![Preserving stories from the Indian Army: Ghosts of the Forest [Part 1 of 3]](https://external-preview.redd.it/j5FANt06UEwtWkq5UsnYrNNeOzZ4jlrbm9adbXgAUB8.jpeg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=165049de0e8501714ee246cbc8196fd2f06fc742)
Preserving stories from the Indian Army: Ghosts of the Forest [Part 1 of 3]
Following up on my last story and sharing another one.
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“Pa, what was that story you told me about your hike in Nagaland”, my friend Anuj asked his father. Our group of friends had gathered at Anuj’s place for beers. Through the night we’d been trading stories of recent travels, and slowly been one-upping each other on outdoorsy-ness. Rohit kicked us off with a tale of his overnight hike in Himachal Pradesh. Zorawar barely let me complete oohing and ahhing over Rohit’s story before launching into a painfully descriptive retelling of an eight day hike around Mount Annapurna in Nepal. Karan, not to be outdone, tried to win on effort and exoticism — he’d trekked Patagonia a few years ago, and unlike South Asian treks where you primarily carry just your clothes and toiletries, he had to lug 25 kgs of tents, kitchenware, and food.
Anuj had seen his dad walk by the living room when he stopped him to ask this question. We’d see how the old man’s tales matched up against ours. “Hike?...HIKE!? That wasn’t a bloody hike” his father responded. We all tensed up. We’d never seen his father get animated.
“It was three months of bushwhacking across 800 kilometers in brutal terrain.” No one was going to trump this story. Just the headline blew our stories out of the water.
“Let’s hear it Pa”, Anuj requested his father. I got up to make uncle a drink.
---
It’s the early 1970s. Nagaland is overrun with the Naga separatist movement — they want to break free from India and form their own country of Nagalim. The Indian military has been struggling to suppress the movement. The Naga separatists attack military and police posts and stations, and then melt back into the dense mountain forests, sometimes over the border into Burma.
The general in command of the area realizes that in order to have any hope, they need to understand the land around them. That would help them identify the separatists’ routes of attack, paths of retreat, potential areas of refuge, and locations of separatist camps.
They call in the special forces for this. We are uniquely skilled to carry out offensive actions in a quick and lightweight manner. While the traditional military is often designed around a capture-and-consolidate model.
Before we even fly out, we know that urgency is key. The longer the Indian military fights blind in Nagaland, the more causalities there would be and the stronger the separatist movement would get. We decide to sprint-run this mission — we will continuously map the terrain for a month, and rotate out any team members who get injured or sick.
A hundred of us fly in on transport planes to Nagaland. As we descend towards the airfield, we can see the terrain we’d be walking for the next few months. It’s like a bedsheet has been pleated, bunched together, and then laid down — it’s just ridges after ridges after ridges. Villages on one side of a ridge are two days’ walk from the village on the other side, even if you can draw a straight line of just a few kilometers between them. And that’s without accounting for the dense vegetation. We squint and peer as we drop height, but still can’t spot a single trail in the forests and can barely see the forest floor. I turn back into the plane and see one of my friends has pulled the bushwacking machete out from his kit bag and is miming sharpening it.
We all laugh. Full of the mirth that ignorance brings. We don’t yet know how much action our machetes will see in the next few weeks.
---
“Had any of you done anything like this before?” Zorawar asked.
“No,” Anuj’s father replied. “Our operations were usually much shorter. Sometimes we were in enemy territory for two weeks at a time, surveilling them, biding our time for the right time to strike. But we had never done a month straight, and never in the conditions we were about to experience.”
“Damn. How did you prepare for it then?”
“We didn’t,” his father laughed. “The ethos was a little different then — we were a hardy bunch of twenty-something year olds. Before we even got into the special forces, many of us had already been to war.” He paused over there. I believe it was the first time it struck him that he had been younger than his son by the time he had already seen war once. “So, uh, yeah…”, he seemed still lost in thought. Picturing his own son at war must have disturbed him. “Yes, that coupled with the fact that we were special forces. So we believed that we could do anything. Take on anyone. And our senior officers believed the same.”
---
We drive up to the eastern most army outpost in the state, and offload there. We divide into three pre-decided groups of about thirty each, give each other nods, and then head off in three different directions into the forest.
It’s hot and humid our entire time in the forest. It’s thirty five Celsius in the shade, and about ninety percent humidity. We’re constantly sweating, but it’s not evaporating and we aren’t cooling down. We had calculated needing one to two liters of water per person per day, but at the rate we’re sweating we need five to six liters.
After our initial water supply runs low, we have to start rationing it until we can find another water source. We drink just a couple of sips of water in the morning. In the afternoon, we can have the equivalent of a glass of water, twice. And finally in the evening, one more glass. We are so thirsty, all the time.
In those first few days, all I think about is water. I am amazed by how many hours my mind can spend fixated on drinkable liquids, and how many forms they can take. I think about water in a glass, bottled water, Fanta, Rooh Afza, nimbu paani, shikanji, butter milk, and beer. I picture rain water, lakes, and streams. I imagine plunging myself into a well and just drinking it dry. It's not just during the day that we obsess over water. It’s on our minds at night, even in our dreams.
When we came across our first stream, it becomes an exercise in restraint. We have to cautiously circle the area, making sure it’s not a trap. All the while imagining how that water will feel in our mouths and throats. Then we send a small team down to get a sample of water, to test for any poisoning. The rest of us wait, eyes fixed to the spot where we can see light glinting off the water. The water is good, but we can’t drink it just yet. We fill our bottles with the stream water and toss in purifying pills to kill any bacteria. Our commanding officer states the time, and commands us to wait half an hour for the pills to act. In normal circumstances he wouldn’t have to do this, we are smart soldiers. But these were not normal circumstances. He lets us know the thirty minutes are over with a loud “Cheers men.” Then, and only then, can we taste the deliciously thirst quenching liquid.
