But that was it. The fire from ANP Hill must have been accurate enough to put the enemy off his aim, because the base plate went quiet, though we remained on a state of high alert.
A short while later, the OC came on the PRR to announce the imminent arrival of air support.
‘B-52 will be delivering ordance onto suspected mortar position in figures five,’ he announced. I immediately relayed his message to the rest of my section.
‘Guruji bhai haru, be advised that air support will be hitting suspected mortar base plate in next few minutes.’
It turned out that by fantastic luck a passing aircraft had spotted a suspicious heat source and relayed the information to the bomber.
‘Roger out.’
‘If it’s a B-52, do you think we’re even going to see it, guruji?’ demanded Gaaz. ‘He won’t come below about thirty thousand feet, will he?’
That was almost certainly correct.
‘The plus point is that if we don’t see him, the enemy won’t either,’ I replied.
‘Yeah, the first thing he’s going to know about it is when he’s got thirty-six virgins come to take him away,’ said Gaaz happily.
In fact, we did just catch a glimpse of the aircraft, but not before it had dropped two laser-guided 500-pounders on the position.
‘HURRAH!’ we all cried as they erupted in giant plumes of smoke.
‘That’ll teach them a lesson they won’t forget!’
‘Well done, everyone! Well spotted and good shooting!’ The OC sounded really pleased. As this was our first successful engagement with the enemy, I guess that was hardly surprising, even though it was really the pilots who had done the job.
When we’d settled back down, I impressed on the bhais that it was really important not to let anything go unreported. ‘They’re testing us for sure,’ I told my section. ‘Checking our reaction times, checking our arcs. No question about it. And they’ll have noticed how long it took to get air support. A minute’s a long time in battle. So if you see anything suspicious, anything at all, you must inform the CT immediately, OK? And if we do get given clearance to fire, don’t mess about. We’ve got to show them we mean business.’
The enemy needed to be in no doubt about how the Gurkhas would fight if they decided to take us on.
It was strange looking out of the sangar later that morning. Despite the contact, life in the town continued just as before. Most of the shops were open as usual and there were people milling about as if nothing had happened. The Afghans inside the compound behaved no differently. They appeared long after we’d been stood down and spent most of their time sitting in the shade talking or sleeping. There was no weapon cleaning or anything like that. In fact, the only thing they did with their weapons was to sometimes stick a flower in the barrel. Quite often you would see an AK-47 propped up against a wall with a marigold poking out the end.
Towards afternoon, however, we did begin to notice a change. There was a lot of extra traffic on one of the roads leading out of town.
‘Take a look at this, guruji,’ said Gaaz. ‘Looks to me as if people don’t like this place so much any more. Reference the road approx three kilometres.’
He was right. When I looked through my binoculars I saw a long stream of people – probably several hundred, including a lot of women and children – heading out of town in an easterly direction. Many were pushing small carts with their belongings piled high. Others drove donkeys laden with goods. Some of the kids, I noticed, were carrying chickens in their arms, while others were pulling goats along on leads. It was clear there was a major exodus under way.
I picked up the field telephone.
‘Zero, this is Sangar One.’
‘Zero. Go ahead, over.’
‘Reference road running east–west approx three kilometres. Large movement of civilians. Looks like they’re leaving town.’
‘Zero, roger. Wait out.’
As all of my military readers will know, Wait out is the response you give when you need time to reply – in this case, Mathers sahib would probably be plotting this movement on his map, or perhaps speaking to someone else. Although the field telephone was secure, we more or less kept to standard radio procedure, partly out of habit and partly because it kept speech disciplined. When you are using a radio, what you don’t do, for security reasons, is hold down the transmit button while you are undertaking some other activity. If you do, there is a strong danger that you give the enemy the chance to intercept the transmission and then follow the rest of the conversation. The idea is to keep all radio transmissions as short as possible. In our situation, it wasn’t likely that the enemy had sophisticated equipment to break into our radio net, but he would know roughly on which frequency bandwidth we operated. By simply scanning this using an ordinary cheap scanner of the kind you can easily get on the internet, he might be lucky and intercept a transmission – especially if it was a long one. Then he’d be able to listen in until such time as you changed the frequency. In our case, that would mean until the end of the day – unless of course we became aware he was eavesdropping and changed sooner.
