“The bombardment began a little after six. A seductive dusk was slowly settling over the Drass valley and as the sky darkened, shade by shade, sounds of war took over. Point 5140, still out of reach of Indian forces, was wrapped in a hail of artillery and mortar fire. Guns were blasting off from a dozen positions in the valley, and their ballast was thudding into the peak. Plumes of smoke rose from it, dissipating into the fading evening light.”

From a report in The Telegraph, June 18, 1999

The jawan stood silhouetted in the dusk, ramrod and still as a statue. On his olive-hatted visage loomed a storm that few could see that exultant evening.

The only fire on the craggy peaks overhanging Drass last week was celebratory. Thousands of flambeaux - many of them gas-powered to withstand sleet and high velocity winds - lit magically, as if by the throw of a switch.

From the snow-streaked Tiger Hill to the west to the crumbly masonry of Tololing, Point 5140 and kindred heights in whose lee the svelte Drass valley lies, peak after peak lay necklaced in light - the real trophies of the war of 1999, each rendered a shimmered frame. A sombre all-faith prayer had followed a rhapsodic hour of military bands playing in tribute and in triumph, and now the darkening sky was drawing the curtain on the tenth anniversary of festivities for Operation Vijay. Time for one last toast to the heady feats of a decade ago.

Not far away, the old Drass Brigade was already decked out for night. It used to be a shelled-out, scree-ridden escarpment during the war; now, frog prince-like, it had turned into a manicured landscape sloping, terrace after terrace, into the summer tempest of the Drass river. Fairy lights tinkled in the young oaks, a sheep, skinned and spiced, rotated on the barbecue spit; soon it would be time to uncork wine and song.

Relatives of the soldiers who died in the Kargil war attending the 10th anniversary of Operation Vijay at Drass

The jawan stood and watched glistening salons sweep away his high bosses and their quick-heeled ladies to the festivities that awaited them. The storm around him gathered thicker, darker. When this was done - the lights put out, the marquees folded and the honoured guests saluted to their far and more commodious stations - it would be just him and his forbidding and much-forgotten slog. Six months, probably more, in frozen desolation guarding a frontier that his countrymen merely assume to be safe, not knowing just how, not even bothering to know. 'It's tough, sir,' he said, easing his taut shoulders as the last of top brass sped away, tail lights blinking, 'it's just the high mountain and snow and nothing else. It's hard surviving, two months up there and you are already going mad, and you haven't even done half your vigil.'

He'd been part of the action in 1999, a much younger man fired by the first flush of patriotism; he was among those who scrambled up the jagged flanks of Tololing, often under fire, and eventually took it.

A forlorn memorial to martyred soldiers in Mushkoh Valley

Some of us had watched that see-saw assault from shell-peppered bunkers in the Drass valley that summer. Tololing and Point 5140 had been tough to take, perhaps tougher than the later and more fancied recovery of Tiger Hill because by then the conquest of Tololing had already triggered the troops into winning mode. Night after night, mortar and molten lead from Bofors guns thudded into the mountain, ripping the ridges and probably the posts infiltrators had occupied.

The evening it was finally wrested, the Tololing mountainhead looked like a volcano spewing smoke, or more like a demon slowly being put to death under artillery fire. 'Looking back it seems full of horror,' the jawan said. 'I can't imagine myself rushing up amid all that fire now, but back then we felt nothing, nothing but a screaming rush of blood, you become momentarily crazed, you don't care whether you'll live or die, it's just the mission. This is somehow tougher, preserving what we secured in 1999 winter after winter, it's a barren hardship nobody even seems to take cognisance of.'

Much later in the evening, plumbed in the convivial vortex of spirits, the jawan's officer, a smart infantry major just married, used sophistry to put a finer point on his soldier's burden. 'This is peace time, you see, but that doesn't make it any easier,' he said. 'You still get hurt and damaged on these heights, you still die, but nobody calls you a hero. There's no bravery in dying on the frontier in peace time, no medals for it.'

The major's unit had already been in Drass a month or so, acclimatising, and in a week they'd be backpacking up the ridges to do duty on posts that cannot be left unmanned a single day; that remains the signal lesson from the conflict of 1999 - leave an inch thinking nobody would bother occupying in the depths of freeze and you risk losing a mile.

'Nothing is left unmanned for a second any more,' said the major, 'we can't afford that after what happened 10 years ago, but that does not mean it has become a pleasant job. No air, no appetite, nobody to talk to, just dragging your heavy snow-suits and getting blinded by the whiteness of snow. Nothing happens, which is good in a way, but that's also the problem. Nothing happens, you return bombed by six months of vacuum, and nobody's even applauding good work, much less calling you a hero. There's no war, and there are no medals for dying in peace.'

The gala for the gallant war of 1999 was nearing its end, and the ironies of the scant notice given to the grimness of preserving those gains twisted away into the night with the quick-heeled ladies.