With soldiers like you, nation is safe: Malik to PVC winner

This is for the first time in the history of a battalion that two PVCs have been received for a single operation and both the recipients were from Himachal Pradesh and from the same unit. Sanjay’s action came just two days after Captain Vikram Batra fought valiantly at Tololing heights to sacrifice his life safeguarding the integrity of the country. He too has been bestowed with a PVC, posthumously.

With a mangled right leg, a broken knee and a profusely bleeding hip, Sanjay Kumar managed to capture two strategically important enemy posts, killing all the intruders entrenched inside. It was the izzat

of the platoon that kept him going. Dragging his leg onto a rugged cliff, Sanjay managed to climb up the hill and launch a surprise attack on the enemy picket.

“By the time we reached the top, many of our men had either succumbed to enemy bullets or injured. When I looked back I had only four men along with me. That very moment I decided not to retreat and to march ahead till my last breath,” recalled Sanjay.

After an arduous night climbing, he alongwith his colleagues charged at the Pakistanis. “The moment we reached near the Pakistani bunker, all of us started lobbing grenades on them. Five of them were killed, while two managed to flee as perhaps they had an impression that we are in a large number,” he said.

But, for Sanjay and his men, the actual task was lay ahead when enemy soldiers hiding inside a bunker, opened fire on them.

Since all their ammunition had got exhausted, they used machine guns of the slain Pakistani intruders to capture the second bunker, killing all the men hiding inside.

Platoon Commander G V Bhaskar, who also received Vir Chakra, said that it was after the fall of these bunkers that the enemy caved in as their supply lines got clogged, making it difficult for them to continue fighting in this region.