The telephone rang.
‘Sangar One, this is Zero.’ It was the 2 i/c again. ‘OK, understood. I think you’re probably right. Sounds like people could be moving away. Keep an eye out and let me know any developments.’
‘Roger, out.’
‘So what do you reckon, guruji?’ Gaaz wanted to know, his curiosity aroused. ‘Do you think they’re abandoning the whole place to the Talibs? Maybe there’s a really big attack coming and they know it?’
‘Could be,’ I replied. ‘Could be the women and children are being moved out, and the elderly. In which case, yes, the Talibs might be taking over.’
‘Hunza, guruji.’
In the event, though, the day wore on with no further sign of trouble. We were still pretty pumped up from the morning and passed the time in a state of high alert. Our tension was heightened by the fact that the traffic on the road out of town was heavy throughout the day. But after a while, we began to calm down, and soon Gaaz began asking me questions again.
‘What about your school days, guruji?’ he wanted to know. ‘I bet you were a star pupil.’
Actually I wasn’t, at least not to begin with.
In fact, during my first year, I was an extremely lazy pupil. The only thing that really interested me about school was the opportunity it gave for fighting. I was always challenging other boys, and one time I remember asking six or seven of them to take me on at once. They refused. The trouble for them was I was the tallest by far, taller than some of the kids five years older than me.
Best of all was when there were lathi fights between whole year groups. Lathi as we played it was a kind of kick-boxing. On these occasions, you would get thirty or forty people in a great bundle. Every so often, a few got hurt, but on the whole it was just really good exercise.
The other good thing about school was the opportunity for sport. We played football and volleyball, and when we weren’t playing either of those, we would make our own balls out of discarded rags and plastic wrapped inside an old sock, which we proceeded to throw at each other as hard as we could.
But the learning side of things did not interest me one bit. The result of this was that when we sat an exam at the end of year one, I failed. I remember my uncle telling me the news.
‘Kailash, you’d better look out. Your parents have just had your school report. You’re in big trouble.’
I remember I was so ashamed that I ran to the top of the house and cried. It was at that moment I made up my mind that I wanted to be at the top of the class and not the bottom. As it turned out, it took me most of the second year to catch up, but by the end I finished in first place and after that, by working hard, I never lost my place.
‘So you were a star pupil after all, guruji!’ exclaimed Gaaz.
‘Well, I suppose you could say that. But it didn’t mean I stopped fighting and I was still always getting
into trouble.’
Luckily for me the teachers usually let me off punishment. I put this down to my good performance in class and also in sport. I had quickly become quite a good volleyball player.
‘Wow! I wish I could have been your friend back then, guruji,’ said Gaaz. ‘I suppose everyone knew you were planning to be a Gurkha one day, did they?’
Actually, that wasn’t exactly right either. Although I’d started out with that wish, something happened to make me change my mind. When I was in Class 4 my mother gave birth to a little girl. I remember the first time I saw her, she seemed so small and beautiful. I nicknamed her Gudiya, meaning ‘doll’, because that was how she looked to me. I still call her that, even though she is now a teacher in a primary school. Unfortunately, it was a difficult birth and my mother became very ill. To make matters worse, this was the time that my father went to work in the Gulf. As a result, I had to start helping out in the house a lot. My grandparents kept an eye on us, and sometimes one of my aunties came to help out. But even so, I had to do all the cooking, as well as working in the fields both before and after school. The result was that for a long time, it became hard to keep my place at the top of the class. What was more, when I was actually in class I found it very hard to concentrate, as I spent the whole day worrying about my mother. Did she have enough food and water to see her through and how would she be when I got home? At the end of class, I used to run home even though it was uphill all the way.
