by Shiv Aroor
The officer does have one regret regarding the mission, though—not having brought back a flag or any other object from the camps as a ‘war trophy’. Before heading out for the mission, Lt. Col. Delta had requested the Army leadership not to fix a deadline for exfiltration as the commandos were planning to return with a captured flag. ‘Unfortunately, there was no opportunity for us to seize a flag. I guess we will have to wait for another mission,’ he says, smiling.
But what happened to the Burmese hunters the commando squad had taken captive? Lt. Col. Delta instructed his men to set them free minutes before the commandos began their descent from the hill for the final assault. They were given Rs 5000 each to compensate them for the trouble. In appreciation, before they melted into the woods, the hunters offered the commandos some monitor lizard meat. Lt. Col. Delta remembers the flavour.
And the meat was just the way he liked it. Raw.
Note: Some names in this chapter have been changed to protect the identity of Special Forces officers who operate in hostile territory.
3
‘When He Awoke, Death Smiled’
Lance Naik Mohan Nath Goswami
Udhampur, Jammu and Kashmir
1 September 2015
When he awoke each day, Death smiled.
It whispered in his ear, its arms outstretched. It stalked him with every crunch that his boots made over beds of dry pine needles—on the snow-blown peaks of mountains few have even heard of.
Death would tap him on the shoulder as he trudged forward eagerly through the thickest forests, never hesitating. Like the hundreds of times before, he brushed Death off like he would a speck of dirt on his camouflage combat fatigues.
L. Nk Goswami didn’t have time for death. In the final 11 days of his life, he laughed at it straight in the face. And when it was finally time for their dance to end, it was he who let Death have him. Willingly, without wavering. And not on Death’s terms, but his own.
Even among the countless tales of unspeakable courage in the Indian Army, the story of Lance Naik Mohan Nath Goswami of the Para-SF is legendary. It is a story that even the Army regards not just with pride, but also with a sense of awe and disbelief. It is the story of a man who volunteered for 3 operations over 10 days in 2015, killing 11 terrorists in all.
On 1 September 2015, L. Nk Goswami stretched his legs outside his quarters at his Para unit headquarters in Udhampur, J&K. The unit, respected by other SF units and deeply feared by terrorists who infiltrated across the LoC, had a job that none envied.
Wearing his combat trousers, boots and a vest, the muscular warrior was fitting a few hours of rest into what had been a week bristling with action and peril. Just 4 days before, in an encounter on a mountainside not far from Rafiabad in Baramulla, L. Nk Goswami and his team had eliminated 3 Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists over an extended, furious, 2-day firefight. The squad had even managed to capture a fourth terrorist, a Pakistani national, alive. L. Nk Goswami never breathed easy, but as he strolled back and forth that morning 4 days later outside his unit camp, he did the one thing he loved more than hunting terrorists.
L. Nk Goswami used his cell phone to call his wife, Bhawna, at their small home in Lalkuan village, about 30 km outside Uttarakhand’s popular hill station of Nainital. The two would speak for a few minutes every day when possible. A gap, and this was often, always told Bhawna that L. Nk Goswami had set off on an operation. That morning, the phone didn’t need to ring a second time for her to pick up.
‘It was a very personal conversation on 1 September,’ Bhawna recalls. ‘Mohan spoke about the future, about our lives and how we needed to plan. He would constantly remind me of how uncertain a commando’s life is, and how anything could happen at any time, and how we must prepare. But he said nothing like that in his last call. He was very matter-of-fact in his manner. He was building a new house for us across the path from where we live. All I wanted to know was how he was holding up. And all he would say was he was hoping to complete the construction of our new house the following March when he came home.’
The warrior had been home in the hills of Uttarakhand the previous month for his daughter Bhumika’s seventh birthday. It had been 2 weeks of real rest before he took his train back to Udhampur and onward back to the unit he loved. Barely a week after his return to Kashmir, L. Nk Goswami would set off on the first of his final 3 operations.
Physically supremely fit, it hadn’t taken L. Nk Goswami more than a few hours to work his muscles back into action mode following a fortnight of relative repose with his family. He had been raring to set off on another hunt the moment he stepped off the train at Udhampur on Independence Day, 2015.
