by Aroor, Shiv
SHIV AROOR | RAHUL SINGH
INDIA’S MOST FEARLESS
True Stories of Modern Militory Heroes
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Introduction
Foreword
1. ‘We Don’t Really Know Fear’
The September 2016 Surgical Strikes in PoK
2. ‘They Didn’t Know We Were There’
The June 2015 Surgical Strikes in Myanmar
3. ‘When He Awoke, Death Smiled’
Lance Naik Mohan Nath Goswami
4. ‘Even the Toughest Take Cover. But Not He’
Havildar Hangpan Dada
5. ‘Two Bullets Can’t Kill a Commando’
Captain Jaidev Dangi
6. ‘Just Tell Me, Will He Live or Die?’
Colonel Santosh Yashwant Mahadik
7. ‘I Got Hit. I Can’t Believe It’
Major Mukund Varadarajan
8. ‘Medical Science Cannot Explain This’
Lance Naik Hanamanthappa Koppad
9. ‘Everything Was against Us. Everything’
Lieutenant Commander Niteen Anandrao Yadav
10. ‘We Follow That Man. He Has Seen Death’
Captain Varun Singh
11. ‘This Is India’s Honour. We Cannot Fail’
Commander Milind Mohan Mokashi
12. ‘You Think It’ll Never Happen to You’
Squadron Leader Rijul Sharma
13. ‘Every Chopper Pilot’s Worst Nightmare’
Squadron Leader Vikas Puri
14. ‘Could Taste the Blood on My Face’
Wing Commander Gaurav Bikram Singh Chauhan
Footnotes
1. ‘We Don’t Really Know Fear’
Glossary
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
INDIA’S MOST FEARLESS
Shiv Aroor is an editor and anchor with India Today television, with over a decade’s experience covering the Indian military and conflict. He has reported from conflict zones that include the Kashmir Valley, India’s North-east, Sri Lanka and Libya. For his work on the latter, he won two awards for war reporting. Aroor also runs the popular award-winning military news and analysis site Livefist, on which he frequently tells the stories of India’s military heroes.
Rahul Singh has covered defence and military affairs at the Hindustan Times for over a decade in a career spanning eighteen years. Apart from extensive and deep reporting of the Indian military from around the world, including several newsbreaks that have set the national news agenda over the years, Singh has reported from conflict zones including the Kashmir Valley, the North-east and war-torn Congo.
To every Indian hero who has lived and died
Introduction
‘Without heroes, we are all plain people
And don’t know how far we can go.’
—Bernard Malamud
‘Lead me, follow me,
Or get the hell out of my way.’
—General George S. Patton Jr
As we sat in an underground chamber with the young Indian Army officer, his beard hiding most of his face, it was with an overpowering sense of disbelief. Here was a man who had been trained for swift, unapologetic destruction of targets, a man who, only a few months before, armed with an assault rifle, night-vision goggles and a hand-picked group of India’s most fearless warriors, had led his band of Special Forces (SF) men into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) near the Line of Control (LoC). We needed to remind ourselves constantly that this was the first time Major Mike Tango was talking to journalists about the hair-raising mission he led into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) in September 2016. As a result, the book you hold in your hands contains the only first-hand account of that astonishing mission—by the very man who led it.
Maj. Tango’s awe-inspiring tale is the first of fourteen stories we have the privilege of narrating in this book. The recounting of each story has been a journey into spaces that are usually both physically and emotionally out of bounds: where brothers in arms of fallen heroes still pick up the pieces of a glorious shared past; where widows, from the mountains of Uttarakhand and Arunachal Pradesh to the plains of Karnataka, resign themselves to a life that will forever be laced with a curious mix of pride and grief; where men who have demonstrated fearlessness beyond anything even conceivable to most of us explain it away as ‘just another day on the job’ . . .
These are stories like that of Lt. Col. Oscar Delta, who led a revenge mission on foreign soil just as his mother was being wheeled away for cancer surgery; or the young marine commando who would save fellow warriors only to have a grenade burst like a birthday balloon on his chest; or the Air Force pilot who decided, trapped in a screaming, shattered cockpit, that all those years of torture-testing needed to amount to something.
Not every one of the heroes you will read about in this book is alive. Telling their stories has meant that those who saw them fall, those who fought alongside them in their final moments, have permitted us access to what is for them a sacred place. It is a place where memories and trauma remain untouched and stowed away perforce so that the proverbial show may go on—like the hair-raising tales of Lance Naik Mohan Nath Goswami and Havildar Hangpan Dada, who are deified and worshipped by their units for acts of courage that even their fellow warriors say they will spend an entire lifetime coming to terms with. It is an irony we would encounter endlessly as we conducted interviews for this book—soldiers often do not have more than a few minutes to mourn their departed comrades.
The way we as citizens regard the lives and stories of soldiers today is another monumental irony. We live in times when we encounter almost daily a stream of grainy mugshots of deceased soldiers followed by photographs of their flag-draped caskets at military funerals. We feel exultant pride at their acts of bravery, fuelled by social and television media—only to be forgotten the next day. It occurred to us in the writing of this book that the levels of fearlessness displayed even routinely by the men you will read about—and countless more whose stories we hope to tell in future—reserve for them a place in the pantheon of immortals, legends. But never mind the details of their courage, how many soldiers can most of us even recall by name?