‘How are you, Mum?’ was always the first thing I said as I went through the door, and always the answer was the same.
‘I’m feeling a little better.’
But I knew it wasn’t true. It wasn’t until almost a whole year had passed that, eventually, she did start to improve. For a month at a time, she would be well, and then for the next month she would fall ill again. It alternated like that for a long period. But when she still didn’t fully recover even after several years, I remember having a big argument with her. I told her she should go to the hospital in Jhapa district and see a proper doctor. Her sister would look after my sister.
‘It’s a waste of time seeing doctors,’ she said. ‘They just take your money and you don’t get better. If you want, you can call the priest back.’
She said it was better to rely on the priests, as they had more power over the gods.
‘After all, it is the gods who will decide whether I get better or not.’
Eventually, though, I managed to persuade her that, as she was not getting fully better with the priests, she should at least give modern medicine a try, and when she was having one of her good spells I took her down to the nearest bus stop. It was a real struggle for her. She could only manage a few minutes at a time before she had to take a rest. But she never complained. Altogether it took almost three whole days to get there, even though normally you can do it in just over twenty-four hours. In the end it was worth it. The doctors diagnosed some kind of heart problem and prescribed some pills. After that she made a good recovery.
But because of my mother’s illness, for a long time I gave up my dream of joining the Army. I was determined to become a doctor instead. I really wanted to help her, and people like her. Instead of guns and ammunition, I became interested in biology and chemistry, both of which I excelled at. In fact, after passing my School Leaving Certificate aged seventeen, I enrolled for a science course at Hattisar College, the nearest place of higher education.
‘So you nearly became a doctor, guruji!’ exclaimed Gaaz. ‘That’s incredible. I can’t imagine you with a stethoscope round your neck. So what made you change your mind again?’
‘My grandfather.’
When I told him my plans, he said it was good if I became a doctor. ‘But there’s no harm in having a try at Gurkha selection,’ he said. ‘If you pass, you’ll have a choice. If you don’t – well, you have a college place.’
‘That was good advice,’ said Gaaz.
It certainly was, and I’ve never regretted taking it and putting myself forward for selection. But I must admit that there were moments in Now Zad when I might have thought different.
*
That evening, I remember me and Gaaz noticing the town was more or less deserted.
‘What do you reckon, guruji? Do you think the Taliban are going to come visiting tonight?’ demanded Gaaz.
‘They could be back any time,’ I replied.
In the event, the evening was quiet, and so was the night. Back on duty in Sangar 1 at first light with Gaaz and Nagen, we talked about what might be in store for us that day.
‘They’re bound to be back, aren’t they, guruji?’ said Nagen.
‘Well even if it’s not this morning, we’ve got to be ready for them,’ I replied.
‘I hope they do come back today,’ said Gaaz. ‘It would be good for them to see how Gurkhas fight. It would be a shame to go home without having the chance to show them.’
‘Like I said, be careful what you wish for,’ I replied. ‘Ten Platoon were lucky not to take any casualties.’
As things turned out, we didn’t have much longer to wait before the pace of life changed dramatically. But for one last day, we had plenty of time to talk. As usual, Gaaz steered the conversation back to my early life. He wanted to know about my experiences during selection.
‘How many people were at your first selection, guruji?’ Gaaz wanted to know. ‘Did you get thousands like we did in Pokhara?’
‘No, maybe six hundred,’ I replied.
‘Tell us about it, then, guruji. What happened? Were you nervous at all?’
‘Of course! Everybody is a bit nervous, aren’t they?’
‘Well yes. But you’re lucky with your height.’
At five feet seven, I am two or three inches taller than the average Gurkha, although I have noticed that recruits are getting bigger and bigger every year. It must be something to do with improved diet.
‘Well it wasn’t just that. I’d passed top out of my school, so as well as my School Leaving Certificate, I had a good report. That must have helped.’
