“Tiger, tiger, burning bright.
In the forests of the night…”
Once again, it was spring-cleaning time. Spring-cleaning my old computer, that is. From time to time it signals that I have strained its capacity and I must do some pruning. So I sit down and go through the directory, trying to figure what to throw out.
So there I was, engrossed in this task, resisting the temptation to read through every old letter and document, before deleting it. Trying to find out what "C:\pw\Chitra" stood for, I suddenly came upon a letter starting "My dear Tuna". Now, why had I filed a letter to Tuna under "Chitra"? I eventually figured out what had happened was: writing to Tuna, I had built it round bits of an earlier letter written to Chitra. The pieces I had thought worth repeating had remained deep-frozen in the computer's memory, retaining their freshness. Re-reading the letter brought back the details of the experience and my reactions at that time. Now, more than a year later, I could piece together the memories with a little less emotion.
".... you know how I got involved in raising a corps of raw volunteers for front-line duty in the east. It began, as usual, with an appeal for help to raise one and - you know me - my ego did not let me say 'No'. So, like so many times in the past, I said 'Yes' (when I shouldn't have) and got into deep water. What was happening was that we were trying to raise a group of about ten thousand to send out to the eastern front, to relieve regular troops for the push up north....."
It was a quixotic scheme, with more "gung-ho" than common sense. The funny thing was that it worked. The call had come one night. "I say, Somasiri, you are not doing anything special these days, or are you? Good! Look, there is this thing we've got to do - I said I would do it – and it's what you and I did once before, so there's nothing new to it. Only thing is, its sort of urgent. So how about tomorrow? Good. Well,……" And that's how it began - twenty years after I had retired from the Navy!
We had a bare room, two desks, a jeep and some borrowed odds and ends. But we could use the magic words "Defence Ministry". And so we began the task of cajoling the provincial organizations to find us volunteers. We had precious little to offer them beyond honour and discomfort. Not a very good marketing plan. Again, funnily enough, it worked. Starting as a trickle, the names eventually began to stream in. We selected area leaders, called them over and explained to them what it was all about. Our message, the one we tried to get across, was that they were coming to help the country through the most dramatic moment in its history. Their hope, though, was that this would help them get a government job after the fireworks were over. Anyway, we got them - not the ten thousand we hoped for, but less than half that number.
".......They got about two weeks training. We had only World War II .303 rifles to give them. Even the uniforms we gave them were what we could squeeze out of donors - we were operating without voted funds, and there was a parallel operation to arm-twist industrialists and motivate 'persons of good will' - and we started training them in groups of several hundred each, in a number of training camps all over the country. After six weeks of this, I had to go for my Conference, for about two weeks. The very day I got back, my assistant had started deploying them to the operational areas. It was a logistical nightmare. We had to coax them back from home, feed them, kit them up, buck them up, provide them with an army escort and shoot them (not really!) across....."
It was pretty chaotic, naturally. My assistant - a lady officer - was "on the ball" and wading through the mass of conflicting orders by all manner of geriatric Generals, still managing to mix Efficiency with PR. There were several new faces in the group, people who were even less able to cope than we were. Add to that the many Generals, each doing his own thing, and you can imagine the rest. I am afraid I did not do well in my task – fighting the old Generals and getting myself ‘frog marched’ out of the parade ground! Still, what still amazed me is that this entire Heath Robinson operation, held together by a string and a prayer, actually worked
That left us with the overwhelming question: how would our "cadres" fit into the battle-scarred areas they were being sent to?
"....They were attached to the army and so they were safely part of a system, but of a system that was foreign to them. As one said, later, they all thought the life of a soldier was glamorous - remembering only the soldiers home on leave, in their best uniforms, polished boots and sage advice on of how the war should be fought and where the Generals were wrong. Reality, they found, was a bit different. We had them in the really jungle areas - Vavuniya, Welikanda, Singhapura, Thoppigala - where the 'tiger' was burning bright. We had a good percentage of drop-outs......."
(The reasons they gave were numerous: some serious, and some downright hilarious!)
