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BOOKS: EXTRACT
Heart Of Conflict
The major wondered
if he would be alive to see them. During some weeks thousands of men on
both sides were killed. That was inevitable with more than one million
fanatic soldiers facing one another across an extremely narrow, two-hundred-mile-long
"line of control." Major Puri could see some of those soldiers
now, across the sandy stretch between the trenches. Their mouths were
covered with black muslin scarves to protect them against the westward-blowing
winds. But the eyes in their wind-burned faces blazed with hatred that
had been sparked back in the eighth century. That was when Hindus and
Muslims first clashed in this region. The ancient farmers and merchants
took up arms and fought about trade routes, land and water rights, and
ideology. The struggle became even more fierce in 1947 when Great Britain
abandoned its empire on the subcontinent. The British gave the rival Hindus
and Muslims the nations of India and Pakistan to call their own. That
partition also gave India control over the Muslim-dominated region of
Kashmir. Since that time the Pakistanis have regarded the Indians as an
occupying force in Kashmir. Warfare has been almost constant as the two
sides struggled over what became the symbolic heart of the conflict.
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"Here
in the Himalayan foothills of Kashmir, human life was always in
jeopardy."
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And I am in the heart of the heart, Puri thought.
Base 3 was a potential flashpoint, the fortified
zone nearest both Pakistan and China. It was ironic, the career soldier
told himself. This "heart" looked exactly like Dabhoi, the small
town where he had grown up at the foot of the Satpura Range in central
India. Dabhoi had no real value except to the natives, who were mostly
tradesmen, and to those trying to get to the city of Broach on the Bay
of Cambay. That was where they could buy fish cheap. It was disturbing
how hate rather than cooperation made one place more valuable than another.
Instead of trying to expand what they had in common they were trying to
destroy what was uncommon.
The officer stared out at the ceasefire zone.
Lining the sandbags were orange binoculars mounted on small iron poles.
That was the only thing the Indians and Pakistanis had ever agreed on:
coloring the binoculars so they would not be mistaken for guns ...
Puri made a point of breathing evenly. The line
of control was a strip of land so narrow in places that cold breath was
visible from sentries on both sides. And being visible, the puffs of breath
could tell guards on either side if their counterparts were anxious and
breathing rapidly or asleep and breathing slowly. There, a wrong word
whispered to a fellow soldier and overheard by the other side could break
the fragile truce. A hammer hitting a nail had to be muffled with cloth
lest it be mistaken for a gunshot and trigger return rifle fire, then
artillery, then nuclear weapons. That exchange could happen so fast that
the heavily barricaded bases would be vaporized even before the echoes
of the first guns had died in the towering mountain passageways.
Mentally and physically, it was such a trying
and unforgiving environment that any officer who completed a one-year
tour of duty was automatically eligible for a desk job in a "safe
zone" like Calcutta or New Delhi. That was what 41-year-old Puri
was working toward. Three months before, he had been transferred from
the army's HQ Northern Command where he trained border patrols. Nine more
months of running this small base, of "kiting with tripwire",
as his predecessor had put it, and he could live comfortably for the rest
of his life. Indulge his passion for going out on anthropological digs.
He loved learning more about the history of his people. The Indus Valley
civilization was over 4,500 years old. Back then the Pakistani and Indian
people were one. There was a thousand years of peace. That was before
religion came to the region.
Major Puri chewed his tobacco. He smelled the
brewed tea coming in from the mess tent. It was time for breakfast, after
which he would join his men for the morning briefing. He took another
moment to savor the morning. It was not that a new day brought new hope.
All it meant was that the night had passed without a confrontation.
Puri turned and stepped down the stairs. He
did not imagine that there would be very many mornings like this in the
weeks ahead. It the rumors from his friends at HQ were true, the powder
keg was about to get a new fuse.
A very short, very hot fuse.
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