LOVE STORY OF A SADDER KIND: PART I DOUBLE KILL

He was a little under 20 when I first bumped into him,.... with his perpetual smile and boyish innocence. Athletic and well built, he was previously a student in his village and basked in local popularity for his exceptional football talents. He was also a member of the Cadet Corps, an offshoot of the army for the youth. He had once dreamed of joining the Army and used to travel halfway across the district just to attend the Army recruitment preparatory course that I was running at my Company Operating Base.
Who would have ever thought that this same unassuming kid was once toting an assault rifle and walked tall as part of ULFA, a banned militant organization in a state which was treated like Congo for its resources of timber, oil and tea,...... a state which cradled a behemoth of a river the Brahmaputra, which was everyone’s excuse of not sending fruits of civilization to it. No electricity, bad roads and bridges later someone decided to change the demography by dumping the influx of Bengali Muslim refugees from a nation just freed from the clutches of an enemy state, Pakistan-the ‘bin laden haven’.
Soon, what started with a fight by the youth went on to graduate into a Chinese supported proxy war within a state… the weapons were high grade Chinese unmarked AK 56 assault rifles shipped from the Tibetan plateau via the teak laden jungles of Burma. The training camps were in nearby reserve forests of Bhutan, Bangladesh and Burma, and the funding was the hordes of outsider business class floating there since eons before the independence saga. A state where the natives were now a minority was given birth… It was a victim to British imperialistic strategy of shipping in cheaper labour, mainly tribal’s from states of Orissa, Bengal and Bihar in thousands. The audacity and blind ruin was so evident that an impending threat from the red dragon to the north made the nation build refineries deep inside the subcontinent by pumping crude oil through pipelines running thousands of miles like a railway track.


The grudges were numerous and once a popular movement started, it was too late to tranquilize a sleeping goliath seeking loopholes and bias in governance from the capital of politics and mainland India. That was ages back before a peaceful struggle went onto become an armed struggle which changed names from militancy to finally in its present form of terrorism.
Lalit Moran- I faintly remember his name get highlighted when I heard of the list of new recruits who had joined the banned militant org by a methodical framework of indoctrination. He was selected by the terrorists for his Cadet training Skills, physical abilities and popularity in the area where he was a football “Ronaldhino”.
I find it difficult to recollect how I first met him, though I kind of remember bumping into him soon after he surrendered and dropped at my office for introductions with another lady cadre Momi Baruah. His story was simple. He was never for the ideologies of the hardliners or their barbaric methods. He met Momi when they were together in their temporary militant hideout in a riverine island, about a thousand square kilometers of marshy dense forests, which were so impregnable and remote that army operations there were rare and useless. She was in her late teens, though a smarter and tougher version of Lalit. Together in the wilderness they fell in love and had decided to get married. However the oath of allegiance they had taken while joining the underground organization forbade them from such luxuries till the age of 35years and thus began the desire to quit militancy to live life like a normal couple without the constant fear of military operations or the days spent hiding in brutal leech and mosquito infested forests.
The Army had started spreading the welcome mat for them almost six months ago before they finally had the courage to flee the clutches of terrorism, walk days through marshy jungles, wade dingy flimsy boats and surrender to a covert Army team waiting across the expanse of the Brahmaputra River.
That was a fortnight ago.
Today he smiled and joked in utter innocence as he charmed us with their great escape and jungle romance. Momi was quite as she showed flickers of doubt and a suspicious glint in her judgmental look at her fiancé, as Lalit poured his entire story out like a jigsaw puzzle finally getting some shape. After a couple of hours I left him and moved on to my busy day of loads of coffee, 40 cigarettes, a thousand signatures and a billion phone calls on the four different phones I played with. Soon I forgot the little kid who charmed his way into our hearts.

