The Hindu Business Line : Frozen fortress

It is symbolically appropriate that it is the sharp, black cone of the Siachen War Memorial that pierces into view when one gazes at the sprawling tenement-cluster of the Siachen Base Camp from the heights of the Army Mountaineering Institute in the Base Camp valley. The valley was once carved by the very glacier which was destined to become the world’s highest battlefield. Today the snout of the receding glacier extends a few kilometres beyond the curve of the north ern — or main — glacier into the valley and ends in a conglomeration of ice walls, caves, streams and undulating ridges of terminal moraine.

Alongside Base Camp flows the Nubra, emerging from an ice cave akin to, but nowhere near as magical as, Gaumukh. Like the Ganga, the Nubra too is laden with glacial silt at the cave mouth and the grey water flows quietly, with parts of it frozen in the shallows near the bank. A large bridge stands magnificently at the valley’s lower end, spanning the river as it begins to meander among the boulders and sand banks of the valley floor. In the winter sunshine, part of the ice and the water glitter as does some tin in the clutter of roofs and awnings stretching all the way to the War Memorial, which stands in serene isolation with only the river and bare crags for company.

As in any settlement, daily chores — even though military and in peacetime — lend bustle to Base Camp. Figures in olive green dot the roads and paths between the huts, messes, canteens and bunkers. On clear mornings, helicopters take off and land with comforting regularity — comforting because it means the Army’s Cheetahs and the large, open-backed MI-17s of the IAF’s Siachen Pioneers are at work, maintaining the lifeline of the 3,000-odd men on the glacier’s various posts and transit camps. On the glacier, helipads made of ice-packed tin drums and wooden boards covered with parachutes are part of every camp’s landscape, and the jawans know how to marshal a chopper.

Vital as the supplies of food and fuel are, the most crucial service the helicopters perform is evacuation. Airlifting — quick and immediate, the weather gods willing — constitutes the difference between life and death for those debilitated by high-altitude illnesses or physical injury in subzero temperatures. It is not for nothing that Siachen Pioneers holds a casualty evacuation Guinness Record. The casualty rate on the glacier is high — for jawans, porters and also pilots. Jawans and porters succumb to pulmonary and cerebral oedema, or heart attacks brought on by sheer cold. Among pilots, flying to a post on the southern glacier is dreaded because of its record — stated unceremoniously as “one chopper a year”.

The simple, unlettered jawan knows the glacier as narak or hell. Yet, if a visitor points out the inadequacy of some of the clothing in use on the glacier, it is moving to hear a Subedar’s gentle admonition: “The nation spends Rs 3 crore daily on Siachen, it cannot provide us better clothing than this.”

On days when a body is brought down from the glacier, sombreness shadows the jawans’ faces as they turn briefly from their tasks to watch the helicopter discharge its load.

All bodies — be it a jawan’s or a porter’s — are sent home accompanied by an Armyman, to enable the families to perform the last rites. Only, the porters’ names find no mention — neither on the polished black marble plaques of the War Memorial nor in any other record.

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