Basically, every Gurkha’s selection is exactly the same, so Gaaz’s experience wouldn’t have been much different from my own.
I was one of 32,000 hopefuls back in 1999 when I joined up. In those days, the Brigade was considerably larger than it is today, and there were approximately 250 places on offer. These days it’s around 200. Then as now, the units making up the Brigade are two front-line infantry battalions of The Royal Gurkha Rifles, The Queen’s Own Gurkha Logistics Regiment, Queen’s Gurkha Signals, The Queen’s Gurkha Engineers, Gurkha Staff and Personnel Support Company and The Band of The Brigade of Gurkhas. In all we are 2600 men at the time of writing. But, for example, during the Second World War, there were ten battalions and more than 250,000 Gurkha soldiers serving the British crown. So we are already a fraction of the numbers we used to be. On the other hand, there are approximately 100,000 Gurkha soldiers serving in the present-day Indian Army, plus maybe 2000 in the Singapore police. There are also some others elsewhere, such as in His Majesty the Sultan of Brunei’s security forces.
But it is the British Army everyone wants to join. In the British Army Gurkha units, the standards are higher, the tradition is longer and the history is the best. In two hundred years of service to the British crown, Gurkha soldiers have won a total of thirteen Victoria Crosses and fought bravely all over the world.
9
The Brigade of Gurkhas
According to the history books, the first time British soldiers came into contact with Gurkha warriors was during the siege of Kalunga in 1814. On that occasion, just 650 Gurkhas defended a hill fort against a British force of 4000. It is said that as the battle was raging, a single Gurkha soldier appeared behind the British lines. He was holding his jaw, which had been shattered by a bullet, and indicated he wanted it bandaging up. No sooner had the bandage been tied in place than the soldier requested to be permitted to return to his own side to continue the fight.
Today, one of the most famous names in Nepal is that of Captain (QGO) Rambahadur Limbu. He is the most recent Gurkha winner of the Victoria Cross, and the only one still alive. Not long ago, I visited his house to pay my respects but unfortunately he was not at home at the time. I had wanted to tell him that his action in Malaysia in 1965 had personally inspired me throughout my Army career. It was not until the end of 2014 that I finally got to meet him. What a great man.
The rank of QGO (Queen’s Gurkha Officer) no longer exists, but it used to refer to someone who had joined up as a regular rifleman and worked his way through the ranks to become an officer. Nowadays, Gurkhas who come up through the ranks are treated exactly the same as regular British soldiers who become officers. At that time the highest-ranking QGO in the Brigade was the Gurkha Major, although there have since been more senior Gurkhas. Some years back, one of the battalions was actually commanded by an ex-QGO.
In any case, Captain Rambahadur Limbu won his VC back in 1965 in Malaya during a fire fight when two members of his section were wounded. The situation seemed hopeless and it looked as though the two injured would have to be left to die, as the enemy was only a short distance away. Rambahadur Limbu tried crawling to his comrades’ position in the hope of getting them back to safety, only to be forced back by the weight of automatic fire. After some time, he tried again, with the same result. In the end, he realised the only way he could save the two men was by exposing himself completely and running across open ground in full view of the enemy – which he did, not once but twice. He then went back to the position a third time, and used the machine gun the two wounded men had been manning to inflict four confirmed casualties of his own.
As his citation says, Rambahadur Limbu’s ‘outstanding personal bravery, selfless conduct, complete contempt of the enemy and determination to save the lives of the men of his fire group set an incomparable example and inspired all who saw him’.
It was a great honour for me to be able to tell him personally that not only did his bravery inspire his own comrades, but it continues to inspire people to this day, myself included. I told him that the thought of his heroism, and the heroism of all those warriors of earlier times, is exactly what kept us going in the darkest moments of our time in Now Zad.
Gurkha: Better to Die than Live a Coward: My Life in the Gurkhas Page 12