".....but those who remained really won my admiration. It was the boys from Colombo who would not go: these "Kolamba Kaakkas" thought it an unspeakable indignity to bathe in the tanks up there! NO I'm NOT making this up!"
Having duly installed all we could muster, it was our task to see to their welfare, take them their pay, placate and re-assure their parents, find those little extra comforts for them - rain-capes, water bottles - find more money to give them, arrange a way to talk to their parents, take parents and others to the front to show them the sons were alive. Most important, it was to meet and talk to them in the places they were working.
"I often went to all the places to speak to them, sometimes with their fortnightly pay. There they were, working alongside the regular soldiers, sharing their discomforts and companionship. After the initial culture shock, they had adjusted themselves well enough. You see, both soldiers and volunteers came from the same rural background and in spite of the bullying by the regulars they got along well. The biggest problem our volunteers had, was homesickness: they did not have the soldiers’ long service behind them. Not all were young boys: we had placed no real age limit and I remember a be-spectacled one past his mid-forties, every inch of 5-foot height, doing his best to report to me, Army style, that his platoon was 'Ready for Inspection, Sir!' Later, talking to him informally, I found him devastated at the vast acreage of paddy fields abandoned by frightened villagers - he was a landless peasant farmer, and he was aghast at the wastage. He even floated the idea that the land be given to his own people!"
The fear we, at headquarters, lived with was the news of the first casualty. Yes, we had made all the arrangements for the event, but it was something we ex-service persons did not want to see, or happen. Please, please let them live through the next three months! we prayed.
"They were not confined to work inside the camps. They had been sent to release trained soldiers for operational work. We sent them with minimum training but, to an operations commander losing his better troops to other areas, one man with a gun equaled another man with a gun; and so they were sent alongside the regulars to all the positions manned."
It would gave been the unkindest cut if I did not visit them at their outposts.
"Once, it was to a static position in a not-very-remote village. Still, the ‘tigers’ had attacked it two nights previously, and the villagers were still recovering from the trauma, gathered up and guarded in the village school building by the army. The village bordered the jungle, in the middle of which was a known enemy staging point towering above the distant trees......"
The road linking the towns and townships ran through thick jungle, where lurked the 'tiger'. A little away from the road, linked to it by gravel paths, were the homesteads of the villagers who lived and farmed the fields; whose sons worked often in the townships.
"They had come in the night, with an informer, identified the homes of the Home Guards who worked their fields by day and patrolled with the Police at night, and had selectively butchered their families in a 'night of the long knives', in the silence and darkness of their friend, the night. There was a jitteriness in the air, but neither the soldiers nor our volunteers were affected. Neither had the most of the villagers chosen to go away: only a few."
While we were talking to the troops a wireless message came of an attack on the village we had just passed through. It was, we later realized, just a scare tactic, but the troops on stand-by ran for their weapons and were immediately ready to go hot-foot to the site. We gave them one of our vehicles, and followed them. But the attackers had thrown their scare and melted back into the jungle. Just another day. Just another incident.
The jungle was the womb of both danger and refuge, we found. In the more remote villagers, where the silent death had come from the jungle, it was common for the villagers to steal into the jungle at twilight, with some mats and food, and hide there till morning. So their huts were empty when the 'tiger' came a-visiting.
Deeper in the forests were other little campsites, manned by a handful of men. There, they were really living rough:
".....one was an old road-metal quarry site, blasted over the years with dynamite, forming an arena-shaped hollow. There they were, perched on bare rocks in the jungle, with not a thing between them and the sky. By day they sheltered under the trees fringing the site. At night, they would ambush the known 'tiger' paths......"
Yes, our raw volunteers, within a few weeks, were good enough to go on operations. Night in the forest spells both danger and safety. The regular routes that the 'tigers' took from the jungle north of the road to that south of it were known, but an ambush is only as good as the men who lay it.
"..... but often they could not take them on because the numbers of real soldiers were so few: they were all being sent up north."
I could imagine the frustration of the regular troops when they had the 'tigers' in their sights but could not take them on, for lack of numbers.
