Gurkha: Better to Die than Live a Coward: My Life in the Gurkhas

by Kailash Limbu

  To us Gurkhas, our history is very important. It is how we keep our tradition alive. We remember and honour the great deeds of our ancestors, the men who have gone before us. When, today, a Gurkha does something heroic, he does not do it for himself, but for his comrades and in honour of these ancestors. For us, there is nothing greater a man can do than act courageously in battle, and we take enormous pride when one of our number is commended for bravery. For example, when Lachhiman Gurung was invested with the VC by the Viceroy of India in 1945, family members actually carried his disabled father for eleven whole days over the hills until he got to a road where he could take public transport down to Delhi.

  The number of battle honours won by Gurkhas fighting alongside the British is too large to put them all down here. It is enough to say that there have been Gurkha regiments involved in all parts of the world the British have fought in during the last two centuries. These include the Indian Mutiny, Afghanistan (several times), the First World War – where they served both on the Western Front and in places like Gallipoli and the Middle East – and then the Second World War, again both in Europe and in the East, notably Burma. More recently, there have been further honours won in Malaysia, Borneo and the Falkland Islands.

  A big change came about after the Second World War when in 1947 India became independent. By then there were ten Gurkha regiments, and it was decided that six would be absorbed into the Indian Army while four would remain under British command. But while the British Gurkhas have been cut still further, the numbers in India have continued to grow. There are now seven Gurkha regiments with a total of 39 battalions serving in the Indian Army.

  To become a British Gurkha, you will be one in a thousand who succeeds in passing three selection boards in a process that the successful recruit will never forget. The first board is the local one. In my case, this was at Telog, a few hours’ walk from Khebang village. I went down with two or three other guys from Khebang, people I knew but not close friends. I did talk to Mauta and Hom before going and they did consider putting themselves forward, but in the end they decided against it. I found that I was one of about six hundred candidates competing for just twenty places to go forward to the next stage. At first I was a bit nervous, but as I looked left and right I became more confident. Gaaz was right. I was taller and, judging from what I could see, fitter than most of the other guys. I also had my good School Leaving Certificate result. I felt confident that even if I wasn’t at the top academically, I must be somewhere near.

  We waited in a crowd, sitting or standing, until eventually the recruiting officer, or galla, came out and addressed us.

  ‘RIGHT, LISTEN IN, EVERYONE!’

  To start with he struggled to make his voice heard above the noise of six hundred eager young men chattering away.

  ‘All right. ALL RIGHT. Q-U-I-E-T! If you want to be Gurkhas you will have to learn to do as you’re told, now QUIET!’

  Eventually he established order.

  ‘OK THANK YOU!’ he began. ‘So what’s going to happen is that you will file in one by one in order of arrival. You will give your name, your village, your caste and your age. Then you will have one minute exactly to do some sit-ups. Then another minute to do some pull-ups. After that, there will be a health check, some running and finally an educational assessment. After that you will come back out here until the results are called at the end of the day.’

  After the recruiting officer had finished speaking, everyone started excitedly talking again.

  ‘How many sit-ups and pull-ups do you reckon you can do?’

  ‘At least twenty of each.’

  ‘Bet you can’t do more than ten.’

  ‘It’s not as easy as it looks, you know.’

  ‘I heard the record is fifty sit-ups and forty pull-ups.’

  ‘That’s impossible!’

  ‘No it isn’t.’

  ‘Yes it is!’

  Actually, the pass mark was twenty-five sit-ups and twelve pull-ups.

  One by one, we were called forward into the building where the galla sat at his desk.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Kailash.’

  ‘Village?’

  ‘Khebang.’

  ‘Caste?’

  ‘Limbu.’

  ‘You said Limbu?’

  ‘Yes sir. Limbu.’

  ‘Right, go and wait over there. NEXT!’

  We stood nervously watching the other potential recruits being put through their paces. The recruiting officer’s assistant held a stopwatch and clipboard and had a slightly bored look on his face.

