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The places that people will go to kill each other
EFL form WorldwireNowhere in the world is there a battlefield so remote, so high, so alien. In this wasteland of rock and ice, soldiers fight each other and the weather at heights above 18,000 feet, their bodies wasting away, starved of oxygen. "They look like animals when they come down, unshaven, dirty and thin as rods," is how one soldier described his comrades. Yet since 1984, India and Pakistan have been fighting for control of the Siachen Glacier and the surrounding tangle of mountains where South Asia, Central Asia and China collide. Siachen Glacier where the only non-combatant casualties are the Yeti. Today, so great is the mistrust between the nuclear-armed neighbors, which came close to war last year, that neither side will withdraw its troops, fearing the other will move in We havenât figured out what the advantage is but they arenât hurting the property values up there. Let them rumble. But in the 1980s, Pakistan began what India called "cartographic aggression," showing the Siachen Glacier on its maps and authorizing mountaineering expeditions to the region. I thought that cartographic-aggression was when the Ruskies tried to get a look at the big board. On April 13, 1984 India, fearing Pakistan would use control of Siachen to link up with its traditional ally China, airlifted in troops, who scrambled to occupy the passes leading into the glacier before Pakistani troops counterattacked. We refuse to allow you to establish a mine shaft gap. Since then the armies have dug in on whatever high points they could hold, sometimes within sight of each other. They shell each other, or shoot at each other, but rarely to much effect, their ability to fight hampered by the thin air and sheer challenge of operating in the extreme cold. Only 3 percent of the casualties here are from fighting. The rest die in avalanches, fall into crevasses or succumb to high-altitude sickness. Hey, the recruiter didnât tell me about the crevasses. Posted by: Super Hose 2003-10-15 |
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