New Delhi: "Life is too short — 2 inches." This was the handwritten note on the greeting card which commando Karamjit Singh Yadav quietly handed over to commando Bharat Singh as they settled down for a quick briefing session at the Taj Mahal hotel on November 28. Singh, who had sustained a shrapnel injury on his left ear, looked at Yadav and burst into a laugh. Having just walked out together out of a successful 30-hour long commando operation at Oberoi Hotel, both these men from the National Security Guard (NSG) clearly hadn't lost their sense of humour. Coming out trumps in one of the toughest anti-terror operation ever conducted in the country, the gallant men from the NSG who flew back to New Delhi to a hero's welcome at their headquarters at Mehram Nagar on Sunday were brimming with stories like these. Stories of how camaraderie and humour helped them bond even stronger in adversity, with the enemy just a bullet away.
"The enemy bullet had just missed him by a whisker. I just wanted to convey to him that the difference between life and death in this case was two inches," Yadav told The Indian Express. "I could never imagine that somebody could come up with something like this in such a situation," beamed Black Cat Bharat Singh. Both men were a part of the 50-odd Black Cats from the 51 Special Action Group involved in operations at the Oberoi Hotel.
At little before that briefing at the Taj, when Bharat Singh was getting the wound dressed at the Oberoi Hotel, his team leader commando R K Sharma told Singh that he had got his ear hit purposely so that his wife wouldn't pull it anymore. "I told him that had he given me this idea earlier, I would have got both my ears injured too," Sharma said, tongue firmly in cheek.
But apart from keeping the cheer going, the men leading the charge at Oberoi Hotel were also careful in ensuring that the morale of their teams did not flag at any stage of the long drawn operations. The news of Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan's death was not allowed to percolate beyond two of the senior team leaders leading the Black Cats at Oberoi. "The Major had trained many of the boys fighting in the Oberoi. We knew the news of his death could affect their morale," said one of the team leaders.
Some of the Black Cats in Oberoi even had a verbal duel with the two terrorists holed up there. Having been shot at by one of the commandos, one of the terrorists limped back to hide himself behind a wall. "Chhup Chhup ke kya marta hai, samney aa na, he shouted," said a commando. "Tujhme dum hai toh tu samney aa ja naa, he was told by one of our men," he added. Expletives, many in Punjabi, flew thick and fast between the commandos and the terrorists.
"I can tell you what all was said but you will not be able to print those words in a newspaper," one of the Black Cats told this correspondent. He, too, had clearly not lost his sense of humour.