  ‘All right, go!’

  I recall that I achieved twenty-five sit-ups, just as required.

  ‘Not bad. OK, do you see that bar over there?’

  A thick length of bamboo was supported on a frame. ‘What I want you to do is reach up and hang from it. Get your feet up off the floor. That’s it. Feet off the floor, I said! OK, now you have sixty seconds. Go!’

  Because of my height, I could actually touch the floor with my toes, so I had to bend my legs as I heaved.

  ‘Right, go outside and wait.’

  The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than about five minutes, but now there was a long wait while the rest of the candidates filed in. In the meantime, some of the others asked me how I got on.

  ‘How many did you manage, guruji?’ Gaaz wanted to know. ‘Twenty-five sit-ups and twelve pull-ups.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘I managed twenty-six and thirteen!’ he said proudly.

  As things turned out, after the running and educational assessment, it became apparent that I’d done pretty well. In fact I don’t think anyone had done more, so when I finally heard that I had passed, I was more relieved than excited. But when I got back home at the end of that week, my dad and my grandfather were completely delighted.

  ‘Kailash! You have brought honour to the family! Now you must go to the final selection and pass that too,’ said my grandfather.

  ‘If you do, then you will have the respect of everyone in the whole of Limbuwan!’ said my dad.

  I later found out that I was the first person from Khebang village to have got through the first round for eighteen years – since my uncle, in fact.

  My mother was not so pleased, unfortunately. She really wanted me to stay at home. My grandmother wasn’t too enthusiastic either. But this didn’t matter too much to me, as when I went to work in the fields the next day, everybody was talking about it. I remember playing volleyball in the afternoon with the other boys from the village, and they looked at me almost like I was a different person. Then afterwards several of the girls came up and tried to talk to me. Unfortunately, I was so shy, I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘You shy, guruji?’ said Gaaz, interrupting. ‘I don’t believe it.’

  But it was true, I was.

  10

  Ambushed

  That night before going back on sangar duty, I did manage to get a bit of sleep, but it was only fitful. I kept waking with a start. I had this feeling we were under attack from inside the compound. Sitting up, I listened carefully, only to lie back down and drift off for another few minutes before it happened again.

  Suddenly, I was fully alert. Why, I didn’t know. There was no sound apart from the quiet snoring of the rifleman in a cot two or three bedspaces away from mine. Somehow I realised something was really wrong. My heart thumped in my chest and I readied myself to spring up in an instant. But while instinct was telling me to call out, an even more powerful force made me stay silent.

  Concentrating with my whole being, I strained my ears. The rifleman’s snoring had turned into heavy breathing while the intermittent crackle of radio traffic came from a helmet right nearby: someone had left their PRR switched on. But apart from that, there was no noise other than the barking of a dog in the distance.

  Yet still I was sure something wasn’t right.

  As I mentioned, although some of the soldi
ers slept inside the building, my own section slept outside the accommodation block along the corridor that ran underneath its overhanging roof. My bedspace stood right in the corner of two adjoining walls and there were three or four other beds to each side of me.

  Now as I lay on my back looking into the compound, I saw that the sky was quite cloudy and there was not much ambient light. Enough to make out shapes, but not enough to see detail.

  Turning my head first to the left and then to the right, I scanned along each row. As usual, less than half were occupied. At this stage, we were sleeping with our boots off, but still fully clothed, with our helmets, our rifles and our webbing close at hand. I kept my rifle on my bed with me and, instinctively, I closed my hand round it as I squinted into the darkness.

  But there was nothing.

  I shut my eyes and relaxed my grip.

  I must have drifted off for a few seconds – maybe even a few minutes – when, coming to yet again, I detected movement out of the corner of my eye. Not a hurried movement, just the soundless arrival of a darker shape close by. For just a second longer, I paused.

