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Outside Magazine February 2003

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The Coldest War (Cont.)


	Casualties of war: remains of a pack animal on the trail up the Baltoro Glacier to Pakistani forwards posts near Gasherbrum (Teru Kuwayama)

WITH DAS IN THE LEAD, our party set out on foot. The plan for the first day was to hike five hours to Camp I and rest overnight. From there we would follow a northwesterly route, passing through Camps II and III, until we reached Kumar Base, about 25 miles into the middle of the glacier. The whole trek, to Kumar and back, would take nine days.

It was late September by now. The autumn snows had already begun, and each day the temperatures, which hovered in the thirties, seemed to drop more. We slept in the tents or in the fiberglass huts; we ate meals that Yaseen prepared by the light of a candle stuck to the lid of an oatmeal can. One morning, about an hour before the sun hit the ice, Yaseen came into the tent and beckoned me outside. "Come! Come!" It was our first clear day; the sun was turning the tops of the peaks gold. "Look at the faces of these mountains!" he marveled. "See how beautiful they are? See how special? The mountains here, they tug at your heart." He grabbed the front of my jacket and gave it a sharp yank. "We call this kashish, which in Urdu means Ôattraction' or Ôpull.' Can you feel it?"

What I felt was a low vibration coming from the rotor blades of three high-altitude Cheetah helicopters beating their way up the glacier in close formation. They looked like tiny green insects—delicate, bulb-headed dragonflies with red underbellies. This was the first of more than 17 sorties moving supplies up to the bases and posts that day.

Our progress was slow but steady, with Captain Das gradually revealing a few things about himself as we trudged. Most Indian officers come from parts of the country that have long-standing military traditions, such as the Punjab. Das is from Bengal, a place better known for producing poetry, philosophy, and India's first Miss Universe. He grew up in Calcutta, acting in theater companies and singing for a band called Trash Pool. He was studying to be an accountant when he abruptly decided in May 2000 to enter the Military Training Academy in Madras. Six feet tall, with dark skin and black hair, Das has the rigid bearing of an officer coupled with a sad-eyed air. He volunteered to serve on the Siachen because, as he put it, "I'd never been on anything adventurous before, and I thought it would be good."

His post, whose name he refused to disclose, is at 19,700 feet and is one of several key positions the Indians hold above Bilafond La. It looks directly down on Tabish, the besieged Pakistani post where Captain Safdar endured the rockslide. It took Das and his squad more than two weeks to trek up the glacier from base camp; the final stretch required an ascent up ropes anchored to a 460-foot ice wall. They got there on January 21, 2002, and spent the first week getting used to the shelling.

The Pakistanis fired an average of ten rounds every 24 hours when the weather was clear—usually after lunch, but also at night. Each incoming shell announced itself with a sizzling wail. At the first sound of a barrage, Das would order his squad to take cover in a nearby ice cave while he and two other soldiers took lookout positions. Most of the shells landed in soft snow and were duds; only those that struck rock or ice would detonate—unless they were airburst shells, which have fuses timed to explode before they hit the ground. "The splinters come out sounding like a hundred people screaming," said Das. "You have no idea where the next shell is going to land. It's terrifying."

By the middle of February, Das and his men had adapted to the shelling and the sleep-all-day, up-all-night routine. The cold was a different story. Even with all their clothes on—five pairs of socks, three pairs of gloves, a down jacket—they shivered miserably in their double sleeping bags. The latrine presented another problem.

"After a bunch of guys take a shit, it's impossible to clear it away," Das explained. "Pouring boiling water on it, or banging on it with an ice ax, won't work—it just keeps building up. So those mounds, we would have to clean them with our machine guns. Cock an LMG—tacka-tacka-tacka—and it breaks into tiny pieces of rock-shit. They fly in the air. A couple times a week is enough."

In March, a cake and a white puppy with black spots made the trip up the ice wall via a gas-powered winch. The cake was for Das's birthday; he turned 24 on March 7. The puppy was named after the post, so Das refused to tell me its name. It slept in Das's sleeping bag and survived on butter, rice, and chocolate. During Das's downtime, he read his way through every book in the post's "library," including the complete works of Jane Austen and Into Thin Air.

In April the routine took a turn for the worse. "It just kept snowing and snowing and snowing," said Das. "It was like somebody pouring truckloads of snow on top of you." At three o'clock one morning, a massive avalanche wiped out an entire Indian post near Das's ridge. Five men were killed. It took the 11 survivors more than eight hours to dig themselves out, under enemy fire. "This happened right in front of my post," said Das. "It was like the sky breaking on your head."

On May 21, Das and his squad were relieved, and he handed his dog over to the new commander. He had spent 120 days at 19,700 feet. No mountaineer in the world can make such a claim.

I asked if he ever wanted to go back.

"Never," he said. "Not in my life. I went up to the post hoping for some action. But to have a shell land right on top of where you are, with the splinters flying, it scares the shit out of you. Once you've been under fire, you never want it again."

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