Echoes of a war and its wounds Premium

Heart-wrenching stories of Kargil War martyrs' families and soldiers' bravery during the conflict, shared with pride and sorrow.

On July 2, 1999, Poloju Sharada’s heart lightened when she received an inland letter from her husband, Lance Naik Gopaiah Chary. “I am far away from the war zone. There is nothing to worry,” read the letter. Gopaiah’s reassuring words brought her a moment of relief amid the turmoil of the ongoing war in Kargil district of Jammu & Kashmir. She clutched the letter, sent almost two months after he had left for the India-Pakistan Kargil War, and imagined him safe and sound.

Just hours later, an united Andhra Pradesh Government official, landed up at her father’s house. Sharada listened in disbelief as he broke the news of Gopaiah’s martyrdom. The comfort from his letter, posted barely two weeks ago, shattered instantly.

A native of Suryapet in erstwhile Nalgonda district of Telangana and the sixth among 11 children of his parents, Gopaiah had joined the Army in 1985 at the age of 19. His was the first artillery unit — the 315 Field Regiment — to be deployed in Drass, a town near Kargil, during the initial phase of the war that began on May 14, 1999. The hostilities finally ended on July 26, 1999, with the Indian Army reclaiming most of the area on the Indian side that had been occupied by infiltrators.

“The entire town turned up to pay their last respects when his body was brought to Suryapet,” recalls Sharada, now 47, as tears run down her face.

Sharada and Gopaiah had been married just three years when he passed away. Their daughter, then six-years-old, now runs a hall that she leases out for events, in Suryapet, and is married.

Four days later in Hyderabad, the capital of united Andhra Pradesh, M.Y. Divya’s world was upended by the news of her husband Lance Naik M.Y. Ramachander’s death. A resident of Bolarum in Secunderabad Cantonment, he had been selected to the Madras Regiment in 1994 at the age of 19.

“He was home on leave when the situation in Kargil was getting tense. I asked him to stay back for a few days, but he refused to extend his leave, saying that the country’s honour was at stake,” says Divya, now 43. She got married to Ramachander, a close relative, in 1999 just weeks before the war broke out.