by Aroor, Shiv
Kandhon se milte hain kandhe, kadmon se kadam milte hain
Hum chalte hain jab aise toh dil dushman ke hilte hain
(When we walk shoulder to shoulder, and march in step as brothers
When we move like this, our enemies tremble in fear.)
Like most Army men, the commandos loved the song and knew the lyrics by heart.
By noon on 8 June, the steep hill they were headed towards loomed into view. From its flattened crest, the commandos would get their first view of the camps they would obliterate the next day.
It was time for a much-needed hot meal. The commandos’ backpacks held hexamine fuel tablets along with cooking stoves. A quick lunch was rustled up using the smokeless, odourless, long-burning tablets. The meals, ready-to-eat packs, contained rajma–pulao. The famished men ate in turns. A cordon of soldiers made sure they were well-guarded at all times. For dessert, they helped themselves to shakkarpara from a common polythene bag, a sweet that reminded them of celebrations back home.
Marching into thicker foliage at the base of the steep hill, their fatigues ensured the commandos blended in well. By the time the team began climbing up the hill, they realized they had almost run out of water. Each man had carried 7 litres in his backpack. It was the peak of summer and the men were parched. It wasn’t something they were not trained for, but neither was it a favourable situation the day before a big assault. The sooner they finished their mission, the faster they could get water from the destroyed camps, Lt. Col. Delta joked to quiet laughter and cheers. He glanced at the men in his squad. Every one of them was under his charge. He was responsible. The mission had primacy in the men’s minds, but Lt. Col. Delta knew that it was his responsibility to make sure no one got hit.
Or worse.
In a fast-paced situation, anything could happen. A casualty evacuation scenario would not only be a nightmare logistically, but also leave fewer men available for the mission. It was something the squad simply could not afford. Apart from the big picture, there was also something that only those in fighting units could fully comprehend.
‘We knew if something went wrong, the battalion’s honour would be sullied. People would say SF stands for sabse faaltu (most useless)! How could we let that happen? Never!’ says Lt. Col. Delta.
As leader of the mission, Lt. Col. Delta was in touch with the Army leadership in Imphal. He was carrying a mobile phone and the signal strength was at 3 bars. It was known to the Army that Indian mobile phones continue to function up to a certain distance along the border. Missed calls based on a predetermined code were used to stay in touch during the operation. Through a combination of missed calls and communications over a secure satellite link, Lt. Col. Delta remained connected with the Army leadership.
Fully backing the Army’s mission, the government in Delhi had kept its counterpart in Nay Pyi Taw, Myanmar’s capital, in the loop.
For security reasons, Lt. Col. Delta cannot reveal the other modes of communication he maintained during the mission. The team would regularly receive intelligence updates.
Some inputs suggested the insurgents might have fled the camps.
‘Delta, are you sure the guys are still there? Can you see them? There’s a possibility that the situation may have changed,’ said a voice at the other end of the line during one such transmission.
Lt. Col. Delta had been prowling the North-east for over a decade and had built an excellent network of informants. There was no doubt in his mind that the insurgents were at their camps, and in large numbers. He calmly told the caller not to worry. He and his men hadn’t come all the way to raid empty camps.
As the commandos began climbing the steep hill, those carrying TAR-21 assault rifles took their slings out. The Israeli weapon is built butt-heavy and muzzle-light—the magazine and firing mechanism are located behind the weapon’s trigger.
‘SF guys don’t use slings. We believe in carrying our weapon in our hands to react swiftly. But you can’t climb a steep hill holding a Tavor due to its design,’ Lt. Col. Delta explains.
A few hours later, as the sun set, the Para-SF squad arrived at the hilltop. Lt. Col. Delta and his men took carefully picked positions from where the targets were now in sight. The men felt their first big rush of combat adrenaline. The camps were barely 400 metres away. The reconnaissance elements from the team were at the highest positions to observe the camps, their layout and possible movement of insurgents within. The rest of the men had occupied positions below them. Every man on that hilltop had night-vision gear.