It was some weeks later that I was tasked along with my Commando Platoon to undertake a search and destroy mission in an interior village close to the banks of the mega river, Brahmaputra. My senior subaltern, a brave boisterous, gung ho style operative had been diligently tracking radio intercepts for over a week now and had latched onto a general location of their base. We had our dinner, took skimpy naps and in the middle of the night went out in strength for the operation to seek and kill the originators of the radio conversations.
By early morning 0340 AM, when the sun bore down on the eastern part of the country, we hit the target village and started tactically searching for any traces of hostile elements. We had been up the entire night and now we were getting exhausted with the running around and bush whacking as slush and leeches greeted us everywhere.By morning 0730h, I married up with my senior subaltern, now a Canadian Citizen and concluded on the futility of the exercise, as we had mopped every inch of outhouse, teagardens, bamboo and wooded patches and were getting only ten degrees more exhausted and delirious than getting any leads. Lalit had been moving with my subaltern and I had another surrendered cadre who was from a different part of the district. Somehow as we sat there in a local village heads house and chewed on cucumber and salt to quench our thirst, I made a random decision to go ahead and visit the neighbouring notorious village, of which I had heard and mapped a lot, but never seen on ground. I split my team into three and decided to take Lalit as my guide as we treaded onto the village through the less frequented path through teagardens and dense bamboo patches.
We started off and I could see the boys with their sagging morale as they dreaded the beginning of yet another futile, humid and exhausting search. I halted the patrol and mouthed orders replete with foul words and cusses that were stinging at the patrol to gear up their killer attitude, range their assault rifles at 200m and move like trained soldiers. Seeing my anger the boys straightened up, weapons ready and senses alert as they trudged along.
Lalit tagged along quietly after my outburst, as we moved on, in one seemingly futile ops. All I wanted was to see this part of real estate first hand. All that the others wanted was a warm bath, hot meals, chilled water and the loving embrace of their beds- simple pleasures in an unearthly world. It would have perhaps been 10 to 15 minutes of moving stealthily through the grain of the country when we hit an ‘L’ junction. I saw two civilians a kid and a teenage girl approaching from one end and I started trying my broken local lingo on the poor souls, basically asking directions and a layout of the village. The sun was blistering and beating down mercilessly on us as my scouts moved ahead in a bid to scan the bamboo hutments about a stone throw away and more importantly get some shade from the sun.I broke off from the civilian duo and started moving ahead towards the hutments, ensconced within bamboo and jungle, as a thought flickered through my mind…..
…. Wasn’t the girl dishing fear in her eyes as she spoke to me, that look sure couldn’t just be the fear from an Army that had left behind a legacy of high handedness and ‘tough on the locals’ attitude. Over the years the concept of velvet glove and people friendly ops had seeped in and our unit had created a rather positive rapport with the locals despite the militancy situation there. ‘Not likely’ I said out aloud….just when,
RAT!...TARATA!...TAT!....RATTAT!...TAT.!
The unmistakable burst of AK fire pounded my ears from the location of the bamboo huts. For a fraction of a second I froze. Fear of losing my scouts, whom I could not see due to a right turn into the huts, made me sprint with my head under cover towards the target area, weapon cocked and shoulder ready. I saw my first scout generally the toughest of the lot, shaking vigorously with fear balking through his eyes as he muttered, …”fire came from inside the huts….. there are militants inside”,

The scene was ‘chaos incorporated’. Women and children screaming and running helter skelter, the gunshots being fired by a lady terrorist single handed with her left hand, who was fleeing using the group of ladies as shield…
My patrol was blood shot with excitement as they saw no fear or danger and went about cordoning the group of three huts with an intervening tea garden. I stood behind an 8 inch thick tree hardly three meters from the bamboo hut from within which the bullets were fired onto my first scout. My mind worked like a super computer and I assumed the hut to still be holding two to three terrorists.
The next couple of seconds is a blur and I just remember the incidents without actually recollecting the seniority of what happened when. First, I spotted one terrorist running almost 150m too far and using quick reflexs, took aim and did a double tap to bring down the bugger. I couldn’t make out if he was hit but assumed he must’ve made a dive into the tea bush to try and escape using cover. Was too far to do shit, so I just shouted and field signaled to my second scout to keep a watch for the terrorist in the tea bush.
As I am about to move to a better position of advantage onto the right side of the hut, I see my buddy jumping inside the four feet bamboo hedge right in front of me and spilling his magazine clean… one meter ahead of him in the bamboo and mud splattered wall of the hut, I could see the holes he made as he opened fire to kill the occupants of that unlucky hut. I shouted abuses to my buddy to take cover, fearing the lack of cover costing us more than bargained for……to my dumb shock I then saw holes being made by bullets on the same wall as they flew onto both of us. Bullets that came from within the hut…

