certain her husband had not survived. A neighbour who visited the Koppad household that night later told a Kannada TV news station that Mahadevi was momentarily paralysed by the news, too terrified to believe it could really be true, wondering if someone was playing a cruel prank on her. She picked up her baby daughter, Netra, and wept as late-night celebrations began outside her house.
Nearly 2000 km away, her husband spent the night in the green glow of the medical tent, an oxygen mask over his face.
Early the next morning, barely conscious as he was strapped to a stretcher with a cylinder of oxygen by his side and a doctor for company, L. Nk Koppad was flown in a Cheetah helicopter to the Siachen Base Camp. Col. Tanwer recalls the unforgettable moment he met L. Nk Koppad in the speciality medical tent he was shifted to.
‘He was conscious,’ Col. Tanwer says. ‘I held his hand and he pressed my hand. His eyes were open. He had energy in him even after everything he had been through. I strongly believed he would survive.’
The Colonel did not know what to say, but found himself telling L. Nk Koppad, ‘Tambi, tujhe kuch nahi hoga, tu theek ho jayega. Koi dikkat nahi hai, Tambi, tu bilkul theek ho jayega. (Nothing will happen to you, young brother. There is no problem. You will be absolutely fine.)’
After a rapid medical check to make sure the flight down from Sonam Post had not further compromised his vitals, L. Nk Koppad was quickly loaded into another Army Cheetah and flown at full speed to Thoise, a military airfield that functions as the lifeline and gateway to the northern glaciers. Nestled in Ladakh’s Shyok Valley, ‘Thoise’ is an acronym for ‘Transit Halt of Indian Soldiers En Route (to Siachen)’, and is barred to civilians.
When the Cheetah landed at Thoise, an Indian Air Force C-130J Super Hercules from the 77 ‘Veiled Vipers’ squadron was already waiting for it. It had made the 90-minute flight from the Hindon Air Force base on Delhi’s outskirts early that morning and was carrying specialized life-support equipment and a critical care specialist from the Indian Air Force. Its 4 engines whipping up dust over the high-altitude airfield, the aircraft roared off the tarmac minutes after receiving perhaps its most special passenger till date.
Shortly post noon, the C-130J landed at Delhi’s Palam Air Force base, the military and VIP terminal co-located with the Indian capital’s Indira Gandhi International Airport. A super-speciality ambulance from the Army Hospital Research & Referral was waiting to receive L. Nk Koppad. In a convoy with priority access, the ambulance tore down the short 5 km to the sprawling hospital complex, carrying L. Nk Koppad strapped to his stretcher in a thick sleeping bag, passing through a crowd of television cameras and journalists that had collected in large numbers outside the hospital to capture the media’s first glimpse of Siachen’s heroic survivor.
Lt. Gen. S.D. Duhan, then commandant of the Army R&R Hospital, had seen nothing like this in his 38-year medical career in the military. And he had seen some amazing things. He stared at L. Nk Koppad in disbelief, wondering how the 32-year-old had defied all odds to stay alive.
‘Medical science simply cannot explain how he survived at that altitude. It cannot. Remember, 9 others had died,’ Lt. Gen. Duhan says. ‘L. Nk Koppad was a man of incredible physical and mental courage. People have survived in those conditions for a day or 2. But 6 days? I have been through volumes of literature but have found no such instance,’ says Lt. Gen. Duhan, who supervised the specialists attending to the soldier.
The soldier was immediately wheeled into the hospital’s ICU. Thirty minutes after treatment began, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Army Chief Gen. Dalbir Singh arrived at the hospital. The soldier had slipped into a coma. At his side in the ICU, the Prime Minister listened in silence as the doctors explained what L. Nk Koppad had endured.
The Lance Naik had been recovered alive and conscious, but he was severely dehydrated, hypothermic, hypoxic, hypoglycaemic and in shock. Comatose and in a precarious situation, the soldier also had severe pneumonia. Making matters worse, he had developed signs of liver and kidney d
ysfunction. One saving grace, the Prime Minister was told, was that L. Nk Koppad had miraculously escaped frostbite and bone injuries. The bodies of some of the other men in that same tent had been recovered crushed by the block of snow that buried them. In an enormously unlikely stroke of luck, L. Nk Koppad had managed to be caught in a tiny space between the ground and the ice slab, giving him a small bubble of oxygen to live on. Surviving in that position for a few hours, maybe even a day, was conceivable. How he did it for 6 days is something medical specialists, mountaineering legends and his comrades at 19 Madras can only guess about.
