India's Most Fearless 2

by Shiv Aroor

  Early in the morning on 25 May, aided by the log, the Alpha Company of 4 Garhwal Rifles stepped into a minefield.

  It would turn out to be a deeply tense operation, with each man on edge, sweating even at that altitude as they placed the log carefully, hoping it wouldn’t be on a mine. The log allowed them to reduce the risk of a mine explosion significantly, but didn’t eliminate it completely.

  ‘The innovation ensured safety, but it really slowed down our movement,’ says a soldier from the squad. ‘We were moving ahead at a snail’s pace, one man covering six feet at a time. We took almost 5 hours to cover around 350 to 400 m. We were very mine-conscious and took every precaution possible as we approached the LoC. The moment we got close to the LoC, Maj. Preetam started scouting for an area that would give us both good cover and an unrestricted view.’

  By noon, having finally crossed the mined stretch, the squad took up its new positions. Only minutes after they had done so, Maj. Preetam’s radio crackled.

  ‘Spotted and in sight, two men in the nallah straight ahead,’ said a soldier, who was looking through his binoculars from an elevated position.

  The two men the soldier had spotted were about 75 m away across the LoC. Maj. Preetam had split his squad into four buddy pairs, each positioned 30 m apart to provide a 90-m breadth of cover.

  ‘The moment he gave me that information, I immediately changed my position and moved closer to him,’ says Maj. Preetam. ‘This was the first time I was observing likely terrorists from such a close distance. I felt an adrenaline rush. I instructed my squad to hold fire, and not to open fire until I said so. We sat in our positions and observed them. The two men retreated a short distance.’

  Maj. Preetam then called his buddy, Lance Naik Sukhpal, and told him that the two of them would be moving about 40 m closer to the LoC, descending from a spur. He ordered the remaining three pairs to remain in their positions.

  ‘We took our chances without the log, since there was very little time, and because there’s little possibility of mines sticking to a slope,’ Maj. Preetam says. ‘From our new position, closer to the LoC, we could see not only the two men who had been spotted a few moments earlier, but also three more. So there was a total of five, and three of them were carrying weapons. It was now clear that this was the same terror squad that had left the Badori foothills the previous night and was now approaching the LoC.’

  Maj. Preetam radioed his CO. When Col. Samarjit was informed about the sighting of five likely infiltrators, he ordered Maj. Preetam and Lance Naik Sukhpal to retreat to their earlier position immediately. Gathering a QRT at Rustom, Col. Samarjit immediately departed the post and made for the LoC to join what was clearly turning into a major operation.

  ‘Looks like they plan to take one of the three nallahs to cross the LoC and come to our side, Sir,’ Maj. Preetam told his CO. ‘I have a hunch about which nallah they will use, but we are watching all three to be safe.’

  At 3 p.m., suddenly, the five terrorists retreated and disappeared from view. Col. Samarjit ordered Maj. Preetam’s squad to retreat further, to the position they had taken up before crossing the mined area. Using the log once again, the eight men crossed back over the minefield in failing light, reaching their earlier position by nightfall.

  ‘We took positions there and sat throughout the night—it was extremely cold,’ says Maj. Preetam. ‘Once again, we kept an uninterrupted watch across the LoC.’

  The squad had been outdoors in the cold for over 48 hours since they left the Rustom post. At first light the following day, 26 May, Maj. Preetam took five men and used the log to return across the minefield for the third time, towards the LoC. Two men were left behind at the position from where the first two terrorists had been spotted in a nallah the previous day.

  The hours rolled by, with no sign of the men who had been spotted 24 hours earlier. Then, at 4 p.m., three figures came into view.

  ‘It was sudden and very clear—we detected three people about to cross the LoC with weapons and rucksacks,’ says Maj. Preetam. ‘They were barely 40 m away. We decided not to engage them because we were not certain how many of them there were.’

  At 40 m, and undetected, Maj. Preetam and his men had a clear shot of the three terrorists and could have finished them right there. But the officer waited. And there was good reason.

  Forty metres. Close enough to hear their footfalls splashing in the nallah.

