Life could go on uneventfully till a materially superior incident takes place, which tends to jerk one out of drift and a state like that of a tiny twig floating around aimlessly in a side eddy of the stream, going nowhere in particular. This occurrence could involve the subject in the build up and the process of its evolution or it might so happen that one was accidentally around to witness and be affected if sufficiently receptive. In both cases the effects are the same, and only the intensity might vary. For our discussion, the station of the subject is not important but how it affected his perceptions and what kind of message was delivered matter. Such events can neither be manufactured nor designed to happen. They don’t also arrive from nowhere nor are they ordinarily startling or invasive. At the moment of incidence they tend to appear perfectly normal; it is only in hindsight that their significance stands out. In most cases this experience is personal and specific, only rarely it is public or general in nature. This is understandable, as it has to relate to the state of mind of the viewer and the compass of the physical environment he or she might be in. This perforce makes the ring smaller, personal, and with reference to one’s own life for the most part. Therefore it may be useful to focus on what transpired and emerged and much less on who it was. These events tend to set up a magnetic field affecting whoever happened to be within the command area. As we reported to our unit in Lahore after passing out from the Pakistan Military Academy in 1968, we were stacked three bachelor officers to a room and were assigned one batman by our very frugal unit second-in-command. A batman with a bachelor officer used to be the mother, wife, buddy and treasurer, all four woven into one. Khushi Mohammad was our caretaker. He was an illiterate, simple soul from Sargodha, deeply affectionate, dutiful and extremely loveable. We called him Khushia. In our happy neighbourhood there were three more such tiger dens where other bachelor officers were lodged. Khushia was never available to us, as he would be attending every other call coming from any quarter. One had to catch him midway to slow him down from his public service sprints between the Officers Mess and the bachelor officers’ rooms. One Sunday, Khushia was unusually missing in action. I got curious and walked out of my room to see what had happened. Khushi Mohammad was sitting hunched in a corner with his head over his knees, perhaps sobbing quietly. The previous night his young son in the village had had a bad fall from the roof and was fighting for his life in a hospital in Sargodha. Khushia did not want to ask for a leave, as we were to leave for a field exercise on Monday. This was an example of sterling devotion to duty and very impressive. I dispatched him immediately on leave, absence of the unit second-in-command’s prior approval and inevitable shouting that followed notwithstanding. Most regrettably, this ever-threatened species is extinct in the Army now. We had just been repatriated from the PoW camps in India. It was early 1974 and I had a head buzzing with highly motivated professional ideas. These ideas quickly dissolved as the defeat was already three years old and no one was prepared to engage in hard talk. A lot had changed in the Army and the country, not necessarily for the good. East Pakistan and the 1971 War seemed not to have existed. A reference was hardly ever made even in casual conversations. We had perhaps mastered the art of self-delusion and evasion of reality by then. In fact, there was a deliberate attempt to distance from the painful 1971 events, particularly the defeat. A senior officer commanding a formation in Sialkot was rumoured to have declared that he would not accept a ‘returnee’ (ex-PoW) in his formation. That was a very unkind cut. On return I was posted in Gujranwala. That December my sub-unit had just returned from a field-training exercise. It was a bitterly cold winter evening and I was hanging around to see that all the men, guns and equipment were back safely and that they had received a hearty, hot meal. A few hours into the night I went out to take a final round before leaving. As I turned a corner of the barracks, I heard water gushing from a tap that was perhaps left open by mistake. When I reached the water tap I saw a soldier washing something in the semi-darkness. That sturdy soldier from Bannu was washing tent pegs fitted with iron toes. His reply to my question was amazing and has been etched in my mind ever since, “Sahib, if I left these pegs unwashed, they will catch rust and be useless. My detachment (buddies) will suffer during field exercises.” That is the considerate mindset that has been unfortunately eroded by pervasive spit and polish kind of shallowness. Reminiscing occasionally, I still try to figure out who it could be that saved my life on that fateful night in December 1971 when a hulking speeding truck was about to run me over on the road to Khulna, as Jessore fell and panic set in. I am ever indebted to my Bengali buddy who never left my side during the whole course of the battle of Jessore and then Khulna. I had to force him (at gunpoint) to melt into the darkness on the night before the surrender, as I feared he could be hacked to pieces by the huge mob of Muktis that had surrounded us. Great intrepid soul he was. Then we had this exceptional person Subedar Doongar Singh in our PoW Camp at Ranchi, whose genuine humanity and contagious concern never failed to touch us. May these men be blessed many times more for being such wonderful human beings. It was 1983 and my unit was moving for summer collective training and field exercises from Kohat to South Waziristan. En route was a tricky road spiral, winding down to a bridge and up again on the other side. I thought it was a good spot to be around when the unit arrived. So I parked myself on a small clearing among those bends and waited. Unit vehicles began to slowly crawl through the dangerous hairpin road bends. Half the unit crossed over successfully when suddenly a large truck loaded with explosives and ammunition miscued, slipped one of its front wheels over the ledge and came to a screeching dead stop. A serious situation was at hand. I walked over to the driver’s side and found him to be tense and praying hard. He had to be calmed down first. I told him, “Do not release the brakes under any circumstances and hang on, we will get you out of this.” He relaxed visibly. After hours of effort we were able to pull back the ammunition truck like a dead weight, park it safely and relieve the driver. His calm and sense of duty during the entire nerve-shattering rescue were most admirable. Had the truck fallen or our rescue failed, the truck would have plunged into the dry ravine 300 feet below and exploded, blowing him up into tiny pieces. (To be continued) The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan army and can be reached at clay.potter@hotmail.com