‘We Moved Only at Night’: A Tololing Veteran Remembers

He asked that we use only his rank, not his name. ‘The men who deserve to be named,’ he said, ‘are the ones on the wall.’ The havildar was a young soldier in 1999, part of a rifle company committed to the Tololing sector in the first week of June.

The cold before the climb

What he remembers first is not the firing but the cold — a dry, knifing cold that made metal stick to skin and turned every water bottle to ice by midnight. ‘We moved only at night,’ he recalled. ‘By day you froze in your position and did not move, because movement meant the observers above you called down fire.’

The climb

The assault, when it came, was a matter of hauling oneself up rock by handhold, weapon slung, in single file, in the dark. ‘You did not think about the top,’ he said. ‘You thought about the next ledge, and the boots of the man above you.’

He came down from Tololing. Eleven men from his company did not. Each year, on 13 June, he telephones the families he still has numbers for. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is the parade I keep.’