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Outside Magazine February 2003

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The Coldest War (Cont.)


	The 19,700-foot stare: Captain Somnil Das in a hut at Camp II. "Once you've been under fire, you never want it again," he said. (Teru Kuwayama)

AFTER MEETING KUMAR, Teru and I flew to Leh, the 11,500-foot capital of Buddhist Ladakh. There we met Yaseen, our uncontainably cheerful Kashmiri guide, and a liaison officer assigned by the Indian army to chaperon us on our trek across the glacier: Somnil Das, a 24-year-old infantry captain who had recently spent four months commanding a post above Bilafond La. His job was to make sure that we didn't see anything we weren't authorized to see.

To get from Leh to the snout of the glacier, we hired two jeeps and headed in a snowstorm up the single-lane road that ascends through miles of steep switchbacks before it crosses Khardung La, at 18,380 feet the highest paved highway pass in the world. We descended into the Nubra Valley. The surrounding ridges were naked and brown, as smooth as a fossilized dinosaur bone. The snow turned to rain, the rain ended, and the afternoon filled with a pale lavender light. Now the road started climbing again, and flowers appeared: the wild, tangled Sia roses that gave the glacier its name. Das swiveled around in the front seat.

"Hey, would you guys like to hear some rock?" he asked, shoving a tape of Guns N' Roses' Use Your Illusion II into the jeep's cassette deck.

"So what exactly happened to these guys?" asked Das. "I heard that they all became drug addicts and that the band is no more." Teru informed Das that while various members of the band have had their problems, Axl Rose is still around.

"So Slash is no longer there?" asked Das plaintively. Teru shook his head.

"That's really a shame. That guy was too good on the guitar. I used to love listening to him at my post." He stole a glance out the front windshield.

"Okay," he said. "That's it, the snout of the glacier. Can you see the pinnacles? Total ice. Absolute ice."

There it was, immense and gray and hulking, a 200-foot wall of boulders and gravel and muddy ooze. It plugged the entire valley from end to end, surrounded by 19,000-foot fangs shooting almost straight into the air. From a dark hole beneath the ice roared the Nubra River, roiling and chalky, laden with grit.

Base camp for the Siachen theater is tucked into the western side of the valley, just short of the snout. Little more than a dirt lot holding about 35 brown-and-green rectangular buildings, it is the nexus for the world's highest, most expensive, and longest-running military air operation. Two days earlier a glacial surge of ice and boulders had coughed out of the mouth of the Nubra and obliterated the steel suspension bridge leading to base camp. We turned onto a temporary bridge that the engineers had thrown up in 24 hours and rattled across, passing under a brightly painted sign that announced, HERE FORTITUDE AND COURAGE IS THE NORM. Up ahead was a tall pole that displayed a bright green flag.

"Green indicates there's no casualties on the glacier," explained Das. "A red flag signals that someone has been injured. Black means death." Our jeeps came to a halt. "Well, we're here," he said. "Welcome to the Siachen."

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