A third irony that we found ourselves frequently wrestling with was the godlike portrayal of military heroes in the media for the brief moments that they were remembered. As we journeyed through these tales, we were often struck by a violent collision—between the perception of these men as superhuman, and the frequent sledgehammer reminders that they are just like us, their lives back home just like ours, where PAN cards need to be obtained, home loan instalments to be paid, ageing parents to be taken care of, tiffs with girlfriends to resolve, decisions to be pondered over such as what cake to get for their daughter’s birthday, and whether to order butter chicken or kofta curry.
Historically, an impulse has existed to revere the military and its heroes as a physically and mentally superior class of human beings (Plato called them ‘guardians’, for instance), closer to divinity than their human roots. It is possibly a way to offset our own feeling of inadequacy that such acts of courage and fearlessness are really possible by those among us. In the stories you read in this book, we have attempted to straddle both these worlds.
Becoming a part of the lives of the men we have written about, their units and their families, we found ourselves dealing with our own sense of trauma. Drawn into a world where life and death were literally just that and not a clichés, it was difficult for us to remain unscathed. We do not claim to bear wounds, but we also cannot claim to have been immune to the threads of heartbreak, fury, pride and d
isbelief that weave through all of these tales.
One often hears the phrase ‘supreme sacrifice’ being used to describe the death of a soldier in the line of duty. It is a paradoxical term, heavy with implication. Yet, it instantly conveys what it intends to: an act of selflessness so high that the most basic instinct—to survive—fades away and yields to the decision to fight to the death.
American writer and mythologist Joseph Campbell once said, ‘A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.’
What explains that final act of giving? What is that inscrutable space where the will to survive gives way to an epiphany that death in those circumstances will serve a higher purpose? What is that purpose? The survival of fellow comrades, the extraction of a hostage, successful escape from a tightening cordon of a marauding enemy.
Where there is battle, there will be heroes. There is then as much the inevitability that most of them will not be remembered. How does one remember so many heroes, and so many acts of conspicuous courage?
On the rare occasions when they are recalled, Indian military heroes and legends in public consciousness are mostly from our wars: Captain Vikram Batra from Kargil; Major Kuldip Singh Chandpuri from the Battle of Longewala in 1971; the astonishing last stand of Major Shaitan Singh in 1962 . . . It would be the rare citizen who knows or recalls in any great detail the exploits of Second Lieutenant Arun Khetarpal in 1971, or Subedar Bana Singh in 1987, or even Naib Subedar Sanjay Kumar, who, like Vikram Batra, was awarded the Param Vir Chakra, but whose story remains obscure to most of us. These are stories that have fallen through the cracks, not a fraction of the well-known legends they ought to be. It is the odd story of military heroism that manages to penetrate and then pervade public consciousness with any degree of detail as to have instant recall. Capt. Vikram Batra’s war-cry ‘Yeh dil maange more’ during the Kargil War eased his passage into that rare public immortality.
The truth is that India remains constantly at war. Fighting terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir and the North-east means an endless state of combat for several units, including the Para Special Forces that you will read about in many of the stories that follow. We have chosen to tell fourteen stories that stood out to us as extraordinary tales of fearlessness in recent memory. By no means is this to suggest that this is an exhaustive or definitive list. On the contrary, we hope that this will be a small tribute to the large number of uncelebrated heroes in our military past, and the acts of invisible heroism that continue each day.
When we decided to call this book India’s Most Fearless, there wasn’t a moment of doubt that we had chosen correctly. What, after all, is a more human emotion than fear? Yet, are we to believe that these men truly felt no fear at all?
As we present these stories, in the hope that they will mean as much to you as they do to us, we place them in your hands with a note on the astonishing generosity of the men we have written about. Asked what they owed their courage to, we encountered a perplexingly unanimous answer. We quote one of the men: ‘I would say I owe it to the opportunity—being in that place at that time. I think any soldier in my place would do the same.’
It’s true. Heroes walk among us.
Foreword
‘Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers,
but to be fearless in facing them.
Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but
for the heart to conquer it.’
—Rabindranath Tagore
The Indian Armed Forces personnel are the epitome of courage, valour and sacrifice. ‘Peacetime’ is an enduring misnomer for the Indian Armed Forces with a host of constant operational and training commitments.
Our soldiers, sailors and air warriors remain in a constant state of mission alert. The Indian Army’s Special Forces are among the world’s only elite units permanently deployed in hostile conditions and missions in Jammu and Kashmir and the North-east. For the preservation of peace, the war is constant. I am of the view that our citizens must hear about these stories of the unparalleled challenges and operational environment in which our soldiers operate fearlessly; their purpose to accomplish any mission, anywhere, any time.
