Shiv Aroor - India’s Most Fearless: True Stories of Modern Military Heroes

Without heroes, we are all plain people

And dont know how far we can go.

Bernard Malamud

Lead me, follow me,

Or get the hell out of my way.

General George S. Patton Jr

As we sat in an underground chamber with the young Indian Army officer, his beard hiding most of his face, it was with an overpowering sense of disbelief. Here was a man who had been trained for swift, unapologetic destruction of targets, a man who, only a few months before, armed with an assault rifle, night-vision goggles and a hand-picked group of Indias most fearless warriors, had led his band of Special Forces (SF) men into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) near the Line of Control (LoC). We needed to remind ourselves constantly that this was the first time Major Mike Tango was talking to journalists about the hair-raising mission he led into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) in September 2016. As a result, the book you hold in your hands contains the only first-hand account of that astonishing missionby the very man who led it.

Maj. Tangos awe-inspiring tale is the first of fourteen stories we have the privilege of narrating in this book. The recounting of each story has been a journey into spaces that are usually both physically and emotionally out of bounds: where brothers in arms of fallen heroes still pick up the pieces of a glorious shared past; where widows, from the mountains of Uttarakhand and Arunachal Pradesh to the plains of Karnataka, resign themselves to a life that will forever be laced with a curious mix of pride and grief; where men who have demonstrated fearlessness beyond anything even conceivable to most of us explain it away as just another day on the job...

These are stories like that of Lt. Col. Oscar Delta, who led a revenge mission on foreign soil just as his mother was being wheeled away for cancer surgery; or the young marine commando who would save fellow warriors only to have a grenade burst like a birthday balloon on his chest; or the Air Force pilot who decided, trapped in a screaming, shattered cockpit, that all those years of torture-testing needed to amount to something.

Not every one of the heroes you will read about in this book is alive. Telling their stories has meant that those who saw them fall, those who fought alongside them in their final moments, have permitted us access to what is for them a sacred place. It is a place where memories and trauma remain untouched and stowed away perforce so that the proverbial show may go onlike the hair-raising tales of Lance Naik Mohan Nath Goswami and Havildar Hangpan Dada, who are deified and worshipped by their units for acts of courage that even their fellow warriors say they will spend an entire lifetime coming to terms with. It is an irony we would encounter endlessly as we conducted interviews for this booksoldiers often do not have more than a few minutes to mourn their departed comrades.

The way we as citizens regard the lives and stories of soldiers today is another monumental irony. We live in times when we encounter almost daily a stream of grainy mugshots of deceased soldiers followed by photographs of their flag-draped caskets at military funerals. We feel exultant pride at their acts of bravery, fuelled by social and television mediaonly to be forgotten the next day. It occurred to us in the writing of this book that the levels of fearlessness displayed even routinely by the men you will read aboutand countless more whose stories we hope to tell in futurereserve for them a place in the pantheon of immortals, legends. But never mind the details of their courage, how many soldiers can most of us even recall by name?

A third irony that we found ourselves frequently wrestling with was the godlike portrayal of military heroes in the media for the brief moments that they were remembered. As we journeyed through these tales, we were often struck by a violent collisionbetween the perception of these men as superhuman, and the frequent sledgehammer reminders that they are just like us, their lives back home just like ours, where PAN cards need to be obtained, home loan instalments to be paid, ageing parents to be taken care of, tiffs with girlfriends to resolve, decisions to be pondered over such as what cake to get for their daughters birthday, and whether to order butter chicken or kofta curry.

Historically, an impulse has existed to revere the military and its heroes as a physically and mentally superior class of human beings (Plato called them guardians, for instance), closer to divinity than their human roots. It is possibly a way to offset our own feeling of inadequacy that such acts of courage and fearlessness are really possible by those among us. In the stories you read in this book, we have attempted to straddle both these worlds.

Becoming a part of the lives of the men we have written about, their units and their families, we found ourselves dealing with our own sense of trauma. Drawn into a world where life and death were literally just that and not a clichs, it was difficult for us to remain unscathed. We do not claim to bear wounds, but we also cannot claim to have been immune to the threads of heartbreak, fury, pride and disbelief that weave through all of these tales.

One often hears the phrase supreme sacrifice being used to describe the death of a soldier in the line of duty. It is a paradoxical term, heavy with implication. Yet, it instantly conveys what it intends to: an act of selflessness so high that the most basic instinctto survivefades away and yields to the decision to fight to the death.

American writer and mythologist Joseph Campbell once said, A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.

What explains that final act of giving? What is that inscrutable space where the will to survive gives way to an epiphany that death in those circumstances will serve a higher purpose? What is that purpose? The survival of fellow comrades, the extraction of a hostage, successful escape from a tightening cordon of a marauding enemy.