Sleepless in Siachen

Altitude: 15,000 feet. Place: Siachen Glacier. Here, the bitterest enemy is not the Pakistani soldier standing armed to his teeth across the border. For both Pakistani and Indian soldiers, the bitterest enemy at Siachen is Siachen itself. Altitude 15,000 is Camp 3, and above that is Connaught Place! Camp 4, 16,000 feet. At Camp 3, the night temperature is minus 25 degrees Celsius. Connaught Place is much colder, and I cannot imagine what hits the soldiers at the actual border posts at around 22,000 feet. Bana Post, Qazi Post or Chaman Post, from where a bewildered Major Gopal has just escaped minus 40 degrees! 

Talk about wet nights: even at Camp 3, it was a nasty experience, when after two days of blizzard, our Austrian-made sleeping bags were completely wet, covered with a sheet of ice. Sleep fled downhill. We were the 32 persons in the second civilian trek to the highest battlefield in the world. One among us, a scribe, went bonkers rubbing his hands and feet the whole night. We were well clothed: Duck Down feather jackets, which can hardly be worn in the coldest nights of Delhi's winter without sweating, and below them layers and layers of highly sophisticated warm clothing supplied by our hosts, the Indian Army, but to no avail.