  At first I assumed it must be one of the riflemen coming to wake the next person on duty. There was someone quite clearly squatting down next to the sleeping rifleman just two bedspaces away from mine. But, as I listened, the shape made no sound. It just remained motionless. Only when it moved almost imperceptibly did I sit up – just in time to see a dull glint of metal.

  All at once, I realised what I was looking at. A MAN WITH A KNIFE IN HIS HAND.

  With a surge of adrenalin, I threw myself out of bed.

  ‘Ayee! What are you doing?’ I screamed as I leaped up, reaching not for my rifle but for my kukri.

  The figure stood and hesitated, unsure whether to meet my attack or run. By this time I had drawn my blade and raised my arm. I could see enough now to judge where the head was and I grabbed a fistful of hair from under its turban and, twisting the head round, I brought my kukri down hard with a loud cry—

  ‘Guruji? Guruji?’

  For several seconds, I was too stunned to answer.

  Only then did I realise I must have been dreaming.

  ‘What time is it?’ I asked at last

  ‘Two thirty. You’re on duty now, guruji.’

  ‘OK thanks,’ I replied, noticing that I was dripping with cold sweat. ‘Just a moment.’

  I took a long pull on my water bottle as I brought myself back into the real world.

  ‘Anything happening?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘All quiet, guruji.’

  Despite his reassurance, I still felt anxious as I crossed the compound and climbed up into the sangar. I realised that my nerves were starting to get to me but it was important not to let on to the bhais that I was feeling any stress so I took a few deep breaths before speaking.

  ‘Seen anything, bhai haru?’ I asked quietly.

  ‘Nothing, guruji. Nothing unless you count those dogs over there. Looks like they’ve caught something.’

  As soon as I was in position, I pulled my HMNVS, my helmet-mounted night-vision sight device, down and squinted through it.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Over there,’ said Gaaz, zapping them with his laser. Later, we would use our lasers like this to indicate targets for the air assets, but on this occasion I was just looking at three or four animals tugging on what looked like a small carcass.

  ‘Maybe it’s a desert fox!’ said Gaaz.

  He was referring to the time back at Bastion, when one night out on patrol in the WMIK we had seen a desert fox. It was only just over a week ago, but it already seemed like five years. Nani was driving and I’d ordered him to give chase. I thought it would be fun if we could catch it and take it back with us. It could be our mascot. But as we discovered, the desert fox is nothing like the foxes that raid the dustbins around Shorncliffe, the Gurkha barracks in England. They look similar, but the desert fox is a lot, lot quicker. And it can change direction like a hare. We set off after it, bucketing over the sand, weaving this way and that to try and keep it in our lights. But no sooner did we think we’d run it to ground exhausted than it got up and started running again. We must have chased it for at least twenty minutes at speeds up to thirty miles an hour before we eventually lost it. The thought that these mangy dogs could have caught one didn’t seem likely at all.

  ‘Whatever it is, I doubt it’s a desert fox!’ I replied.

  ‘I don’t think so either, guruji,’ Gaaz admitted. ‘More likely a diseased goat or something.’

  ‘Hey, guruji!’ said Nagen a few minutes later. ‘Looks like we’ve got the early-morning patrol coming again.’

  Sure enough, there was a figure moving quite slowly along the road towards us.

  ‘She must have eaten something bad,’ said Gaaz. ‘It’s not even three thirty.’

  ‘Zero, this is Sangar Three. One civilian moving along road in a southerly direction. Looks female. Am observing.’

  ‘Zero, roger.’

  Within the next half-hour, another one or two women appeared, followed not long after by some men, though there were notably fewer than before.

  ‘Hold your nose. Here come the rest of them,’ said Gaaz, pointing. Not long after they had finished, the sound of the muezzin calling people to prayer broke the silence.

  ‘OK, bhai guruji haru, same detail as yesterday,’ I said. ‘Be vigilant in case they’re using the sound for cover.’

  I turned to Gaaz.

