Book review: The questions that war throws up

All wars are invariably followed by books, but these are usually about the blood and gore, strategy and logistics, victories and failures. Colonel Arup Ratan Basu’s book is delightfully different. While being both humble and unassuming, it is also humane and compassionate, shedding light on the usually ignored ‘backroom boys’ who provide the spine to the arms that fight on the frontlines.

Col. Basu is a general surgeon, and this book is a personal account of the two months he spent at the army field hospital in Kargil. It is special and refreshingly different in that it looks at war, not through the eyes of one trained to take lives but one trained to save them.

Freshly commissioned as a surgeon in the Army Medical Corps in December 1998, he was dispatched to Kargil on his first posting where war had just broken out between India and Pakistan. He is candid enough to admit that he was not prepared to be thrust into the jaws of war, ministering to casualties with the most basic of facilities.

A field hospital is only the first responder, its job being to stabilise the wounded before shifting them to base hospitals for more advanced care, but that is in theory only, as Col. Basu soon found out. Severely wounded soldiers have to be saved during the proverbial ‘golden hour’, sometimes requiring complicated operations that field hospitals are ill-equipped to handle. But this reasoning cannot be an alibi, it has to be confronted as a challenge.

The wounded came every night for two months from sectors which are now household names — Batalik, Dras, Kargil.

Col. Basu and his team worked and operated at night and rested during the day. He gives us the reason for this peculiar time schedule: Indian soldiers, attempting to climb up the lofty mountains on which the Pakistanis were perched, could do so only at night. Casualties therefore occurred at night. While some could be evacuated out of the battle zones the same night (if lucky) it was usually done the next night since they would be sitting ducks for enemy soldiers during the day.

So they arrived at the field hospital at night, were attended to and, if required, referred to Srinagar by chopper the next day. Interestingly, the author soon discovered that the number of casualties arriving every day was a fairly accurate barometer of how the war was progressing!

Doctors are the unsung heroes of any war, and the figures from the Kargil field hospital prove it. During his short two-month tenure there, Col. Basu surgically treated 350 casualties and operated on 250 — that’s a mind-boggling four operations a day! He lost only two of his patients.

It speaks volumes about the grit and commitment of army doctors that he performed complex surgical procedures — splenectomy, thoracotomy, intestinal resection and anastomosis — that would challenge even a state-of-the-art corporate hospital in a metro city. Each of these would have ordinarily required a team of specialists.

Col. Basu counts as one of his triumphs his success in saving a havildar’s gangrenous, splinter-shattered arm from amputation by adopting some dexterous surgical procedures. His peers at the base hospitals, where his patients were forwarded for advanced care, soon conferred on him the well-deserved title: Surgeon of Kargil!

Col. Basu’s job afforded him several opportunities to interact with his patients. He learnt a lot about the war from them. Details which have to be believed because they came from people who lived them.

How the ‘disconnect’ of our army field commanders led to intelligence failures in anticipating that Pakistan was up to something on the commanding heights of the border, in spite of being informed by the shepherds and the bakerwals that something was amiss; the complete initial unpreparedness of our soldiers to fight in these heights, without adequate clothing, footwear, snow tents, acclimatisation, even food, a prime reason for the high rate of casualties — 527 dead, 1,363 wounded; how the tide of war turned with the introduction of the Bofors guns; and the deceitful nature of the Pakistan army which planted mines even as they vacated the occupied areas when ceasefire was declared.

There are moments of great poignancy too.

As when news filters down to the field hospital of the handing over of the bodies of the gallant Capt. Saurav Kalia and his six-man patrol; the anger and sorrow at learning of the horrible mutilation and torture inflicted on them before their murder in cold blood.

Or when Col. Basu is informed to be ready to receive a special casualty, who turned out to be Squadron Leader Ajay Ahuja, whose MiG was shot down as he was trying to rescue Flight Lieutenant Nachiketa, whose plane had also been shot down.

Nachiketa was lucky, he was released after a week or so in captivity when India took up his case at international forums. Ahuja was not so lucky. When Col. Basu examined his body, he found clear signs of torture and the cold-blooded murder of a POW.

What happened to the Geneva Convention, he asks. Did the government fail in mounting pressure for his release, as it did for Nachiketa? He realises that though wars throw up many questions, they provide few answers.

It was not all shelling and surgery at the hospital, though.

Soon enough, it was swarmed by journalists and celebrities, for as news of the remarkable work being done got around, Col. Basu himself became a celebrity of sorts! The glamorous visitors included Javed Akhtar, Shabana Azmi, Suneil Shetty, Salman Khan, Raveena Tandon, Vinod Khanna, Javed Jaffrey and Bachendri Pal the Everester. They were a bit of a nuisance at times with their airs, but they were wonderful as morale boosters for the wounded jawans.

The author recounts how one patient, bed-ridden with intense back pain and sciatica, jumped out of his bed to get himself happily photographed with the stars, hopping from frame to frame, his pain forgotten! This was noticed by the commandant, who promptly had the chap discharged and sent off to the front lines.

Kargil is located on the banks of the river Suru, originating from the snowfields and glaciers of Trishul. The last chapter is devoted to this river which, having seen so much bloodshed and disruption in these few months, longed to return to the peace and tranquility its vales once enjoyed.

The book ends with a number of poignant questions posed by the river:

Why did our neighbours [Pakistan] have to tread into our territory, the territory that never belonged to them?

Why did they cause so much destruction?

Was it all worth it?

There are also questions asked of the river by the gallant soldiers who laid down their lives for their country:

Did we not do right in defending your vale?

Have you forgotten us too, Suru, as all the others have?

Why should you remember this tale, when my countrymen have forgotten me?

Do you think that I deserved to die this way?

Questions that will haunt the reader for a long time. For they have no answers.

Title The Kargil War Surgeon’s Testimony

Author Arup Ratan Basu

Publisher Bloomsbury India

Pages 198

Price Rs 399 (paperback)

Views are personal

Avay Shukla is a retired IAS officer. More of his writing may be read here.