The camps they now gazed at belonged to the Manipur-based People’s Liberation Army, but were used extensively by NSCN-K cadres.
As moonlight bathed the hilltop that June night, Lt. Col. Delta rehearsed and fine-tuned the final plan for the predawn assault. With his team leaders, he went over how the teams would be divided 4 ways. The first subunit would storm the camp in an initial direct assault. Two ‘cut off’ subunits would take down insurgents trying to escape. And a fourth team would form the crucial rearguard group.
The orders were clear. The assault would begin with devastating firepower before sunrise the next day, 9 June. At the same time, the corresponding Para-SF squad 100 km away in Nagaland would begin its own assault on an NSCN-K camp that was believed to be sheltering the insurgent group’s notorious military adviser, Niki Sumi.
Just as the final assault plan was firmed up, the silence on the hilltop was shattered by a burst of automatic fire at around 2100 hours. The commandos sat up in their positions, their weapons ready. Had their cover been blown? Lt. Col. Delta hoped it hadn’t. Had the insurgents discovered the commandos’ arrival? Had they anticipated their route?
‘I thought the whole plan had gone to hell. I thought it was finished,’ Lt. Col. Delta remembers. He took a deep breath and in whispers ordered his men to remain statue-still in their positions. Not a sound could be heard but a mild breeze through the trees.
If the men had been detected, Lt. Col. Delta would have had to make an immediate decision. The mission would have been turned on its head from being primarily a surprise assault to a totally defensive, evasive escape mission. It would no longer be about prestige and retribution but about survival.
It was clear now that the insurgents had begun sending out patrols to secure the perimeter of the camps. They had ventured uphill, coming as close as 150 metres to the positions held by the commandos on the hilltop. The patrollers were singing at the top of their voices and flashing their torches. Their cheer, probably drunken, was a sign the patrolling was routine and that they likely did not have a clue about death crouching on a hilltop above them.
‘They fired some shots in the air. It turned out to be speculative firing to provoke a reaction and confirm if someone was in the darkness in the woods around. They didn’t know we were there,’ Lt. Col. Delta says. A wave of quiet relief swept over the soldiers. Their plan was intact.
Some of the men had puris and chutney for dinner as they prepared to go without sleep for the third night straight. But even if the commandos had wanted to get a few hours of shut-eye, midnight brought a fresh surprise.
Just after midnight, a group of insurgents from the camp began firing in the air. The same worrying question about being robbed of the element of surprise exploded once again in Lt. Col. Delta’s mind. A voice inside his head told him that Plan B was very likely going to be necessary. He didn’t need to communicate this to the commandos. The men lay silent and motionless, rooted to their positions. Every last one of them expected a full firefight to break out at any moment.
The firing continued for 10 minutes. And then, just as abruptly, it stopped. The insurgents walked sleepily back into their camps, only to emerge again 3 hours later for another round of firing.
It was 0300 hours. This was proving to be confounding and frustrating. Had the insurgents really been tipped off about the stealthy advance of the Para-SF team? It became evident to Lt. Col. Delta by this time that the assault plan would have to be con
siderably altered. As things stood, the squad’s solitary reconnaissance team was still perched on the hilltop, while the rest of the squad held positions on the slope below.
A commando officer on the team crawled from his position to where Lt. Col. Delta was. Then leaning in, he whispered that if the men could take their final assault positions on the hilltop without getting into a firefight with the insurgents, they should go ahead with the attack as planned, come what may. The mission commander had only 2 hours to decide.
‘The conclusion we came to was that if we occupied our final assault positions without loss of surprise, then we would go ahead with a modified plan,’ Lt. Col. Delta recalls. The modifications were significant. Instead of splitting the team into 4 subgroups, the mission commander now decided on 3.
Two teams would carry out the direct assault, while the third would cover the rear to prevent the commandos from being encircled by insurgents. The third team’s crucial task was to ensure safe exit for the 2 assault teams. The plan to send 2 ‘cut-off’ parties to the other side of the camp was dropped in the changed circumstances.
