In the Valley of Shadows by Abhay Narayan Sapru

Author:Abhay Narayan Sapru [Sapru, Abhay Narayan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Served In The Special Forces, Indian Army
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Published: 2011-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

1Pond (Tamil)

cleared for cultivation sometime in the past was now deserted and over grown with knee-high shrub and elephant grass. He remembered the feeling of vulnerability and nakedness in the absence of any cover. They were sitting ducks to any Tamil Tiger group if one of them was lurking in the area, at this time of the night. The safe, dark outline of the jungle in front beckoned.

‘Lost, sahib,’ whispered the lead scout. One of the most dreaded words for any combat commander. ‘There should have been a pond here as per the map. We clearly took the wrong path at the last bound. Should we backtrack and get on to the other path?’

The other path was three hours behind, recalled Harry and that meant spending the whole night going up and down. He recalled the man’s eyes in the darkness looking at him and waiting for a decision. Oh! How he hated these situations. Barely out of the military academy, he had volunteered and cleared the probation in a Special Force unit and had only recently been allowed to lead independent operations.

When you are inexperienced, young and entrusted with the command of leading a tough bunch of veteran fighters into combat, even the smallest decision magnifies manifold to become the mother of all problems—to go back or to continue? And if the latter, then where to? It was supposed to have been an ambush on a track coming out of the jungle that ran past the pond, to join up with the main Manar-Vavuniya road.

In desperation, he had led the column into some bushes and laid an ambush on an unused path, hoping he might run into some LTTE movement. At around two in the morning he had heard a great rumble in the jungle and had wondered if the LTTE were clearing the undergrowth with a road roller and coming after him. He had moved his men quickly to an abandoned hut, justin time, as a female elephant with a calf lumbered straight into the very same area where his men had taken up position! Harry remembered how they sat in mortal fear with weapons cocked for the next ten minutes as the mother picked up the smell of humans and went berserk, trumpeting, uprooting trees and trampling everything in her path. He recalled the conversation on the radio as he informed his company commander about the position getting compromised and untenable, because of elephants.

‘Are you sure, Harry?’ the major’s faint, sleepy voice inquired,‘that these are wild elephants you are reporting and not LTTE trained?’

Well the tragedy of errors hadn’t ended there for Harry. He took the patrol a few kilometres away to lay an ambush at a crossroad leading into a village. The original mission had already been forgotten and the way to the golden pond where Prabhakaran’swife bathed was clearly guarded by angry elephants. The Indian army had still not worked out its operational response to this new weapon. He had, in all his young wisdom,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.