life of soldiers during the kargil war
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Explanation:
The cordite placed, desolate battlefields of Kargil were first beamed into our living rooms in the summer of 1999. It was the country’s first prime-time war, and the poignant ‘Last Post’ became a familiar tune.
For nearly two decades between, the War lived on only in the Memorial at Drass, forgotten under layers of snow, the geographical references of its peaks — Pt 4875, Pt 5140 — obliterated from people’s minds.Not for septuagenarian Colonel Virender Thapar who has climbed a scree-scattered, rifle-shell-dotted 16,000-foot mountain every year since to keep a promise to his son Lt Vijayant Thapar, VrC of 2 Rajputana Rifles.
Vijayant, (Robin to his family) had written, ‘If you can, please come and see where the Indian Army fought for your tomorrow,’ in his last letter home, before he valiantly battled and fell to an enemy bullet, an act that earned him the Vir Chakra. The terrain is just a hiccup on the road to honour, which Virender travels, bearing a red dupatta sent by his wife to the sangar where Vijayant died and where his portrait now hangs alongside a goddess.A glut of literature has been written on the operational details, but Rachna Bisht Rawat’s Kargil: Untold Stories from the War (Penguin) deals with vignettes that involve the soldier’s family and have fallen through the gaps in our memory.
Delhi-based Rawat, an award-winning former journalist and a writer of three other popular books on war and life in uniform in consonance with the Indian Army, says, “I was reluctant because I had already written two war books and found them emotionally harrowing to work on — the soldiers were old, their memories had faded. But my Army-officer husband said that Kargil would be a good choice because many of the men who had fought were still serving, with vivid memories of the War.”Rawat worked on the book — with a message from the Defence Minister Rajnath Singh — for a year-and-a-half, urging the ADGPI to request units for citations that had not been awarded, stories of valour that had not been told. “Some Army units sent unusual stories. This time, I wanted to focus on the Army Medical Corps through the work of paratrooper and doctor, then Captain Vikram Grewal. He worked with five units at Muntho Dhalo, fashioning stretchers from rifles and running saline drips amidst shelling. Not a single man who reached him, including a Pakistani PoW, died.”