To drink water, soldiers break chunks of ice and heat them in a sauce pan. To defecate, they walk to the cliff edge, tie a rope around their stomach and lean over. They cannot dirty the snow on the cliff for they drink it. Chocolates are used to make bullet-proof bunkers. The minus 35 degrees Celsius temperature makes the chocolate harder than steel and impossible to eat. Soldiers battle the combined onslaught of the Pakistani Army and General Glacier. And General Glacier claims 97 per cent of the lives.THAT is Siachen for you. The world's highest, coldest and most expensive battlefield to maintain where India and Pakistan are entangled in a bloody war for supremacy - India to keep control of its territory and Pakistan to wrest it.It all began on April 13, 1984. Before that Siachen, or ``Rose Garden in Balti'', was a mountaineer's dream come true - to scale the glacier and ski down the virgin slopes. Many an expedition sought permission from the Indian Government toscale the glacier, all rather unsuccessfully. The Government of Pakistan, on the other hand, was more than obliging, granting not just permission to scale but also providing logistical support to foreign expeditions, largely Japanese and American mountaineers. Until 1984, these were simply mountaineering expeditions, until official Pakistani maps began to show the entire area as under their control.The Pakistani claim was on the glacier and a whopping 10,000-sq km area from the termination of the demarcated Line of Control (LoC) at Point NJ 9842 to all the way up to the Karakoram Pass. This was despite the fact that the 1949 Standstill Agreement signed between India and Pakistan declared that the LoC would move ``northwards to the glaciers'' from NJ 9842. By April, military intelligence was certain that Pakistan was planning a major offensive to take over the entire glacier - a plan which, if successful, would lay bare the Nubra Valley and Ladakh to the Pakistani Army, and in a worst case scenario, evento the Chinese military.And thus on April 13, 1984, a company of 4 Kumaon, consisting of 120 men, was airlifted to recover Bilafond La (a pass) overlooking the glacier, an action code-named `Operation Meghdoot'. Pakistan focused its attack on the adjoining Sia La, but the Indian troops succeeded in pushing them back. The war had begun - the war to preempt further Pakistani intrusion into the glacier and to re-assert India's claim. Both Indian and Pakistani Army troops moved to flanking heights, and until June 1987, it was pretty much a stalemate but for the northern sector, where certain Pakistani positions posed a serious problem to Indian troops. In a stirring action, the highest post on the glacier was then taken by troops of the 8 Jammu & Kashmir Light Infantry under the leadership of Naib Subedar (now Subedar Major) Bana Singh. They dislodged a contingent of the Pakistani special forces and the post was renamed from Quaide to Bana.Currently, around 2,000 soldiers protect the frozen boundary whichrises gradually from a height of 12,000 ft at the base camp to a staggering 22,000 ft at Indra Col. The Army has deployed an entire brigade at the glacier with its headquarters at Partapur. Some 2,000 ft below, Pakistan is learnt to have deployed two brigades - the 323 and the 80 infantry brigade - to fight at the glacier.Despite many rounds, the successive Indo-Pak talks on vacating the Siachen glacier hang in a limbo. Earlier, Pakistan floated a theory that if India vacates some heights on the glacier, they would in return vacate certain posts in the Karakoram range. And in 1989, both India and Pakistan did come close to an agreement, but for some inexplicable reason, a breakthrough was not achieved.Says a Siachen veteran: ``Some of the posts are so spread out that the only way to get to them is by air. Soldiers are air-lifted to those posts and so is food, water and other essentials for them. Thus the helicopter units are a life line for the soldiers posted at the Siachen glacier.''Thesingle-engine Cheetah helicopters are compared to Garuda, Lord Vishnu's vehicle. Their main task is casualty evacuation, or ``casevac'' as it is known in the pilots' jargon, and air maintenance of the posts by supplying them food and ammunition.``But the brave pilots perform another important task. The Cheetahs are supposed to fly at a top altitude of 18,000 ft, but here, the pilots often take their birds beyond 22,000 ft to scout for enemy targets and to provide air support to the troops. And that too with tail winds of over 100 km per hour and with helipads barely large enough for their two slides,'' he adds.The Cheetahs and Mi-17s are the main transport helicopters at the glacier and pilots try to fly as many sorties as they can in a day. ``The problem is that helicopters cannot fly at night. We try to fly as many sorties as we can from sun rise till around noon, when the weather starts to close in, for once it does, it is impossible to fly,'' says another official.Officials say that diet andmorale are very difficult to maintain in such conditions and sub-zero temperatures. ``We try to give the troops as many calories as possible because at a high altitude, calories burn fast. But soldiers do not feel hungry. So the effort is to give them lots of dry fruits and sweet things. But even the sweets become dry and hard and have to be dipped in hot milk,'' he adds.It is no surprise then that Siachen veterans feel it is high time a solution was found and the mad war ended. ``Look at it from the environment point of view the amount of junk we throw away. In the snow, in sub-zero temperatures, nothing rots. So there is waste of food, tins, weapons, human waste collecting there for the past 14 years. It is also very taxing on the economy. Psychologically, it wreaks havoc on the troops, their morale and also that of the Army. The governments of the two countries have to come together and find a solution to the problem,'' say the veterans.