  ‘We could see only three men—but if there were six or eight of them, the remaining guys would retreat the moment firing began,’ says Maj. Preetam. ‘I wanted to wait until the full group showed itself. Maybe there were six or eight or ten. It was hard to say. If we opened fire at the three we could see, the remaining would easily escape. We didn’t want that to happen. We would lose the element of surprise and alert the Pakistani Army post 500 m away. It would have been ready to provide firing support to the infiltrating group, which is their standard operating procedure.’

  Once again, Col. Samarjit ordered Maj. Preetam and his men to fall back. The CO and his team had reached a nearby post, taking position to block another infiltration route.

  ‘As we fell back this time, we decided not to use the log as we wanted to retreat quickly and without a moment to lose,’ says Maj. Preetam. ‘There was a sense of urgency and I decided to take that risk. I didn’t have the luxury of wasting 4 or 5 hours. Once we crossed the minefield, we went straight to link up with our CO and his squad. We were now in a place that the infiltrators needed to cross, no matter which route or nallah they chose.’

  The three infiltrators who had been spotted crossing one of the nallahs that day had stopped and waited after they crossed, observing the stretch of LoC ahead of them. Col. Samarjit’s team had already blocked one of the nallahs.

  ‘I told my CO that they have crossed the nallah, and now their intent is clear,’ Maj. Preetam says. ‘They are terrorists about to infiltrate. It was still hard to say which route they would take from where they had stopped, as there were two more nallahs ahead, giving them two more possible routes. But we had both covered now. All possible infiltration routes were closely guarded.’

  The men of 4 Garhwal Rifles were now simply waiting for the full group to cross the LoC and reveal its true numbers.

  ‘My buddy and I had taken position on one side of a nallah,’ says Maj. Preetam. ‘Our CO was on the other side. The complete area was covered. At around 6.30 p.m., as the sun was setting, our squad spotted five men. They were walking with weapons in one hand and walking sticks used for hiking in another. They had rucksacks slung on their backs.’

  Five men. Thirty metres away.

  Maj. Preetam radioed his CO. Col. Samarjit immediately told the squads that no one would open fire until Maj. Preetam gave the go-ahead as he was the closest to the approaching terror group.

  As Maj. Preetam and Lance Naik Sukhpal fixed their night-vision-aided gaze on the five figures stepping slowly towards the LoC, another terrorist stepped into view behind them.

  ‘So six were visible now,’ says Maj. Preetam. ‘The sixth guy was far behind. The first five men were walking 5 m behind each other, but the sixth man was about 20 m behind the fifth. I thought that the sixth man was perhaps leading another squad. There was a possibility that we were dealing with a dozen well-equipped and trained terrorists.’

  It was perplexing. Why was the sixth terrorist walking so far behind the group? Again, Maj. Preetam told his squad not to open fire till all six men had crossed the second nallah. The men were climbing up a small spur. They would need to descend from it before crossing the second nallah that was covered by Col. Samarjit’s squad. The moment they crossed the nallah, they would be in the field of fire of both squads.

  They were being lured into a kill zone they had shown no signs of having noticed yet.

  Just as the terrorist group entered the second nallah, the sixth man splashed through the water to catch up with the first five, now marching with a distance of 5 m between them. Crossing
the second nallah, the terrorists stopped for a moment. And their postures completely changed.

  ‘As we watched, they crossed the nallah and immediately assumed tactical postures,’ says Maj. Preetam. ‘They were now holding their weapons in an offensive posture, each of them scanning the area carefully, I could tell. Perhaps they knew that they could be ambushed any moment and were prepared to fight back. They knew they were in the danger zone now. They didn’t know we were waiting for them, but they had clearly been trained not to let their guard down for even a moment.’

  As CO of the unit, Col. Samarjit had his weapon pointed and ready. He didn’t have a moment to think of anything else, but couldn’t help remembering that this group of infiltrators were the first since the 2016 surgical strikes—it was beyond doubt that they weren’t coming in for small kills. They had to be stopped at all costs.

  ‘I remember thinking—these guys are looking to infiltrate, and then they’ll recruit a whole lot more people and head straight for the Valley to create mayhem,’ says Col. Samarjit. ‘We had to stop them, no matter what.’