.. I half dived- half ran to get towards my right…as I saw the burst from inside make a path towards me on the mud walls, as the terrorist tried to make a break for it while firing onto his invisible enemy… just as the bugger got out of the house my third scout only a meter behind him, who was painstakingly trying to take cover behind a five inch by five inch concrete construction pillar, got trigger happy and sprayed cold steel core bullets all through him. In a split second I saw a mist of pink spray as blood and tissue ripped through the terrorist. Almost a millisecond before, the terrorist assuming more soldiers in his direction of escape fired his Kalashnikov assault rifle and in the same line of fire, I saw a lady scurrying from the kill zone, get hit and drop down like a sack near a grove of banana trees on the edge of the tea garden.
I froze at the thought of having collateral in a bloody encounter. No one would believe it was the terrorist’s fire. Like all such incidents it would have to be my word for the media’s assumptions. I was already stumped when I turned towards my buddy and saw him still standing behind the same wall. Anger filled me and in uncontrollable fury I screamed at him to get the hell out of that area and move to cover,
… he looked at me, while holding his right leg and muttered in pain,, “sir I can’t, I’ve been shot” and took his gaze to his thigh where a bullet had torn through, his bullet proof jacket has taken three more rounds.. His combat trouser was wet with dark blood that seemed blackish due to the red of his blood mixing with the green of his uniform. I can’t say if I thought of the dangers or not, for in the next jiffy I just moved towards the hut and tried pulling my buddy out. His body weight was too much to handle so I reconnoitered to the left and broke the fence and dragged him to safety to a tree stump about 25 feet from the house, I was puffing and panting as I half carried half dragged my buddy and made him lie down,… I made a bandage for him, put another soldier with him and consoled him with words that were more of ridiculing his wound and calling him a tiger than anything close to conventional movie style pity bombardment. I could make out from the bleeding that no major artery was ruptured and neither had his bones taken the shot, .. He would be okay..

Right from the time the bullets were fired till I evacuated my buddy to safety, it would have taken about a minute and a half. The tremendous adrenaline flow made everything seem like a slow motion, matrix style firefight…
It was another twenty minutes when my senior subaltern reached the spot and took charge of the situation. First things first, we coordinated the arrival of our doctor, a rather lively and realistic chimney who was rushing in to evacuate my injured buddy. Then the battle began for confirming the kills and collaterals began as we opened covering fire to let our team close in to the house…

As we fired in a trigger happy spree, I saw the injured lady get up from under the banana stumps and in delirium trudge towards the neighbouring hut for shelter. My senior subaltern then called out in the local dialect for the occupants to move out before we blow the damn place down… just as we were about to start thinking of a house entry we saw a shriveled up scared old lady come out of the hut and in bewilderment walk towards us in shock. We escorted her and comforted her before asking her about whether there were any terrorists inside. When she confirmed there were none… my subaltern along with his buddy then lobbed a few grenades in and carried out house entry, only to further substantiate the lady’s statement.

A few more hours later, the search for the terrorists started. We had eliminated two terrorists both identified by Lalit by name with one of them part of the terror outfit’s enigma group, a secretive underground guerilla force tasked with the most gruesome acts of violence and political killings. On the downside my buddy was shot and the civilian lady had a gaping gunshot wound in her chest as big as a large fist. I immediately got a wooden bed improvised as a stretcher, bandaged her wound to stop bleeding and evacuated the lady first towards the ambulance at the road head, approximately half an hour’s walk away.


Soon the Doctor reached the site and had my buddy evacuated, after offering him a cigarette …. Through all this our friend Lalit was a silent witness as he ducked and hid in one of the drains near the tea bushes. His eyes were filled with fear for he sensed that the villagers would squeal about his involvement in the operation. I got him dressed as one of my boys and quietly evacuated him through the forest route lest someone recognize him. The lady too was in safety in a nearby district hospital about three hours drive away. It felt good to know she would survive.
That day went on from 0800 hours in the morning, when the first bullets were fired, till about three in the afternoon. We fell back to our post, debriefed, freshened and thanked heavens for pulling us through one more of many such days to come. Cheering and shouting was soon followed by beer guzzling, cherishing the operation in which we had been a hairline away from getting onto the other side with angels and puffed clouds.
Dual kill… a messy yet clean sweep. My buddy walked soon and started running in a couple of months. The injured lady survived with a couple of pounds and half a lung less. The weeks went by as the boys relived the moment of shock, fire and chaos over and over again.
Lalit’s life moved on too. He married Momi soon enough and was kept at the army camp for security reasons. They would be under our umbrella of help and protection for some time. As days went by and operations faded into each other, the din of existence took over and normality continued.