By 0400 hours, the commandos were able to crouch and crawl to their final assault positions on the hilltop without giving themselves away. Lt. Col. Delta looked through his night-vision glasses directly at the camps down the hill. The insurgents had not returned to their enclosures after the last round of firing an hour before. They were still around.
‘They were not too far from us. We could have caught up with them in about 10 minutes. They were walking towards the camp,’ says Lt. Col. Delta.
The commandos had reached the most critical phase of their operation. They started moving cautiously in the direction of their targets. Lt. Col. Delta took a deep breath and told his assault teams that they would tail the insurgents right up to the perimeter of the first camp. The strategy worked perfectly.
The insurgents had entered their camp oblivious to the sudden creeping presence of 40 heavily armed Indian commandos who had formed a semicircle around the site. The men were positioned so that each one of them could directly fire at their targets. The other 24 commandos stayed behind, keeping a close watch through the techno-glow of their night-vision goggles, ready to jump in if they were needed. Inside the camp, the insurgents were apparently preparing their first meal of the day, clueless that it would be their last. Their guard was at its lowest.
‘These guys have 2 meals a day—at 0500 and 1500 hours. The attack was timed with their first meal. We knew they would all assemble in the dining area and would be the most vulnerable at that time,’ Lt. Col. Delta recalls.
The attack squad made a final assessment of the target. The first sentry post was empty. There were 2 posts behind it—one manned by 4 insurgents and the other by 2. With a sweep of his hand, Lt. Col. Delta quietly ordered the commandos equipped with Carl Gustavs to unleash their first rockets at the 2 sentry posts, blowing them to pieces in a wave of flame. There was nothing left of the 6 insurgents on guard duty.
The rocket explosions made the ground shudder. It was only then that the insurgents inside the camp realized they were being attacked. But they also knew they had nowhere to run or hide. The commandos then opened fire on the camp with their assault weapons. A single shot followed by a double tap, repeating the sequence till they emptied their magazines. The men would quickly slap in new magazines and continue raining rounds on the insurgents.
The commandos had not put the selector switch on their weapons to full auto mode for burst fire. ‘The problem with bursts is that the bullets spread. Single shot and double tap is far more accurate and you also conserve ammunition,’ says Lt. Col. Delta. Double tap is a technique where 2 shots are fired at the same target in quick succession.
The insurgents scattered, baffled and unable to understand what had hit them. The first camp was cleared without much effort. Dazed by the strength of the assault, the insurgents could not respond for the first 25 minutes. When the men were in the process of clearing the second camp, the insurgents started returning fire with automatic weapons. The layout of the camp had sprung a fresh surprise. The commandos had been under the impression that the camps didn’t have bunkers. Not true. The insurgents had built Army-style deep-dug bunkers inside the camps from where they were now firing at the commandos.
The firefight had been on for about 20 minutes when the entrenched insurgents from the third camp began engaging the commandos in the rearguard, sending a deadly fusillade of bullets whizzing over their heads. The well-prepared commandos answered with overwhelming firepower: they opened up their automatic weapons and pumped grenades from their under-barrel grenade launchers (UBGLs), sending shrapnel scything through the air. The men also fired 2 rockets in airburst mode to cause maximum destruction over a wider area. As the earth burnt, it was time for another decision.
The mission commander realized that the assault teams had achieved their objective with 2 camps completely destroyed. It was time to pull back. ‘When the rear party got caught in a firefight, I decided that it was time to move out ASAP. The assault teams also attacked the third camp with heavy weapons before leaving, but we did not enter it,’ Lt. Col. Delta recalls.
On the ground, there was no time for arithmetic. It would emerge later that the insurgents had taken a huge beating. During that 45-minute assault, the commandos had expended almost 15,000 rounds, more than 150 grenades and a dozen rockets. The men had clear instructions not to stay back to conduct a headcount, but to return as quickly as possible after the mission was complete. They followed those orders.