  Maj. Preetam and his buddy soldier were in a position to cover an area between the two nallahs, where both merged into a single large stream. In the dark, with their night-vision goggles strapped on, the squad watched as the six terrorists stepped through the middle nallah into the Indian side, climbing a spur and passing Maj. Preetam and his buddy.

  ‘The moment they crossed me and my buddy, I looked at my watch—it was 7.13 p.m.,’ says Maj. Preetam. ‘That was the time I radioed all squads to open fire.’

  The men had been out there for two days, tracking the terrorists from a stone’s throw away, but hadn’t fired a single bullet so far. Finally, they had their orders.

  ‘Every man was waiting for this,’ says Maj. Preetam, who opened up his AK-47 with a furious burst of fire directly at the six terrorists. ‘We had already decided that we would open fire when the first terrorist crossed the first buddy pair. And the other buddy pairs would engage when they saw them. All the infiltrating terrorists were now in the range of our men. They didn’t get much reaction time because they were climbing up a spur when we opened fire. But remember, they were very well trained. Like commandos.’

  AK-47 with under-barrel grenade launcher

  The six terrorists stopped in their tracks, taking cover, with two of them firing back in the darkness. The Indian squads were well concealed, so the two terrorists fired randomly.

  Maj. Preetam realized he needed to move if this operation was to end well.

  ‘From the place where I was firing and carrying out surveillance, I didn’t have much cover,’ he remembers. ‘This was from where I was informing the other pairs about the number of terrorists that had passed me and my buddy. The plan was that the moment the crossfire started, I would change my location.’

  The lead infiltrator and the man behind him were killed in the opening minutes of the ambush. The third and fourth terrorists scrambled to take cover behind a boulder, disappearing from the line of sight of Maj. Preetam and his buddy soldier. The fifth and sixth terrorists were being fired at by the other pairs. A full-fledged firefight had erupted by this time.

  ‘Sukhpal and I crawled for about 25 m to take position on slightly higher ground to see if we could engage the two terrorists who had hidden behind the boulder,’ says Maj. Preetam. ‘We took cover behind a tree with a thick trunk, from where we spotted both of them. We could see the muzzle flashes of their rifles as they stuck their weapons out to fire at us.’

  As the crossfire intensified, the sixth terrorist was spotted climbing up the hill towards Maj. Preetam and his buddy. He was crawling quietly, without firing, hoping to sneak up on the two and kill them at close quarters.

  ‘Uss ko dikh gaya tha ki maximum firing kahaan se ho rahi hai (He could make out where the maximum fire was coming from—our position),’ says Maj. Preetam.

  The terrorist got to his feet and began running towards the officer and his buddy. Just as Maj. Preetam and the soldier began to move from their position, a grenade fired by one of the terrorists from behind the boulder landed a few metres away.

  ‘I think he must have seen us as we also had to stick out our rifles from behind the tree trunk to fire at them,’ says Maj. Preetam. ‘The blast was deafening and for a few moments, I could neither hear nor see anything. The grenade exploded very close to us. Splinter kaanon ke itne paas se gaye ki mujhe unki awaaz aa rahi thi (The splinters were flying so close to my ears that I could hear them). I screamed out to Sukhpal to see if he was okay. He asked me the same question. We were both okay.’

  The sixth terrorist, who had been running towards them, was shot down by another buddy pair who had seen him when he got to his feet. Three terrorists were now dead, with three left. At this point, Maj. Preetam left his cover briefly and stepped closer to the boulder that still hid two terrorists.

  ‘From 15 m away, I lobbed a grenade at them,’ says Maj. Preetam. ‘They were both killed by that grenade. After throwing the grenade, I was still firing in their direction, and so was Sukhpal. Firing from behind the boulder had stopped totally.’

  There was now only one terrorist left, and he was approaching Col. Samarjit’s squad. Maj. Preetam quickly radioed his CO to tell him, asking him to throw grenades in his direction. Col. Samarjit’s buddy soldier flung a grenade directly at the approaching terrorist, while the other squads fired towards him. The terrorist crumpled to the ground just as he was about to break into a run for the final stretch to the CO’s squad position.

