Marriage can wait, maybe sometime later this year, he says, ``if the Pakistanis permit''. But Flt Lt Chibber doesn't feel lonely, he has friends in Flt Lts Anuj Gupta, P A Shah, T S Mattu, Pinaki Bhowmick and Flying Officer J `Joe' Joshi. All, like him, in their early twenties. They see Kargil as the mission ``we had been dreaming about since joining the Air Force''.

For Ft Lt Anuj Gupta, from a west Delhi middle-class family, the call came when he was about to turn in for the night in his quarters at Udhampur fighter base. His orders were clear: Leave for Srinagar immediately. Air HQ had decided on air strikes to evict the intruders and he would be among those who would carry them out, beginningnext day. The war had begun.``I flew the first mission on the first day,'' recalls Flt Lt Gupta, who, like Flt Chibber, also flies a Mig-29. ``I was supposed to reconnaissance the area. I wasn't scared, but there was this feeling of the unknown.'' By the morning of the second day (May 27), a fair group of young pilots had assembled at the Srinagar Air Force Station. Flt Lt K Nachiketa was among them. Senior officers briefed them on the operations, the terrain and the ``necessity to stick to our side of the LoC''. Separate briefings were held at Ambala and Avantipur Air Force bases.

But disaster struck later that afternoon. Flt Lt Nachiketa, on his first strike mission, had to bail out and landed in Pakistan. He was taken POW. Squadron Leader Ajay Ahuja, who was following him, was shot down by a Stinger missile. Next day, an MI-17 helicopter gunship, with four Air Force personnel, went down near Tololing. ``We felt low, because Nachi is a close friend. But we recovered quickly,'' says Flt Lt Gupta. ``Ourseniors worked out new tactics and we started off once again. On one mission, I fired several rockets at the intruders' bunkers in Tiger Hill. Another was at Tololing.''

As the air attacks increased, so did the intruders' anti-aircraft fire and the number of shoulder-fired missiles. Given the ragged terrain, these young men and their machines were stretched to their limits. ``Yet we told ourselves, it was nothing compared to what our jawans were facing down below,'' says Calcutta boy Flt Lt Pinaki Bhowmick. Around the first week of June, Flt Lt P A Shah joined the operations with his Mirage-2000. The fire power now changed -- Mirage-2000s are equipped to fire laser-guided weapons -- and the air strikes became more telling.

Until then, air strikes had been ``pretty one-sided''. Suddenly, there was lot of Air activity on the Pakistani side. ``On one mission, I picked up three F-16s on my radar screen. They didn't attack. But we were ready,'' says Flt Lt Shah. ``We would have quite liked a duel, in casethey strayed to our side,'' adds Mig-21 pilot Flt Lt Joshi.