Fighting in jungles is the most difficult task

Our soldiers led by officers can do the impossible

By M S Nazki

They are a defiant band of brothers, ever prepared to any task given to them and the fact is a 𝗙𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝗲𝘁𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝗱 d𝗼𝗴𝗴𝗲𝗱 𝗱𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗻𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗴𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗷𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗲y!

-This was from Dhruva Command Indian army, ‘strong andCapable’! And can do anything and everything at place which could be anywhere or everywhere! the task done would be immaculate!

-i did not get much of an material but the word doggedness struck me and that too ver heavily rather early in the morning today itself! throughout the fifteen kilometers journey (which i wlways start with a walk, suddenly got an idea as to how would i start with! i scratched my head while walking thinking aaas to which book i had read regarding a ‘team’ operating in the thick jungles! I knew what I had to do! By the way, the name of the book was Kurt Vonnegut’s, ‘Bluebeard’!

-The little extract goes something like this:

-The team (about this I have written earlier too) must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail. The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius – a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in in general circulation. ‘A genius working alone,’ he says, ‘is invariably ignored as a lunatic.’! The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find; a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. ‘A person like this working alone can only yearn loud for changes, but fail to say what their shaped should be.’

The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain everything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. ‘He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting,’ . ‘Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a smoked chicken.’! delicious for the moment but ugly in the mornings! Kurt was not wrong!

-But will add here that the officers and men of Dhruva Command slug it out day in and day out to get the results they wanted! they are the real geniuses working it out alone, circumstances and the environment could be any! The picture with the story suggests that exactly! But most soldiers who have experienced combat understand that armchair quarterbacking is shallow and often misguided. It’s easy to second-guess decisions based on their ramifications, and then to assign blame. Considerably harder is accepting that in combat, things can and will often go wrong not because of bad decisions, but despite even the best decisions!

-It has happened and will happen but the same can be rectified! Fighting in jungles is the most difficult task! Everyone is an enemy in it be it animals or the humans who have turned animals with guns in their hand! In other words predators are more and at the moment it is the predators from across dealing with ‘US’!

-Our soldiers led by officers can do the impossible and that is why I thought the word ‘Doggedness’ matters a lot! this story is based upon the same word!

-In 1958, a soldier named J. Glenn Gray wrote a book about soldiers in combat called The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle. Gray, who was drafted into the army as a private in May 1941, was discharged as a second lieutenant in October 1945 after having seen fighting in North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany. His book, which is both obscure and revered, touches on something that would later strike me as relevant to what was now unfolding at Dhruva command as our counterassault came in danger of unraveling. Gray wrote with elegance!

-Calculus of combat, at its most brutal essence, is binary: you either overcome the hurdles that are flung in front of you and you figure out a way to make things happen, or you don’t. It’s a zero-sum, win-or-lose game with no middle ground—and no points for trying hard. But hard trying gets the due results! The officers and men of Dhruva command know the same!

The range of human knowledge today is so great that we’re all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely between them almost has to forgo closeness with the people around him. It’s the Nation that matters the most and all of us are part of the great Nation known as India!

Wolves travel in packs, but the fiercest travel alone. Indian soldier has the latter’s instinct! And finally we will say tha ‘a hunter’s meal is in proportion to his skill.’ Who pulls the trigger first will always win!