On 21 August 2015, a Para-SF squad led by a young officer, Capt. Dipesh Mehra, was deployed to hunt terrorists near a remote village named Khurmur in north Kashmir’s Handwara district.
The intelligence was solid: 3 terrorists were expected to arrive at a designated spot to receive 6 more who had freshly crossed the LoC. The warriors lay waiting. On the night of 22 August, while the squad descended the mountain towards Khurmur village, they spotted the shadows of 3 terrorists right in front of them in the dark. One was walking in a battle-ready position in front like a commando scout, followed by 2 behind. All 3 were carrying AK-47 rifles. Two had heavy rucksacks, presumably filled with ammunition and provisions.
Through the darkness, the commandos spotted them at a distance of no more than 10 metres. The warriors had night-vision glasses, but the foliage was very dense. The squad needed to make sure they were not civilians or woodcutters, or maybe even another Army unit that had accidentally stepped into the path of the Para squad on the hunt. They had to carry out a ‘challenge protocol’, an inherently dangerous task that involves calling out to the other.
‘This was a face-on moving contact at very close range,’ recalls a warrior who was part of the operation. ‘As soon as they were challenged, the terrorists opened fire in our squad’s direction. We returned fire. Capt. Mehra was hit by a ricocheting bullet. In the darkness it wasn’t clear how serious the injury was.’
As a fierce, close-range firefight broke out that night in Handwara, back at the squad’s headquarters in Udhampur, L. Nk Goswami and Maj. Anurag Kumar were getting set to depart in a squad vehicle on a separate mission with 2 more Para commandos. L. Nk Goswami was eager to begin. Looking at a piece of paper containing the input, while pacing excitedly in the small room where the men had met that night, L. Nk Goswami said over and over again: ‘Pukka kuchh hoga, yeh solid input hai (Something will definitely happen; this is credible information),’ insisting they leave immediately.
When not on an operation, L. Nk Goswami was known to sit from morning to night near the unit’s ‘anchor’—the communication set that was used to convey inputs on terrorists, or summon the warriors on a hunt. In ways that even his comrades sometimes failed to fathom, living, for L. Nk Goswami, was the lull between operations.
The 4 men departed late that night in a squad vehicle. The plan was to gather reinforcements on the way and arrive at a contact site where intelligence had reported the presence of at least 10 terrorists.
They were 20 minutes away from the contact spot when they received a message on their portable communication.
‘Mehra saab ko lag gayi (Mehra Sir has been shot),’ said a voice at the other end. It was from Khurmur. L. Nk Goswami immediately asserted to his colleagues, ‘Mehra saab ghaayal ho gaye hain. Wahin pe turant chalte hain (Mehra Sir is injured. Let us go there immediately).’
Maj. Kumar, the only officer among the four, paused, wondering if this was wise. Wading into a live firefight could be a terribly risky proposition for them. But L. Nk Goswami implored the officer, saying there was nothing more important than reaching their comrades in trouble.
‘As team commander, I had to think for the whole squad. Their lives were my responsibility. But L. Nk Goswami had amazing persuading power. This was emotional work for him. He would not let go,’ remembers Maj. Kumar.
He asked L. Nk Goswami to calm down and think straight. There were conflicting reports from the Khurmur site about precisely what kind of trouble Capt. Dipesh Mehra’s squad was in. Did they really need to divert there instead of continuing with their separate mission to hunt 10 terrorists? By now, L. Nk Goswami was beseeching the officer.
‘We have to go there. We will regret it forever if it turns out that Mehra saab could have been saved if we had intervened on time. We don’t have a choice,’ L. Nk Goswami had said.
By this time, word had also reached them that the terrorists in Khurmur may have also had a Pulemyot Kalashnikov machine gun, a brute force weapon that the Para commandos would have found near impossible to dodge in such a close engagement. Worse, communication from the squad at Khurmur had fallen silent. Was it all over? It was the trigger needed for a final decision.
Maj. Kumar ordered the vehicle to turn around and head straight towards Khurmur at full throttle. As the vehicle tore through the night at a speed of 120 kmph, L. Nk Goswami sat up straight, every bit of his posture ready to leap out and into battle.
