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Coming from
India, a peace-loving country, which taught non-violence to
the world and had a track record of non-aggression since 2000
years, Lebanon and its civil strife was an entirely novel
experience for me. Here the tranquillity of the night is often
shattered by booming guns and flying rockets. Peacekeepers of
the 2 Madras Infantry Battalion Group (INDATT-II) have been
burning the proverbial mid-night oil to restore peace in every
sphere of Lebanese life, which has not only won them the
gratitude of the Lebanese people but also the applaud and
appreciation of the local media.
On April 28 last, the
press had come to witness and cover an entirely different
spectacle of operation. After a hard day’s work, I had hit
the sack at 1130 hrs and was dreaming about the advances made
by our country in space technology with satellites and rockets
being launched into outer space, when my reverie was abruptly
and rather rudely broken at 0615 hrs by a shattering and blood
curdling explosion. I was thrown off my bed in the barest
minimum of my birthday suit. Groggy-eyed and with a thumping
heart, I groped around for some semblance of an attire to
protect my honour and then rushed out of my container. I
realised that a Katyusha rocket had landed barely one
metre away from where I was so peacefully slumbering.
Having pierced the
perimeter wire fence, it had landed on a boulder, shattered
into pieces with its fragments ricocheting to a distance of
100-150 metres into the football ground nearby. A large crater
had been formed on the ground which reminded me of the foot
prints of ‘Godzila’ in a film of the same name, which I
had recently seen on the Movie Channel.
Before one could say
Jack Robinson, a large menagerie of people ranging from
civilians to soldiers, had gathered at the site to assess the
damage. It was just then that another Katyusha rocket
landed in the forest nearby throwing everyone off ground and
scrambling to the nearest shelter. What an amazing scene it
was for me to fantasize the rockets of development in my
sub-conscious state and seeing the real ones, with a power of
mass destruction, in my conscious state. May be it was divine
providence and my good karmas of an earlier existence
that gave me a second chance at life. By the time I could
gather courage and marshal my shock, the Lebanese and other
international media had converged and made a bee-line to cover
the events in full detail. I slyly sneaked back into my room
and thanked my stars for not making me the subject of the ‘obituary
column’ in the next day’s papers. But then, work had to be
done. So I quickly changed into my uniform and with a
confident swagger moved out yet again to confront the battery
of the mediapersons and convince them of the courage and
fearlessness of an infantryman.
- Maj GS Bisht
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