A Man Was Lost to the Glacier Siala Post, Siachen Glacier. 18,600 feet. 1992.
Vinod Dora was the kind of officer you remember not because he saved your life — though he may have done that too — but because he taught you things no classroom ever would. Once, on a patrol above Siala, while an HMG position below us was firing in our direction, he had watched the tracer rounds arc overhead with the mild interest of a man observing weather. “Ineffective fire,” he said, not breaking stride. “At this height, the gun sight can’t be properly adjusted. Calibrated for lower altitude. The rounds go high — above us, not through us.” He said it the way a physics teacher might correct a mistaken assumption. Calmly. With pleasure, almost. He was brave because he was logical. In Vinod Dora the two were the same thing — what looked like daring from the outside was simply the conclusion of a clear calculation. He had worked out the ballistics. He knew where the rounds were going. There was no performance in it. I filed it away alongside everything else Vinod Dora taught me, which was considerable. And I thought of it often afterwards, in a different context entirely — the idea that at extreme altitude, the calibrations shift, and what was true at a lower elevation simply does not hold.
The first jawan went down in the morning. He had been trying to extract a snow scooter from a crevasse — rope, carabiner, jumar, the standard kit. Then the rope dropped from his hands. He swayed once, slowly, like a man falling asleep standing up, and went down onto the ice. I was closest. I reached him first, made him flat, raised his legs. A faint, I thought. Blood pooling away from the brain for a moment. But when we carried him into what passed for a Medical Inspection Room — a kerosene-warmed space barely above freezing itself — there was nothing. No condensation on the tongue depressor held to his mouth. No pulse. Cardiac arrest. At 18,600 feet. I administered a chest thump and started CPR. The problem was immediate and mechanical: at this altitude the air holds perhaps twelve to fifteen percent oxygen, against twenty-one at sea level. No single pair of lungs could sustain the effort. Four men rotated through the compressions, spelling each other every few minutes, each man himself breathing too hard to keep going long. CPR as a relay race, passed from pair of arms to pair of arms, while I managed the IV line and the oxygen and the portable HAPO chamber being worked steadily in the corner by a foot pump. Vinod appeared at the door. He looked at the scene without expression. Evacuation, Bopa? I nodded. He went to the radio. The message that went out to the helicopter crew was honest: a jawan, probably won’t make it. The chopper was en route. We continued. I had given Xylocard rather than adrenaline — a decision made on instinct, a gut sense that the arrest was electrical rather than mechanical, the heart misfiring rather than stopped. The IV line was working, which meant some circulation was present. I held onto that.
Approximately half an hour before the helicopter arrived, the jawan opened his eyes. He sat up. He looked at the men gathered over him — the rotating CPR teams, now motionless and staring, Vinod in the doorway, the IV line still in his arm — and his expression was one of complete bewilderment. Nothing happened to me, he said. Nobody spoke for a moment. The kerosene heater hissed. Then someone laughed, and then everyone did — the slightly hysterical laughter of men who have been holding something very tightly and have just been allowed to put it down. He was evacuated. Hale and hearty. Puzzled by the fuss.
Later, sitting alone with Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, I was looking for confirmation of what I had done, or perhaps absolution. Instead the book fell open to Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome — a condition of accessory electrical pathways in the heart, predisposing a person to tachyarrhythmia, often silent for years, occasionally lethal under precisely the physiological stress that Siala had applied that morning: altitude hypoxia, pulmonary pressure already pushed to its limit, and then the sudden surge of heavy exertion. The ECG at the base hospital confirmed it. Delta waves. WPW. The Xylocard had been right. Harrison’s, falling open to exactly the right page after the fact, had the quiet dignity of a friend who simply nods. Among the men of Siala, something shifted. A doctor who could wake the dead was no longer merely a functioning doctor. I had been elevated — not by my own account, but by theirs — into something else. A man who could perform a miracle. That breathing continued until the next disaster.