About 200 metres short of the contact site in Khurmur, L. Nk Goswami asked the vehicle’s driver to switch off the headlamps, sensing they were exposed. He was right. The moment the lights were switched off, a hail of bullets clattered around the car, missing it by barely a few feet. The terrorists had seen the approaching vehicle and let loose a few shots directly at it. The four Para warriors scrambled out of their car and began the careful trek through the darkness in the general direction of the terrorists. L. Nk Goswami led the way.
‘Mohan Nath always led from the front, in the dangerous but critical scout position,’ recalls Maj. Kumar. ‘I would often tell him he was senior enough now, and that he should let younger warriors play scout to get experience. His reply was always the same, and there was no arrogance in it, just plain, honest opinion: “Sir, mujhse achha kaun kar sakta hai? [Sir, who can do it better than I?]”. He promised that if anyone proved more effective than him as a scout, he would personally invite that person to lead.’
Until a better warrior was found, L. Nk Goswami wouldn’t risk the lives of the men he was with. He was clear about that.
Though the squad had just faced fire, they only had a general 6-figure grid reference, a rough geographical coordinate, on the location of the terrorists who had let loose the volley of bullets. The 4 men crept down the path towards the 100-sq. m area that would be their hunting ground in the dark. On the fringes of Khurmur village, as the land rose into a forested Handwara hillside, the 4 warriors got on to their bellies. In the darkness, 20 metres up that same hillside, were the terrorists with their weapons.
And 10 metres away from them lay an injured Capt. Dipesh Mehra along with the rest of his squad. Intermittent fire rang out at close quarters. L. Nk Goswami and the other 3 warriors had crept right up to the firefight, positioning themselves flat on the ground under a large tree.
The situation was ripe for disaster. With neither squad accurately aware of where the other was, the risk of shots being fired at mistaken targets was very real. L. Nk Goswami quickly slithered over to Maj. Kumar and told him to convey on the communication set to the other squad that he would be blinking his flashlight to indicate his position—a terribly dangerous move in the situation, but it was the only way to take the next step. Maj. Kumar once again cautioned him, saying the flashlight would paint a big fat target sign on them for the terrorists to fire at. L. Nk Goswami was nonchalant. ‘Let them fire at us, sir. This tree will protect us.’
Maj. Kumar was right. As the flashlight was switched on, a burst of Kalashnikov fire exploded down the hillside towards the 4 men under the tree. And as L. Nk Goswami had predicted, the fat branches of the tree took much of the fire. Their position now revealed, the squad engaged directly with the militants, with L. Nk Goswami managing to quickly kill 1. Capt. Mehra’s squad quickly relocated to join their 4 comrades at the base of the hill. As the terrifying close combat continued, L. Nk Goswami helped the injured Captain out of the area, his arm slung across his shoulder. All the while, he kept himself between the injured man and the firing terrorists, just in case a bullet managed to find them in the darkness. By morning, the other 2 terrorists had been killed too.
Operation Khurmur, as it was later formally code-named, was a victory, and a powerful message to the terror training camps in PoK. August was the heart of the waning summer season, and every soldier in the state knows what that means: that terror groups would be looking to crank up the infiltrations and replenish their hidden cells on India’s side of the LoC before the unforgiving winter put a virtual stop to any such cross-border activity. The next 2 months would see a visible ramping up of scale and audacity. L. Nk Goswami and his team knew that squads like theirs were India’s principal weapon against this annual rising tide.
The squad had barely squeezed in a 2-day lull when a fresh intelligence input trickled into their camp on the morning of 26 August. They hadn’t expected much rest anyway. Para squads never do.
Five Pakistani terrorists had infiltrated across the LoC in the Uri sector. It was a difficult entry point, with some of Kashmir’s most hostile terrain, but one that afforded several hiding places. The 5 had trekked over the Shamshabari range, scaled the formidable Kalapahar mountain and weathered the 4000-metre-high Kazi Nag Dhar as they made their way towards the more manageable lowlands of the Kashmir valley. One of the men had been shot dead in a brief encounter with men from the Army’s 35 Rashtriya Rifles on a remote ridgeline on the Shamshabari. The other 4 had escaped at double speed, taking advantage of the evasive tactics that are a special part of terrorist training.