  All the six terrorists were dead. They had been drawn into a kill zone and eliminated in under 15 minutes. The ambush site had been designed in such a way that there was no real place for the infiltrators to hide for any extended period. They had been, in effect, lured to a place from which there was no escape. From any one point, the terrorists were visible to at least one of the buddy pairs, allowing for two pairs of eyes to be fixed on them no matter where they tried to run or hide. By the time the assault rifles finally fell silent, the sky was overblown with clouds and it had begun to drizzle.

  ‘I radioed my squad to check if everyone was okay,’ says Maj. Preetam. ‘My CO was doing the same. There were seventeen of us in that operation. My team of eight, which included me, and our CO and his QRT of eight soldiers. That area, in the shape of a bowl, was covered by these seventeen men. We enjoyed the advantage of height. The ambush site was chosen very carefully. And we got the results we wanted. We were still very alert, because you never know—there might still have been some more people hiding somewhere. We told our surveillance detachment to keep the area, that section of the LoC, under watch to see if more infiltrator squads were coming. All our men were still behind cover.’

  The squads then launched quadcopter drones equipped with thermal cameras for an airborne sweep of the area—a final effort to ensure they hadn’t missed a terrorist or two. With the all-clear from above, the squads settled down on the mountainside to wait the night out.

  At first light on 27 May, the men of 4 Garhwal Rifles began searching the ambush site to retrieve the bodies of the six terrorists. Standard operating procedure needed to be followed in every case.

  ‘First, we took headshots from up close to make sure they were dead,’ says Maj. Preetam. ‘Terrorists trained by the Pakistani Army frequently use their bodies as booby traps. We use a rope and hook to move the bodies. We throw the hook hoping for it to catch on the body. If not, we go close to the body and anchor it and then pull the body from a distance of about 25 m. If there is a grenade under the body, it will explode.’

  The search and retrieval of bodies continued till early in the afternoon. The men looked at each other, and then to their company commander as they completed the ‘mopping up’ operation, which involved special surveillance by two buddy pairs to ensure that the ambushers weren’t ambushed by any more infiltrators.

  ‘As a company commander on the ground, my top priority was that there should be not be a single scra
tch on any of the men I am leading,’ says Maj. Preetam. ‘This was a highly dangerous mission, and we needed to stay motivated as a team. Imagine the scout out front. He knows the area is infested with mines. But he follows my word because he trusts me. No mission is possible without the trust of your men. And it was that trust that allowed me to plan the mission in such a way that all of us stayed alive.’

  With the mopping up operation complete, the squads finally received word that they could return to Rustom post.

  ‘This was an operation that stood on a razor’s edge,’ says Col. Samarjit. ‘This terrain was tricky. The minefield threat was real. The terrorists were very well trained. And we still managed to ensure there wasn’t a single scratch on any of the men. It was a very clean operation, although Preetam and his buddy, Sukhpal, exposed themselves to a lot of risk during close-quarter surveillance of the infiltrators and by frequently relocating their ambush site.’

  Back at Rustom post a few hours later, Maj. Preetam, Col. Samarjit and some of the team gathered in the operations room for a debrief about the mission and to take stock of what they had accomplished. If there was a unanimous takeaway, it was fire discipline.

  ‘If you lose the element of surprise, chances are you will end up getting killed,’ Maj. Preetam says. ‘I made it very clear that no one will open fire till I order them to. Imagine you are observing two or three guys with weapons and they are a few metres away. You know that either they are going to kill you or they will get killed. That is the time you have to be in control of the situation. You cannot suddenly become trigger-happy and fire. Had we done that that day, we would have got only three of them. The remaining would have escaped. It is easy to forget how crucial and indispensable fire discipline is.’

  He may have been the one issuing orders to his men to hold their fire, but Maj. Preetam would remember how it was his own momentary lapse of fire discipline that had cost him at least seven terrorists two years earlier, when he operated as part of the Army’s 28 Division in Kupwara. An early burst of fire had sent a large group of terrorists scurrying back across the LoC, depriving the squad of a major encounter. The squad had waited 96 hours for the terrorists, but a few bullets fired too early had brought the operation to an end in minutes. A major infiltration had been foiled, but the terrorists had got away alive—certain to attempt another infiltration at a future date. That day, Maj. Preetam had decided he would never make the same mistake again.