The company undertook the 10-day mission on a ration of 35 puris and a handful of shakkarparas per soldier. They moved in absolute silence, ate snow to quench their thirst, and closed in on enemy bunkers up the hill in the freezing cold of the night, spending daytime hidden behind boulders. "When we were about 500 metres below their post, we could see the Afghans in their thick white coats and green trousers, faces covered by black scarves. Almost seven feet tall and well built, they made us look like midgets. The Pakistani soldiers were slimmerand smaller. They were all well protected from the weather and wore snow shoes," he says. "For us, the food really did not matter. No one felt like eating, we were so fed up of shakarparas in a few days. It was sheer adrenaline that kept us going," says Hariram.

That was the attack in which his comrade-in-arms Naik Mukesh Rathod of Meghani Nagar lost his life. After an eight-day climb, the company reached a spot 50 m below the post occupied by the Pakistanis at 2 am. "Suddenly the moon came out of the clouds and they spotted us. Six of our men died in the exchange of fire that lasted more than 10 hours. Eight of theirs fell in the nearby gorge. Mukesh shot two of them with his AK 47, I shot one," he says. At 8 am, Mukesh was shot. "I saw him trying to ease his way back but he fell in the gorge," says Hariram. At 10 am, Hariram himself received bullets in his leg and fell. He lay flat till the firing seized and then crawled back to the base with the help of another soldier. It took him eight hours.From there a Chetak helicopter lifted him to the base hospital.

When the regiment launched another attack and captured the post about 10 days later, they noticed something in the gorge. Using binoculars, they saw that it was a man lying on his stomach with one hand in his pocket. When the body was recovered it could not be identified but for Mukesh's I-card and a letter from his wife in his pocket.

Naik Mukesh Rathod was cremated in Srinagar at 4 pm on June 28 with full military honours.