Abhimanyu stood marvelling the tiny holes in the wall of his fibre glass hut. He was pretty sure they weren’t there earlier. Meanwhile he could hear the faint boom of the engineers as they blasted the rocky hill side near his observation post making new bunkers. In the background the 5 bravo phone was ringing. It had to be his adjutant asking for the daily morning report. He was sick of the bureaucracy of this reporting - it wasn’t analysed anywhere and no action taken on it. It just got buried in piles of paper which would slowly be eaten away by termite. Age, adrenaline and ambition drove him. He’d joined the army hoping to see some action in the Kargil war but active hostilities had been reduced to artillery duels by the time he reached the forward area.
The boom of the engineers blasting sounded a lot closer as the phone continued to ring. Reluctantly he picked up the receiver pulling out his pad to give an NTR (nothing to report) feedback to his adjutant. He could hear the high pitched tense voice of his adjutant shout from the other end, “you bugger why aren’t you picking the phone? You’re being shelled idiot. Get yourself and your men to safety”.
The holes in his FGH suddenly made sense. They weren’t holes but jagged incisions where shrapnel from enemy bombing at ripped through. It was a miracle that he’d not been hit. Dropping the receiver he ran outside to see his 3 men hiding behind a makeshift stone wall - they called it a ‘sangarh’.
The phone started ringing again with its incessant and continuous “rrrrrrr” getting drowned out by a closer boom. The ground shook now. He checked his body to see if he’d been hit. The Gods seemed to be benevolent today. It was the adjutant again and he ordered Abhi to move to the observation post (OP) bunker to ascertain the direction and distance of the flash where the fire was coming from. To reach the OP bunker he would have to move about a 100 meters in direct visibility of the enemy. The path was littered with 3 inch long pika bullets - an anti aircraft gun which the enemy was using to hit own personnel who came to the OP bunker.
He shouted out to his radio operator to run behind as he started sprinting towards the OP post. The whining pika bullets started ringing out hitting the stone mountain side ricocheting in every direction and sending stone shrapnels flying everywhere. He would have definitely beaten Maurice Greene had some timed the sprint.
Over the next 20 minutes he diligently recorded the flash to sound gap to work out the distance and noted the bearings at which the flash could be seen. Plotting it on the map, he was pretty sure that it was close to a village called Shaqma and he passed on the intelligence report to his adjutant. By then the firing had stopped and he was ordered to fall back.
Here was another day wasted, another instance of lives risked and another opportunity lost. Disgusted he crawled back to his bunker.
Epilogue - Shaqma was hit by over a hundred rounds of 155mm bofors after a gap of 15 odd days. The 15 days went in preparation, lulling the enemy into a false sense so security so that they brought their guard down, and making sure that gun end was surveyed accurately to ensure precision at the target end. An ad-hoc OP was established to correct the fall of shots. Intelligence reports gathered through eye witnesses and radio intercepts later confirmed that the enemy gun position had been completely destroyed with multiple casualties
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