Minutes after killing 1 of the 5, the leader of the 35 Rashtriya Rifles team at the site had quickly called for a drone to track the 4 terrorists who had escaped. A Searcher Mark II drone was scrambled immediately from an airbase in the Kashmir valley, darting straight and high over the Shamshabari range, its cameras and thermal imagers switched on. Infiltrating terrorists make sure they limit their movement by day, using the darkness to cover ground and head to their destinations. But before sunrise on 26 August, the featureless crests of the Shamshabari gave the drone a perfect view of the terrorists in the dark, their bodies showing up as 4 ‘hot’ blotches ambling over the featureless expanse of the range. The drone would remain in the air, tracking their every movement as they made their way towards Baramulla.
The 4 men could be seen climbing down a hillside littered with enormous boulders and, apparently, a network of caves and crevasses. At 0545 hours, with the sun now out, the drone witnessed the 4 men stopping and taking cover. This would be their last known location.
An hour earlier, over at the Para-SF unit’s headquarters, L. Nk Goswami was among 12 men who were issued a ‘warning order’, placing them on operational standby to be dropped from a helicopter on to that boulder-strewn ridge to hunt and kill the 4 infiltrators. By 0700 hours, an Army Dhruv chopper lifted off from Udhampur with the 12 commandos, including L. Nk Goswami and Maj. Kumar, taking a deliberately circuitous route before finally identifying a landing zone on the ridge and dropping the warriors off at 0930 hours. The fully armed men grouped for a quick execution plan for a hunt that would later be code-named ‘Operation Lidder Panzal’.
The landing zone was about 4 km away from the last known location of the terrorists as designated by the Searcher Mark II drone, which was still in the air above the range.
Twelve of India’s most hardened warriors were on the hunt for the 4 terrorists. But even they knew that being transplanted to a 4000-metre altitude would substantially limit their true strength. The thinner air would bring on fatigue faster. And this being an airborne operation, each man had a combat load of over 40 kg. As they gazed up at the ridge, none of the dozen knew just how long the hunt that lay before them would stretch on for.
As the men began their careful trek through a maze of boulders along the ridgeline, the drone kept the warriors in its sight, its pilot sitting far
away at a secret location, updating the Para commandos in real time about how close they were to where the terrorists were believed to be resting. The men trudged on towards their quarry, crossing a glacial lake and uninterrupted mountain terrain. By noon, they were close.
As always, L. Nk Goswami led the squads as the scout out in front. Maj. Kumar remembers how L. Nk Goswami actually managed to keep the squads a step ahead of the technologically advanced drone that buzzed high above them.
‘He used his terrain wisdom to detect a trail—something that the drone couldn’t see. Mohan actually discerned what he was sure were footprints in the misty dew that settled on the patches of grass between rocks at that altitude,’ Maj. Kumar remembers.
Some of the men were sceptical, wondering whether L. Nk Goswami was reading too much into what he saw on the ground. But the warrior was certain.
‘Issi taraf se gaye hai, sir. Contact humko mil jaayega (They have definitely passed through here. We will find them),’ L. Nk Goswami said, bending down to scrutinize a trail that was clear to him and apparently nobody else.
Not for the first time, team leader Maj. Kumar decided to go with L. Nk Goswami’s gut. He dispatched 1 squad down the ‘trail’ L. Nk Goswami had found, and sent the second one higher up the ridge to take a commanding position in case the terrorists were waiting in ambush.
‘I have never known a highlander like Mohan. If he hadn’t spotted that trail in the mountain dew, we were almost certainly headed into an ambush situation,’ remembers Maj. Kumar. ‘We would have lost men.’
By this time, the Army drone pilot had communicated to the Para team that the 4 terrorists were hiding inside a cave at the target location. The 2 squads had split up through the boulders, agreeing to arrive at the cave at precisely the same time. The tactic was simple. Two teams arriving from 2 different directions would distract and divide the attention of the terrorists, halving the effectiveness of their possible retaliation.
