Free THE GARUD STRIKES by Mukul Deva

defences at Akhaura, but it was one huge shot in the arm for our morale.’
    The Pakistanis were not sitting quietly either. By now, their artillery was blasting the attacking forces with everything in their arsenal. There was a blanket of gunpowder and smoke over the area. Adding to the disorientation of the men was the nerve-shattering thunder of exploding airbursts.
    ‘By now all our senses seemed to have gone numb,’ Granthi mused. ‘One could see everything, hear everything, smell everything, but as though from far away. Yet, it was all horribly real.’
    Brigadier Mishra walked into this hellfire, accompanied by his IO (Intelligence Officer), radio operator and the usual protection detail, not that they could have done anything to protect him from the death that was raining down from the skies.
    ‘The Old Man always said that we were damn lucky we had gone to war with a commander like Mishra,’ Tuffy reminisced. ‘A simple, god fearing man, Mishra was from a renowned family; his father had served on Lord Mountbatten’s staff. The commander was polite to a fault, except when he had to lay down the law, or when one failed to live up to his expectations. His most endearing quality was that he was extraordinarily humane.’ Tuffy leaned forward, to emphasize his point. ‘Right from the word go, the commander was with us, literally. We were waiting for 10 Bihar to find a gap for us when he landed up.’
    Along with the rest of the unit, Himmeth had also gone to ground and was waiting for the go ahead from 10 Bihar. Seeing the brigade commander sauntering around as though he was out for a morning walk, Himmeth went up to him and advised him that it would be safer for him to take shelter behind the embankment in the rice field.
    ‘Later, the Old Man told me what Brigadier Mishra’s reply was: “Himmeth, Pakistanis have yet to make the bullet that will kill me. I am going to retire peacefully and die only when my time comes… from natural causes”,’ Paunchy had a faraway look in his eyes as he narrated this. ‘And how right he was… Brigadier Mishra is still around, happily retired and living a peaceful life.’ Then, returning to the moment, he looked at me. ‘Brigadier Mishra was present with us at every decisive moment, at every crucial point in our headlong dash for Dacca. So much so that after the war, when we were going through a de-briefing in the brigade headquarters, and there was some acrimony between the battalion commanders regarding the battle for Ashuganj, Mishra intervened and took the blame. He had said “Perhaps I got too involved with the 4 Guards heliborne operations across the Meghna. I should have been with the bulk of my brigade, fighting the battle at Ashuganj.”,’ said Paunchy. ‘Such honesty and sense of responsibility is rare. It takes a big man to stand up and take blame.’
    Declining to take shelter, Mishra heard out Himmeth’s briefing patiently and realized that there was an acute danger of the brigade’s operation getting stalled.
    Unwilling to allow that to happen, Mishra immediately went ahead with his Intelligence Officer and one of the 10 Bihar company commanders.
    Perhaps fortune does favour the brave. Perhaps the presence of so senior an officer in their midst spurred 10 Bihar to try harder. Either way, a gap had soon been found.
    However, by now it was 0200 hours, almost two hours after the designated time by which they had to begin infiltration. Any later than that and the guardsmen would face a major problem; since the sun comes up rather early in Bangladesh, and the distance to be covered by 4 Guards was such that the battalion would most certainly be hit by day light before they could reach their destination behind Akhaura and dig in.
    Mishra, a veteran of every battle the Indian Army had been involved in since Independence, knew what that meant. He had commanded a battalion at Thanga during the 1962 War, and then another one in J&K during the 1965 operations,