Red-faced Army officers realised the goof-up and Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Ved Prakash Malik rushed to the Army hospital late yesterday to meet the soldier and congratulate him not only for the PVC but also for ``being alive''.

Sources said that an enraged army chief has ordered an inquiry into his ``unpardonable faux pas,'' and heads were certain to roll. ``This is not a clerical or typing error. It is just lack of interest in work. The chief is also angry because of the babu-like attitude of officers who deal with the sacrifice of the soldiers in the war front in a routine manner,'' Army headquarters sources said.

The mistake was pointed out by Yadav's wife Reena who hails from Bulandshahar. The hospital informedthe headquarters and now efforts are on to find out where the word posthumously crept in to the citation of the soldier belonging to the 18 Grenadiers.

Ironically, Yadav's citation also had ``posthumously'' written by hand and not typed. Yadav of the elite Ghatak platoon of 18 Grenadiers was tasked to recover Tiger Top While the 8 Sikh soldiers covered the flanks, the Ghatak platoon reached the rock face at night. Climbing a vertical wall using mountaineering equipment, the platoon reached midway when an enemy machine gun nest opened up.

The platoon commander was injured as they were all climbing with their weapons slung on their shoulders and could not fire back while scaling the wall. Yadav volunteered to carry on and continued climbing amid a hail of bullets. He reached the nest with three bullet injuries but lobbed a grenade inside a bunker. He killed four Pakistani soldiers as they came rushing out of the bunker but was critically injured himself.

Despite being injured he continued alone.Two of his colleagues had climbed up with him and together they killed three more enemy soldiers. His courage inspired his comrades-in-arms and after a 13-hour-long operation, Tiger Top was taken. ``What the inquiry will find out is where the word posthumously crept into his citation. From Drass, Yadav was taken in a helicopter to Srinagar and after emergency medical treatment there brought to Delhi,'' an officer in Delhi said.

``Somewhere along the line when citations were being prepared somebody wrote posthumously. Whether at the Brigade level (Drass), the Division level (Mughalpura), the Corps level (Srinagar), Command level (Udhampur) or even headquarter level (New Delhi), somebody has to pay for making the Army and the nation look stupid,'' he added.

Army spokesman Colonel Shruti Kant in New Delhi, however, chose to down play the incident. ``It appears to be a typographical error but we express our sincere regrets,'' was all he said.