  ‘By the way, Gaaz, how are you doing? How’s your back?’

  He had been working out the evening before and had unfortunately tipped off our makeshift sit-up equipment. I was worried he’d pulled a muscle.

  ‘It’s OK, guruji. No problem.’

  ‘You’re not just saying that, I hope?’

  I’d told him he might as well go and see one of the medics in the morning if it gave him any trouble. They might be glad of something to do that wasn’t serious.

  ‘Honest, guruji, I’m fine.’

  After that, we were all silent with our own thoughts. Later that morning, however, we noticed that again there were a lot of people heading out of town. It was an uncomfortable feeling looking out from our position, knowing that most of the local population was on the move. Apart from the main street, where there was some buying and selling still going on, the town was beginning to take on an abandoned air. There was hardly any movement among the buildings within our arcs of fire. The hospital clinic next door lay empty and the compounds beyond showed no signs of life. Occasionally you might see someone walking into or out of a building, but that was all.

  ‘It reminds me of those FIBUA (Fighting In a Built Up Area) exercises we did at Shorncliffe,’ said one of the riflemen. ‘The place looks completely empty, but you know the enemy is lurking in there somewhere.’

  I agreed. It did look a lot like that.

  ‘With one big difference,’ said Gaaz. ‘These jatha have got live ammo.’

  The big event of the day was a shura that Rex sahib had called for the early evening. A shura is a meeting of elders – the important people of the town – and we were all looking forward to seeing who would turn up. We have similar meetings back home in Khebang when there is important local business to discuss, or if there is some dispute in the community. But this was likely to be a gathering with a difference. As the OC had said, there were bound to be some spies among them. This made it exciting in a way, to think that we might be being visited by the very people who had been attacking us. But it was an uncomfortable thought in other ways. Who was to say they wouldn’t turn up with a suicide bomber and try to hit us at the meeting?

  ‘What are we going to do if a suicide bomber comes in with the elders for this shura?’ demanded Gaaz, as if reading my thoughts.

  ‘These guys are brave. But I doubt they’d want to kill all the elders. Not that you can ever know with these people.’

  ‘What happens if they try to take one of us hostage?’ demanded one of the oth
er riflemen.

  Both of these scenarios were possible, and neither of them was easy to think through. The visitors would be searched on arrival, but of course that did not help very much if one of them was carrying a suicide bomb. We would still be taking casualties. But as for hostage taking, that was less likely – although we had heard of a recent incident when some Canadians were attacked by someone who had managed to smuggle a machete into a similar meeting. But we would search them thoroughly and we would have men standing guard while the shura was going on. Plus we were going to cover the proceedings from up in the sangars. But still, there was danger, and it was very difficult to predict all the possible scenarios.

  ‘It’s a pity we don’t have some cardboard cut-outs we could post around the place to make them think we were more than just a platoon plus in strength,’ said Gaaz as we waited for them to arrive.

  ‘They’ll already know our numbers, you can be sure of that,’ I replied. ‘Their friends in the local police will have told them.’

  For myself, I particularly wanted to try and work out which were the ones who had been attacking us. I really wanted to see what they looked like, to see who it was who had been trying to kill me. I wanted to look them in the eye. And the reason for that was, I wanted to kill them.

  ‘You know what, guruji? If it had been me, I’d find some way of bugging those jatha. The younger ones I mean,’ said Gaaz later on. ‘I mean, if you could find out where they are living, you could send a fighting patrol to take them out.’

  But the fact of the matter was there just weren’t enough of us to launch any kind of offensive. To send out a fighting patrol, you’d need a minimum of twelve men, plus another six on stand-by in reserve. If you had a man hit, you’d then have to have an extraction party to come and get him out. And all the time, you’d have to keep the sangars at full strength in case they launched a counter-attack before you had a chance to get back in. The numbers just didn’t add up. Besides, there were the ROE to think about. We couldn’t go out taking people on just because we didn’t like the look of them.