My experiences
Life along the Line of Control Part
I: Fire and Fury
It was famously described as the most
dangerous place in the world by former US President Bill Clinton. A ceasefire
pact is supposed to be in place along this 740-km frontier, but the situation
on the ground is quite different. Some operational details have been withheld
to maintain anonymity.
The
Line of Control follows runs through mostly mountainous terrain, following
natural features where it can. All that is good on a map, but on the ground
it’s a living line over and around slivers of land—a ridge, a spur, a valley, a
stream bed—where sudden death is a constant possibility.
Indian
and Pakistani troops face each other from crude but hardened sandbagged bunkers;
somewhere they have the advantage of a superior firing position, and in other
places it is us. On the whole, it balances out.
Among
the kind of battles fought on the LoC is what we men in Olive Green call a fire
assault. A fire assault means bringing great firepower to bear for a
pre-ordained span of time on a particular target to attain dominance. This story
is about one such operation.
I
commanded a company somewhere in the northern part of the LoC in the late 90s. A
company of any infantry battalion of the Indian Army usually has a hundred-odd
fighting men divided into sub units. The usual rank of a company commander is
Major.
My
company was in charge of a handful of bunkers at an average elevation of 10,000
feet. Opposite, about 800 to 1000 yards away and slightly higher than us were
Pakistani bunkers and its adjacent supply dump, a situation that allowed them
to shoot down on us, including a devastating cone of fire from company level
weapons.
This
would not do, so we devised a plan to launch a fire assault on the Pakistani
position which we believed held up to a sizable number of troops. To cause
maximum damage a 75 mm heavy gun, an old faithful, was the weapon of choice. Using
this Gun for such operations was unique concept and never done before in high
altitude terrain. For such requirement, this gun can be broken down into parts
and re-assembled quickly. The shell it fires is of large calibre and causes
great damage—it can easily blow up an ordinary house with a few well-placed
shots. Besides, we had High Explosive (HE) shells.
The heavy
gun was broken down by a couple of engineering technicians commandeered
specifically for this operation. Special mules that the Indian army uses for
exactly this kind of work were not used to maintain surprise. We got the non-combatants
from our rear administrative location—cooks, laundrymen and assorted others—to
carry the pieces of the gun during dark hours to a ridge at 13,000 feet that
looked down on the Pakistani position.
Big gun
assembled, HE ammo stacked, we waited for dusk because that’s when there was a
lull in the Pakistani fire and because it would be difficult for them to pinpoint
us and retaliate.
We pointed the gun straight at the Pakistani
bunkers rather than using the conventional mode of firing the shells in a
lobbing arc, making it like a giant pistol rather than the light artillery
piece it is meant to be.
Fire!
I ordered, and the shells began to smash into the Pakistani bunkers. We fired
30-odd big rounds into them in a matter of minutes. That group of bunker took a
lot of punishment; a dead silence reigned after through the night.
The
silence lasted two weeks; the Pakistanis didn’t fire at us. Our fire assault
had worked: devastating firepower had cowed them down into a temporary peace.
