Unlike mountaineers, who usually climb during the best weather, Siachen soldiers endure the worst the mountains can throw at them, year-round. Avalanches are frequent and terrifying; their thunder is so great that it’s often impossible to distinguish from shelling. Blizzards can last 20 days. Winds reach speeds of 125 miles per hour; temperatures can plunge to minus 60 degrees. Annual snowfall exceeds 35 feet. During storms, two or three men have to shovel snow at all times. If they stop, they will never catch up and the post will be buried alive.
‘Sometimes in the winter, you see nothing but white,’ said Captain Jamil Salamat, 24, the medical officer at Ghyari. ‘And you think, Maybe I will never make it back. That is the hugeness, and the hugeness has its own effect. It’s overwhelming. The snow is like an ocean up there.’
In such extreme cold, the single most important resource is kerosene. Known as ‘K2 oil,’ it is used for cooking, melting snow for water, thawing out frozen guns, and keeping warm. It gives off a noxious smoke that coats the igloos with grime; for months after they descend, soldiers cough up black gunk.
Survival under these conditions requires specialized equipment. There are 112 separate items in a Pakistani soldier’s high-altitude kit, including two types of oxygen canisters, three models of ice axes, three kinds of rope, 29 sizes of pitons, five different pairs of gloves, three types of socks, a puffy white down suit rated to minus 60, and a black plastic”nuclear-biological-chemical warfare face mask.” The Pakistani gear that I saw seemed to be generally low-quality stuff; most of it carried the brand name Technoworld, which no one I spoke to in the outdoor industry had ever heard of. In contrast, Indian soldiers get state-of-the-art gear from a wide range of highly specialized Western firms like Koflach, Asolo, and Black Diamond.
The monetary cost of these posts is enormous. A liter of kerosene that goes for 19 rupees in Rawalpindi costs Pakistan more than 650 rupees by the time it’s been hauled to 19,000 feet. (On the Indian side, almost every pound of supplies, including the artillery pieces, is flown in by helicopter because there are no roads on the glacier, pushing transportation costs ten times higher.) Each summer in the Ghyari sector alone, more than 35 Pakistani bases, gun positions, and fighting posts have to be stocked with some 2,000 tons of ammunition, rations, and fuel. This material is freighted to Ghyari by truck and hauled up the ice on mule and donkey trains. To prevent snowblindness, the pack animals are equipped with specially made glacier goggles. Sometimes they stumble and plummet into the crevasses. “They scream for an hour until they freeze to death,” one of the muleteers told me. “It is terrible to hear.”
Over 90 percent of the casualties on both sides are caused by weather, terrain, and what mountaineers call “objective dangers.” Above 18,000 feet, the human body cannot acclimatize and simply starts to deteriorate. Soldiers fall ill, lose their appetites, can’t sleep, and have problems with memory. Severe frostbite — all it takes is touching a gun barrel with bare hands — can result in the loss of fingers and toes. The two most serious killers are HAPE (high-altitude pulmonary edema) and HACE (high-altitude cerebral edema). Men suffering from HAPE, an accumulation of fluid in the lungs, cough up a pink froth and can be dead in a matter of hours. With HACE, fluid leaks from oxygen-starved blood vessels in the brain, causing severe swelling, headaches, hallucinations, and dementia. Untreated, HACE can kill a man within 24 hours.
In settings like this, suffering is often transformed into legend. The Pakistanis tell of a post beyond Sia La, at nearly 22,000 feet, that is said to have three separate cracks in the ice known as Three-Man Crevasse, Five-Man Crevasse, and Eight-Man Crevasse — each named for the number of men who died falling in. Soldiers talk of men losing their minds and leaping from the posts to their deaths. Some say their tormented cries can be heard in the wind over the peaks. And then there’s the story about the platoon killed in an early battle at Bilafond La, whose bodies froze into such grotesque positions that their corpses had to be hacked into pieces before they could be placed in helicopter panniers and brought down for return to their families.
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