I never tasted anything as good as that cool stream water, before or after.
After that first week, we become more deliberate in how we’re looking for water sources. We get good at reading the topography to find water. We learn which faces of the mountains got the most rain in the previous rainy season. We learn how their slopes dictate where water will percolate. We learn where the ground water will be closest to the surface. We become uncannily good at uncovering rivulets, and use them to refill our bottles.
Water’s still on our minds, but the thinking is a lot more productive.
Before falling sleep, we dig triangular holes in the mud and cover it with a plastic sheet. The sheet is held in place with rocks. We then place a tiny pebble at the center of this sheet. Overnight, these sheets collect condensation. If you’re fortunate, you can get about half a liter per sheet.
After that experience in Nagaland, I never took tap water for granted again.
---
“I know what you mean”, Karan interrupted. The rest of us nodded. We all had just remembered the thirstiest we’ve ever felt, and then tried to amplify that in our imagination.
“When I was hiking Patagonia,” he continued “drinking water after a day’s hike became a laborious ceremony. It’s not like reaching for the bottle in the fridge. I had to plan the act an hour in advance. I would hike down to the nearest stream, fill my water filtration system—”
“Are you joking!?” Rohit nearly yelled.
“What?”
“Are you seriously trying to compare your experience glamping across some tourist destination to what uncle just told us?” Rohit asked, incredulous but half-smiling, happy to have found an opportunity to trash talk Karan.
“No, I mean I just, I, I wanted to relate to uncle.”
“You can relate to him by making him another drink” Rohit replied. We all laughed.
And I quietly noticed that Anuj’s father had finished that drink suddenly when Karan interrupted him. It was like the thirst came back from all those years ago.
---
In these initial few weeks, it isn’t just the weather and lack of water we have to get used to. We have to deal with the morale crushingly slow pace of progress.
When we are near villages or suspected enemy areas, we need to leave any existing trails. To remain undetected we need to walk off trail. But these mountains are thick with trees and shrubbery. So thick that even at midday, not a single ray of sunshine would touch the forest floor. And if a ray isn’t getting through, a full grown man sure as hell isn’t.
We have to hack our way through the forest using ‘dahs’. These are machetes we use to cut the shrubbery and undergrowth. We walk single file and let two people at the front of the line cut the vegetation. It’s grueling work, so every so often we change who’s at the front.
Each kilometer takes us an hour. Our arms are throbbing by the end of the day. And because we are moving so slow, we become easy targets for insects. We are bitten raw.
Sometimes when we set up camp at night, it feels like I can throw a stone and hit the spot where we started the day. All of that day’s effort feels pointless.
Not only are we cutting through forest, we are often doubling back on ourselves as well. We know that some of the local population would inform on us to the separatists. Tell them where we are headed and set us up for ambush. So we have to counter that by spreading misinformation. After we pass unavoidable villages, we walk in a direction that’s different from our intended destination. We do this for two or three hours, until we are out of line of sight of the village, and then we redirect towards our actual destination. This is extremely frustrating for us. Every time we pass near a village, we basically lose an entire day trying to throw the separatists off our trail.
We come to the conclusion that mapping this terrain isn’t going to take us one month. It’s going to take us three. We’re going to be hot, humid, thirsty, and tired for much, much longer than we expected.
---
“Wait, it was basically a suffer fest, sooo you decided you were just going to do it for longer?” Anuj asked incredulously. “You didn’t just cut it short and decide it wasn’t worth it, or decide to do the surveillance aerially or something? I am just imagining some of the younger guys at work and they protest if I send them an email over the weekend.”
“No. That’s not how the army works,” Anuj’s father replied. “You don’t just give up because something gets hard.” I could almost see the hackles on the back of Anuj’s neck rising, he could feel a lecture incoming. ‘When I was a young boy, I wasn’t soft like you’ type of lecture.
His father resisted this time. “We couldn’t do the mapping aerially. The walking trails, camp sites, and enemy movement were so well hidden by the trees and foliage, that you couldn’t spot anything by helicopter, let alone a plane. Plus, once a helicopter passes over a separatist camp, they definitely won’t be using that again.”
“So we hunkered down for months more of this. It was hard. People fell sick, we missed home. Hell, we missed any house, not just our own — just a roof would have been amazing to have,” he continued. Then added “Don’t even need walls.”
“And, despite the painfully slow progress, we were uncovering ground the military hadn’t seen before. We discovered new spots on which to situate outposts. Twice we came across recently abandoned separatist camps, and once we spotted them on the far ridge.”
“In fact as we showed our navigational prowess, our mission morphed. Surely because someone senior in the special forces had been extolling our capabilities to the general in command. In addition to understanding the terrain and finding the enemy bases/posts, we got a new task — hunt down and eliminate any separatists we find.”
“Holy shit”, Zorawar muttered. He was familiar with the lore of the special forces — one of them was like a hammer coming down, a team was like a thunderbolt from hell, but a hundred…that was an extermination. “The poor separatists”
Anuj’s father laughed, “That’s what we thought as well initially.” Then his face became serious, “but we quickly realized that we weren’t the apex predator in those mountains. The Nagas were.
I still remember the day we found out how far our skills lagged behind the Nagas.”
[To be continued.]
[I have published the full story here on my blog. Will share on reddit shortly — just want to polish it a tiny bit more.]