Miraculously, not a single man on Lt. Col. Delta’s team was hurt. Not even a scratch. The exfiltration route had already been planned. As the commandos pushed closer towards the Indian border, Lt. Col. Delta made the call that the Army had been waiting for. The magic words were spoken: ‘Mission accomplished’.
In the operations room at Leimakhong, Lt. Gen. Rawat smiled broadly. Everyone in the room cheered. The message was immediately relayed up the chain of command. In the hours that followed, in a rare move that stunned the world, New Delhi would officially reveal India’s military response to the Manipur ambush.
Lt. Col. Delta and his men returned to Manipur around noon on 9 June, trudging through forest for the next few hours before arriving at the first border village on the Indian side. It was 1500 hours. The sun was scorching and the men were exhausted, hungry and dehydrated, but smiling grimly in the glory of their mission’s success. From a local store, Lt. Col. Delta and the men purchased bottles of ice-cold beer, treating themselves to hungry gulps of the beverage. Lt. Col. Delta noticed, as he drank, that the beer was from Myanmar. The men allowed themselves their first laugh in days.
Later that day, 2 Army Aviation Corps Dhruv helicopters clattered into a clearing near the village. They had taken off from Leimakhong an hour before to fly the victorious commandos back to base. On foot for days, the commandos were delighted that they didn’t have to trek the 30 km more to the staging area where they had been dropped off for the mission. By the next morning, all 64 men on Lt. Col. Delta’s team were back in Leimakhong.
The commando team assigned to target the NSCN-K camp across the border from Nagaland was not as lucky as Lt. Col. Delta’s combat group. The insurgents there had fled hours before the raid. The men simply set the camp ablaze and returned.
Fifteen minutes after landing in Leimakhong, Lt. Col. Delta’s phone rang. He was not expecting to hear from the man at the other end of the line. It was Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar.
‘I hadn’t even untied my shoelaces when the raksha mantri (defence minister) called to congratulate me and the team. It was exhilarating and absolutely incredible. It’s not every day that you get a call from the Defence Minister,’ Lt. Col. Delta, who went on to command a battalion in Manipur, recalls.
His work wasn’t over, however. Lt. Col. Delta spent the day debriefing the Army leadership about the mission. He spared no detail. It missed nobody up the chain of command and government that histo
ry had just been made by the men of the Para-SF.
When he was finished, Lt. Col. Delta allowed himself the liberty of remembering his family. He wanted to drive to the hospital to meet his mother who had been operated upon that morning. Lt. Gen. Rawat and the other commanders were astonished to learn of Lt. Col. Delta’s mother’s cancer surgery just a few hours before. The commanders were not comfortable with Lt. Col. Delta’s plan to drive down to the hospital alone in his Maruti 800. They knew hit squads would be after him. But Lt. Col. Delta politely refused a commando team for his personal protection. He spent 4 hours with his mother and returned to the base the next morning.
In Delhi that day, the Army would tell a packed news conference that the commandos had raided the insurgent camps on the basis of ‘credible and specific intelligence’ and inflicted significant casualties on the insurgents. The Army gave no specific numbers but estimates that emerged later pegged the figure in the range of 40–50. The Burmese Army is believed to have transported the bodies in 2 trucks to a nearby location for quick burial. Scores of badly wounded men were taken for treatment to a hospital south of where the commandos struck. The casualty figure would have been far higher had the cut-off teams been able to deploy on the other side of the camps as well.
Two months after the strikes, on the eve of Independence Day, the government announced a Kirti Chakra for Lt. Col. Oscar Delta, a Shaurya Chakra for a Havildar-rank commando on his squad and Sena Medals (Gallantry) for 5 other commandos who were involved in the cross-border raid into Myanmar. The strikes made Lt. Col. Delta a cult figure in a regiment already full of heroes. But you’d never know it if you met him.
‘You are not a Rambo out there. My Kirti Chakra (India’s second-highest peacetime gallantry award) belongs to every man who took part in that mission. We did our job and it’s a fantastic feeling being recognized for it. But other than that, awards really do not matter,’ says Lt. Col. Delta.