The signalman had detached himself from the rope. A line had gone down on an elevated pole — one of the cable line poles that carried communication across the glacier — and he had left the linked group of eight to fix it alone. A practical decision, the kind men make a hundred times at altitude without consequence. He went to the pole. He began to work. Then the ice bridge beneath him collapsed. He went into the crevasse without a sound that anyone heard. When the linked group felt something odd — the rope gone slack behind them, the weight of eight become seven — they turned and looked back. There was only the glacier. Pristine snow. No man. No mark. As if he had simply been erased from the frame, cleanly, between one moment and the next.
The pole next to the one with the wire was used to probe the snow. They found the crevasse that way, by feel, by the give of hidden space beneath the white surface. The men stood immobile at its edge. Vinod Dora reached them in the shortest time possible, on a snow scooter, crossing whatever distance lay between him and that circle of standing men as fast as the machine and the glacier would allow. He arrived. He looked at the hole in the ice. He understood what it meant. He went down first. To go into a crevasse is not a dramatic plunge. It is a deliberate thing — you are lowered on a rope, slowly, into narrowing darkness. The cold down there is not the cold of Siala’s surface, which is already brutal enough. It is something beyond that, a cold that reaches into the body faster than the mind can track, the kind that turns flesh before a man has understood what is happening to him. Frostbite claims people at far lesser temperatures than the inside of a glacier. Vinod was lowered in. The crevasse was conical — wide at the top, narrowing as it descended. He got stuck in the narrowing. He was hauled back up. A second man went down. Then a third. Each in turn reached the point where the geometry of the ice said no further, and each in turn was brought back up, the cold having done what it does to anyone who stays in it long enough. They sent for the High Altitude Warfare School team. Hats off to every soldier who went into that crevasse. Hats off to the daredevils of HAWS, who came with their ropes and their training and their willingness to be lowered into places most men will never see. By the time they arrived, an ice bridge had formed below the body. The glacier, having taken the signalman, had closed around him. All the skill and all the rope in Siala could not move what the cold had sealed in the hours since he fell. A man was lost to the glacier. I wrote the report. Declared him perished. A doctor’s signature in place of a burial that the glacier would not permit. The body could not be sent home. His family would receive words, not remains. The glacier would keep him, as it keeps everything it takes — sealed under ice, in that narrowing cold darkness, beyond the reach of rope or grief or rank. It was a big blow. There is no other way to say it.
I should say something about Vinod Dora, and a name that was never his to carry. There was a Pandit in that world — unstable, as some men are — who had called him the prince of bad luck. One man’s verdict, unratified by the battalion, unearned by anything Vinod had done. The kind of label that floats in the air of a posting and occasionally lands on someone who cannot easily shake it off. In my eyes it was never true. What I saw at Siala confirmed what I had already understood: a man who read danger with clarity, who moved faster than anyone else when a man had fallen, who went down into the crevasse first and came back up having failed and watched two more men try and fail after him — and who stood at the edge in the end with the particular stillness of someone who has done everything available to him and knows it. The battalion knew what it had in Vinod Dora. One unstable Pandit’s epithet does not outweigh the evidence of a man’s life. If the crevasse washed anything clean, it was not his reputation — that needed no washing. It washed away the last trace of a foolish name that should never have been spoken.
I have thought about these two days often, in the years since Siala. The same altitude. The same cold. The same glacier with its crevasses and its indifference. One man restored by CPR and Xylocard and a textbook falling open to the right page and whatever it is that cannot be named. One man kept, despite Vinod Dora going in headfirst after him, despite three men trying, despite the HAWS team and their ropes, despite everything. The glacier does not negotiate. It has no calibration problem — unlike the HMG gun sight, it is perfectly adjusted for exactly this height. What it takes, it keeps. Vinod taught me that in extreme environments, the calibrations shift — that what holds at a lower elevation does not hold here. I understood it first as physics, standing on a patrol while rounds arced overhead. I understood it again as medicine, watching a man sit up from cardiac arrest and ask what the fuss was about. I understood it finally, and completely, standing at the edge of a crevasse in pristine snow, watching the glacier give nothing back. In extreme environments, life exists in narrow bands. Sometimes medicine is logic. Sometimes it is a guessed equation and a quiet heave-ho from fate. And sometimes the glacier simply keeps what it has taken, and the snow closes over, and there is nothing left to see.
The signalman’s name should be here. I am sorry that it is not.