Having seen combat through my years in one of the world’s most professional and capable militaries, I can tell you that it is difficult to fully understand acts of heroism and fearlessness. What drives heroes to put everything they have worked so hard for—their families and their own lives—at stake during an antiterror operation? What compels a pilot to delay an ejection so he may save lives on the ground even though such a delay means certain death for him? What pushes a sailor to willingly venture into harm’s way if it means the oceans are just a fraction safer? One of Mahatma Gandhi’s lesser-known quotes perfectly captures how we in the armed forces regard acts of courage:
Fearlessness is the first requisite of spirituality. Cowards can never be moral.
For all the decaying values we tend to be surrounded by, let nobody convince you that true heroes don’t exist. It is therefore with great pride and anticipation that I recommend to you the true stories you are about to read. May India never forget her most fearless.
Jai Hind.
New Delhi
General Bipin Rawat, UYSM, AVSM,
YSM, SM, VSM
Chief of the Army Staff
1
‘We Don’t Really Know Fear’
The September 2016 Surgical Strikes in PoK
Uri, Jammu and Kashmir
18 September 2016
Final checks on the AK-47 rifles. Final checks on the stacks of ammunition magazines and grenades stuffed into olive-green knapsacks. The 4 men shoved fistfuls of almonds into their mouths, chewing quickly in the darkness and swallowing. Small, light and packed with a burst of energy, mountain almonds are as much a staple for terrorist infiltrators as their weapons are. The high-protein mouthfuls would have to sustain the 4 men for the next 8 hours.
At least 8 hours.
Dressed in deceptive Indian Army combat fatigues, and shaven clean to blend in, the 4 emerged from their concealed launch point below a ridgeline overlooking a stunning expanse of frontier territory. In total darkness, they trekked for 1 km down to the powerfully guarded premises of the Indian Army’s Uri Brigade in Jammu and Kashmir’s Uri sector, on the LoC.
The 4 men knew their mission was not particularly extraordinary. Indian military facilities had been attacked by Pakistani terrorists before. In fact, just 8 months earlier, in January 2016, an identical number of terrorists had infiltrated the Indian Air Force’s base in Pathankot, where they had managed to kill 7 security personnel before being eliminated.
But there was something these men did not know. What they were about to do would change India like nothing else had in the past quarter century. It would compel India across a military point of no return that it had resisted until then.
Above all, it would awaken a monster that Pakistan had been arrogantly certain would remain in eternal slumber.
Infiltrating the Army camp at Uri before sunrise, the 4 men crept forward with an unusual sense of familiarity. Their Pakistani handlers had clearly ‘war-gamed’ the attack with maps and models of the camp. Wasting no time in familiarizing themselves with the camp’s layout, they headed straight for a group of tents where the soldiers were sleeping.
By the time the sun was fully up and Special Forces (SF) commandos had been diverted to Uri as reinforcements, 17 Indian soldiers lost their lives. Two more would die later in hospital.
In a valley that has steadily numbed India with uninterrupted spillage of blood, the Uri terror ambush was special. Other than the horrifying scale of casualties the 4 terrorists managed to achieve, it was the hubris of the Uri attack that ignited unprecedented anger. It had come while families still mourned those who had died defending the Pathankot Air Force base only 8 months before.
Like the 4 terrorists, Pakistan was probably confident that India’s ensuing wrath would be confined to public outrage and
diplomatic condemnations, a standardized matrix of responses that it had learnt to handle with mastery. But Pakistan did make 1 devastating miscalculation. India was about to use precisely its reputation for inaction to exact a hitherto unthinkable revenge.
As blanket coverage of the Uri attack took over television news and the Internet on the morning of 18 September, a chill descended upon India’s Raisina Hill in Delhi. Emergency meetings were held in the most secret ‘war rooms’ of the security establishment, one of them presided over by Prime Minister Narendra Modi along with National Security Adviser Ajit Doval.
It was at this meeting that the Indian leadership secretly took 2 major decisions: (1) the Indian military would take the fight to the enemy this time to deliver a brutal response to the Uri attack; (2) the country’s ministers, including Modi himself, would play their parts to perpetuate and amplify India’s reputation for inaction until such a time when the response had been delivered. An elaborate, carefully crafted political masquerade would thus begin the following morning.
Meanwhile, 800 km away and high up in the Himalayas, a young Indian Army SF officer sat grimly in front of a small television in his barracks. Uri was his area. His hunting ground. Away on a special 2-month mission to the Siachen Glacier with a small team of men from his unit, the calm of Maj. Mike Tango’s demeanour belied the fury that consumed him within. He watched familiar pictures from the Uri Army camp flicker on the screen in front of him. And just as the Indian government was about to decide on an unprecedented course of action, a prescient warning rang in the Major’s mind.
‘We knew the balloon had gone up. This wasn’t a small incident. There was no question of sitting silent. This was beyond breaking point,’ he says.
As second-in-command, or 2IC, of an elite Parachute Regiment (Special Forces), or the Para-SF as it is called, Maj. Tango had spent a decade of his 13 service years in J&K. He had been part of over 20 successful antiterror operations. And yet, the morning of 18 September had sent a knife through the officer’s heart. He could not wait to get back to the rest of his unit deployed in and around where the terrorists had struck.