Col DS Cheema (retd)

For 20 long years, I served in ‘peace’ locations before being posted to a field station in 1986, only the second time in my entire career. The first was in NEFA in 1964 after I had just completed the Young Officer’s Course.

I was looking forward to joining a unit in high altitude, but my wife wanted me to wriggle out of that posting. Without my knowledge, she spoke to the medical specialist at the Military Hospital, Secunderabad, who was incidentally a neighbour, and, as it turned out, more than willing to downgrade my medical category. But, I put my foot down and told my wife I did not want to be labelled as a softy who had chickened out at the prospect of a tough challenge. Commanding a battalion in a difficult terrain is a lifetime opportunity; I could not have missed it. I landed at the Leh airfield in the summer of 1986.

Those days there was only one Electronics and Mechanical Engineers (EME) battalion to provide support to equipment, weapon systems and vehicles deployed on borders along our two adversaries, China and Pakistan. This meant I had to move to forward locations quite often, sometimes in a chopper. I remember how thrilled I was when I used one the first time to visit my men in Chushul. I looked forward to more such opportunities.

In the meantime, a flight of Cheetah helicopters was attached to our Division. The Officer Commanding, a Lieutenant Colonel, and three other officers of the Air Op flight were accommodated in my battalion’s Officer’s Mess as it was a stone’s throw from the airfield. They would discuss their routine flight schedules with me at the breakfast table and ask whether I would like to avail any of the flights planned for the day. I could not accept their generous offers because of one reason or another.

However, one day, I made up my mind to move to one of my units at Darbuk (which means ‘gateway to hell’ in local parlance), and checked up with the OC if they would be flying to that location. He denied and I postponed my visit. Later that day, the Adjutant informed me that the chopper I could have travelled in had crashed and one of the officers on board had lost his life.

Another time that I narrowly escaped death was when I was asked to accompany the GOC (Maj Gen DD Saklani) and another General from AHQ (Maj Gen Afsar Karim) in a chopper to a forward location across Khardung La, where one of my workshops was also located. After reaching the destination, I went to the workshop to sort out certain issues of logistics and, as planned, reached the Brigade Officer’s Mess for lunch. The two Generals joined soon. Around 2.30 pm, the pilot approached me to request the GOC to move to the helipad at the earliest. By the time we reached the helipad, it was 3.15 pm. Strong winds had started blowing by then and the pilot expressed his reservations about flying. But the Generals insisted and he relented.

En route to Leh, the helicopter had to manoeuver a kind of tunnel formed by the shoulders of two mountains. Our chopper was at the mercy of winds defying controls of the pilot. The General from AHQ, himself an Air Op pilot, tried to give some instructions to the pilot but sensing the seriousness of the situation, the GOC told him to shut up in no uncertain terms. We were on tenterhooks for almost 20 minutes during which the three of us, all from different faiths, must have said our respective prayers.

The scene at the airport explained how we had cheated death because of the presence of mind shown by our hero, the pilot. Anticipating a tragedy, many fire tenders were in operational mode and the staff were ready for action to handle any untoward incident.