‘It wasn’t just about physical endurance. I like to think Hanamanthappa’s belief in his team, his seniors and the Army pulled him through,’ says Col. Tanwer, who, at the time of writing this book, was deployed in a different sector of Ladakh, this time along the border with China. ‘He believed in his training and didn’t let despair or exhaustion force him to give up.’
On prime-time television that night on 9 February, anchors and reporters drafted medical experts into their studios to make sense of the miracle man of Sonam Post. A sense of hope and disbelief would pervade coverage late into the night.
‘We can talk all we want to about what happened,’ says Lt. Gen. Duhan. ‘But, for a moment, picture being buried in total darkness under a mountain of ice with nothing for company but the sound of your own voice.’ He paused, nodding. ‘Now imagine the same thing for 6 days.’
Late that evening, L. Nk Koppad’s wife, daughter and extended family landed in Delhi. Received by an Army vehicle and once again thronged by journalists, they were driven straight to the Army R&R Hospital where L. Nk Koppad lay.
A smiling but anxious Mahadevi would speak more confidently to television journalists this time. ‘It is a day of joy for me and my family, but let us never lose sight of the tragedy for 9 other families.’
The spotlight had shifted to Delhi, but search operations for the other men continued at Sonam Post and would not stop until all 9 bodies had been recovered.
By midnight, the team of doctors attending to L. Nk Koppad decided on a more intensive course of medical action to revive the soldier. It was a single notion that powered them on: if he had survived so much, surely he could make it. Surely, he was special.
Enlisting himself with the Army at a recruitment camp in 2002, L. Nk Koppad had immediately proven himself a tough infantryman. The year after he joined the Army, he was sent on counterterror duties in the Kashmir valley where he spent 3 years. He would return on a 4-year tour in 2008. In 2010, he was packed off to the North-east for counter-insurgency operations. It had become clear to his seniors that L. Nk Koppad was a tough soldier ready for greater operational challenges. Which was why, when a 10-man team was to be selected in December 2015 to man Sonam Post, L. Nk Koppad’s name was a shoo-in.
Mahadevi and her family visited a temple and prayed late into the night on 9 February. They had been reassured by the Army doctors, but knew that L. Nk Koppad’s condition was extremely delicate. The hope that L. Nk Koppad’s rescue had brought to Mahadevi had both energized and terrified her. On the one hand, it was a magical moment of joy and relief. On the other, the reality of his condition made it likely that her joy would be short-lived.
The next morning, the Army provided a brief update on the soldier’s condition:
‘L/Nk Hanamanthappa Koppad continues to battle the odds and his condition remains very critical. The medical team treating him is monitoring his situation continuously and is treating him with expertise available in the world.’
By this time, a panel of medical experts from Delhi’s renowned All India Institute of Medical Sciences had arrived to inspect the soldier’s condition, joining critical care specialists, a nephrologist and a senior neurologist.
In a span of a few hours, the news from inside the hospital took a sharp turn for the worse. Doctors had discovered evidence of oxygen deprivation in L. Nk Koppad’s brain from a CT scan. The tone of the new medical bulletin that followed strongly suggested that the soldier’s condition was no longer within medical control:
‘There is evidence of pneumonia in both lungs. His multi-organ dysfunction state continues unabated. His condition has deteriorated despite aggressive therapy and supportive care.’
Prime Minister Modi received a briefing on the soldier’s health that evening. The Army informed him in no uncertain terms that saving L. Nk Koppad was going to prove next to impossible. When the Prime Minister inquired if there were any other medical avenues that still existed for the soldier, the Army assured him that L. Nk Koppad was receiving the best possible treatment that existed anywhere in the world.
Early next morning, the Army released its final medical bulletin on L. Nk Koppad. It would spare no details and soften no words:
‘Extremely critical with worsening multiple organ dysfunction. His circulatory shock is now refractory to all drugs in maximum permissible doses and his kidneys remain non-functional. His pneumonia has worsened and his blood clotting disorder shows no sign of reversal despite blood component support. He is on maximal life support with aggressive ventilation and dialysis. He has slipped into a deeper state of coma.’
Mahadevi and the family were escorted to the hospital before noon.
At 1145 hours, L. Nk Koppad stopped fighting for his life.
An unusual eruption of nationwide mourning broke out that Thursday in February 2016. Amplified by a media that refused to move away from the story, L. Nk Koppad’s death had, for a moment, sobered millions.
