AFVOA Newletters of Year 2004

Page 88 of 153 spokesman. Among those who attended the ceremony were the Kargil Corps Commander Lt Gen Milan Nayudu and GL Batra, father of Param Vir Chakra winner late Capt Vikram Batra. Drass township, which saw major action during the Kargil conflict, is overlooked by the known peaks of Tiger Hill, Hump, Three Pimples and the Saddle, which had been taken over by the enemy soldiers who were finally evicted. (Source: http://www.indiadaily.com/breaking news/3148.asp) If the only prayer you say in your-whole life is ‘thank you’, that should suffice. ~ Meister ‘Eckhart The questions, they will not die 47. Often, the deaths of our military officers raise questions. The answers? That’s the hard part, says Dilip D’Souza. 48. July 2004 - Lunched recently with a young officer in the Army, and I was struck again by something I’ve long sensed: there’s a look, a style, in many such men. I don’t mean that at all disparagingly, but in the best possible way. They have a sort of bright-eyed idealism; a cheery respect for family, friends and authority; a clear sense of their part in how the world turns; and a devotion to their work. 49. Some will call all this patriotism. Perhaps so. Whatever it is, the Army’s training schools do a fine job instilling this spirit in its officers, if I judge only from the number of times I’ve run into it. But what fascinates me is that I sensed the spirit not just in people like the Major I ate with, but at least thrice in officers I didn’t even meet. Officers I couldn’t have met, because they were dead. 50. Saurabh Kalia, Nawang Kapadia and Abhijit Gadgil. Wiry, athletic men all. Their legacy lives in their smiles, in the stories their families tell me about them. Wistful, misty- eyed in the telling -- yet also proud through the sadness. 51. For those who need them, the bare facts are quickly told. Captain Kalia was one of the six dead soldiers returned by Pakistan early in the Kargil war, their bodies mutilated. Lt Kapadia died in a shootout with terrorists near Kupwara in Kashmir in November 2000. In September 2001, Flight Lt Abhijit Gadgil was killed in a MiG-21 crash in the Rajasthan desert: one more in the long list of MiG crashes the IAF has suffered. What happened to Kalia and his colleagues roused a nation to fury. Pakistan was branded an immoral state that would stop at nothing, not even mutilating dead soldiers’ bodies. Arguably, nothing else during Kargil so defined that war, so defined our wartime patriotism. The other two deaths were less dramatic and high-profile, if no less tragic. Gadgil’s actually had to do with our Western neighbour only peripherally, but raised some troubling questions. 52. And in fact, that’s the thing about deaths of military men: often, they raise questions. The answers? That’s the hard part. 53. Take Saurabh Kalia. When he came home to his parents, his body had cigarette burns on it, his bones had been broken, as had his teeth, his ears had been pierced, his lips were cut, his nose chipped, his skull fractured and his eyes removed. 54. I could barely stomach reading these details in an account Saurabh’s father, Dr NK