Later that day, L. Nk Koppad’s remains were placed in a casket and taken to Brar Square, the ceremonial Army compound in Delhi reserved for the last rites of military personnel. Politicians do not normally attend wreath-laying ceremonies for soldiers. For L. Nk Koppad, they all did. The long line of government and state leaders would include the Prime Minister himself. Before he arrived, he tweeted a brief message:
He leaves us sad and devastated. RIP Lance Naik Hanamanthappa. The soldier in you remains immortal. Proud that martyrs like you served India.
‘L. Nk Koppad’s wife was amazingly strong. For her, the soldier had died for the second time in a matter of a few days,’ recalls Lt. Gen. Duhan.
When news of his death was broken to her at the Army hospital, Duhan recalls her saying, ‘Don’t tell his mother that he’s gone. She will not be able to bear it.’ His mother, Basamma, had not stopped praying.
‘Courage has many shades. The unbelievably strong-willed L. Nk Koppad added another shade to it,’ says Lt. Gen. Duhan.
The soldier’s body was flown to his home town in Karnataka, where his final resting place, a samadhi near his home in Betadur, became a site protected by a metal gate and fence.
Eleven months later, on Army Day 2017, Mahadevi arrived in Delhi to attend the parade and receive her husband’s posthumous Sena Medal. With little Netra in tow, she was briefly the centre of attention at the Army Chief’s residence that evening, at a reception attended by the President of India and members of the government. Mahadevi had been sitting quietly in a corner with her daughter.
‘She can do what she likes, but I hope she will grow up to be an Army officer and be posted in Siachen,’ Mahadevi smiles. ‘I know they don’t send women up there. But Netra is still young. That will change when she’s old enough.’
9
‘Everything Was against Us. Everything.’
Lieutenant Commander Niteen Anandrao Yadav
Dabolim, Goa
22 May 2009
It had been 6 months since 10 Pakistani terrorists had entered Mumbai from the sea in November 2008, holding the city hostage for 4 whole days and massacring 166 people across 3 locations. The 26/11 attacks would occupy India’s national security system for years to come. But just 6 months later, it was by far the biggest thing on the country’s mind.
By May 2009, as a wounded country attempted to make sense of the invasion and horror, the burden of keeping a watchful eye over the Arabian Sea had increased dramatica
lly. India, it was clear, had let inevitable gaps in surveillance and intelligence be terrifyingly manipulated by foreign terror machinery focused on spilling blood on Indian soil. In the months after 26/11, it became clear that for all its ambitions as a regional power, India had let slip from its mind one of Jawaharlal Nehru’s most memorable quotes on strategy: ‘To be secure on land, we must be supreme at sea.’
The terror attack was a devastating jolt. But it served to amplify the inevitable—that India’s problems from the sea could only multiply. The steady audacity of pirates on the high seas, pushing ever closer to Indian waters, had been keeping the Indian Navy feverishly busy throughout 2008. And when Ajmal Amir Kasab and his fellow terrorists stepped ashore from their rubber dinghy, India was about to be violently roused to the dangers the sea could present.
As Mumbai burnt, hundreds of kilometres away, at Goa’s Dabolim airbase, groups of naval officers sat rapt in front of television screens, taking in the enormity of what was happening on their watch. Even before it became clear that the terrorists murdering people in Mumbai had come from Pakistan, military personnel across the country automatically knew they would be expected to be in a heightened state of readiness.
For anything.
From Air Force bases to Army infantry units and naval strike formations, explicit orders did not need to be given for men and women to brace themselves for what they were trained for. Among them was 38-year-old Lt. Cdr Niteen Anandrao Yadav. Lt. Cdr Yadav knew instantly that his unit would have an exponentially bigger role to play in what lay ahead for India.
He was right. Just days after 26/11, India officially bestowed its Navy with greater defence responsibilities. Already stretched thin by virtue of being the smallest of the 3 armed forces, but with the largest domain of responsibility—including a 7517-km coastline—the Navy collectively flexed its muscle as it assumed the role of guardian against every conceivable threat from the sea.
By May 2009, the Navy had possibly never been busier. Along with the gruelling after-effects of 26/11 on maritime security, the Indian Navy was preparing for another event with far-reaching ramifications—the expected delivery of a Chinese-built warship to Pakistan, the first of a new generation of lethal ships Islamabad had purchased for nearly $1 billion. The F-22P Zulfiquar-class missile frigate was expected to sail from Shanghai to Karachi in 2009. At Dabolim, Lt. Cdr Yadav and other naval aviators with the INAS 315 ‘Winged Stallions’ had their mission cut out for them.