" Night in the jungle, even under threat, could be beautiful - the stars were unbelievably bright to our eyes, long accustomed to seeing them through the haze over the city. By day, we would see elephants feeding by the roadside, peacocks pecking at the grains of rice fallen off passing lorries, along the road.
"Night in the 'headquarters', such as it was, was only relatively better. Often the big artillery boomed in support of another position, kilometers away, and under attack. The jerry-strung wiring in the camp would give way and the lights go out and bits of roof would fall into your drink! We experienced the immediate, fragile and spontaneous friendships that bloomed for a night, only, when all that one wanted was the company of human beings. Relaxing after a hard day in the parched dryness and alert for the signals that would call them to stations once again.
"We had our share of misfits among the 'Dad's Army’ types on our co-ordinating staff, who preferred to stay out of the field, if they could. We worked in civvies, in non-military vehicles, and it was easy to pretend we were some sort of govt. servants. So we made a point of dragging the reluctant Generals along every time we visited the outposts, pretending that we believed they were our best guides. As soon as we went back, they went back too - to the bottle! One letter I treasure from a devout Christian from Ja-Ela, out there in the jungle, calling the Blessings of God on me for doing something he had requested - something I would have done anyway, but not if I had not gone there."
I am no Christian, let alone a Roman Catholic, and so the letter was a bit of a puzzle. It took many readings for me to decipher the sonorous resonance of Church Sinhala in which it was written. Translated, as well as I can, into the English idiom it read:
" Lord in Heaven, dispenser of Justice to all beings, hear my prayer, in the name of your Son, Jesus of Nazareth!
"O Lord, our Father, who dwelleth in Heaven! We thank Thee, O Lord, for sending us Lieutenant Commander Devendra as the Deputy Commandant of our Force. Thank you, O Lord, for revealing to him the correct way to heed to my request. Give him, O Lord, the wisdom to carry out his duties in the future correctly. Defeat, O Lord, the forces of Darkness that try to hinder him, and help him lead our Force, through you, from Darkness to Light!
"This, I ask of you, Lord, in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, your Son."
A song to remember, indeed.
We had our volunteers further north too, in the forward defence lines. The closer they were to the combat zones, the higher their morale was, too, as it was among the regulars.
".....The Army morale was so utterly high. I remember, in Vavuniya, going to a platoon headquarters manning a number of points on the forward defence line. The headquarters was a low, two-'roomed' mud hut one had to stoop to enter. Yet, the OIC was conducting an analysis and strategy session, complete with blackboard and pointer: he, and his officers - all in their twenties - had identified a possible weakness in the line and were planning how to meet the contingency. At an abandoned Church we could see, barely half a mile away, the 'tigers' would gather every night. The officers were happy to see us and talked freely. Our volunteers were doing good work, had now learnt to handle more sophisticated weapons and were fit for combat in every way”
The war games in Colombo became so unimportant in these dry, dusty, thirsty, clearings in the scrub jungle, where the troops were trying to create a semblance of domesticity and a substitute for family life.
"We went on to the main barrier at Thandikulam, just north of Vavuniya, where the people from "no-man's land" between our and 'tiger' territory would cross between these two areas. They came every day, the locals, and bought all the same things every day, to sell at what must have been pretty high prices, back in the villages. All coconut and kerosene oil was carried in the plastic 'Pepsi' litre bottles - the consumer society had reached even ‘No Man’s Land’! There was a sort of Custom's Shed, pretty big, where they had to place their purchases on cement benches and stand behind them, while their purchases were examined by women in uniform. All were known persons, and all knew the weekly ration allowed. So only occasionally did we see something being confiscated. These "Custom's Officers" were Home Guard and Army women, in battle fatigues, all from the area and therefore equally at home in Sinhala and Tamil. I also went up and talked to the middle-class, English speaking people coming in from Jaffna for some family wedding in Colombo, returning to work from leave, coming for a holiday with their children in the south, coming to sit some examination. Many were pensioners and we found we had so many friends in common. Tissa - G.A. in Jaffna when Alfred Duraiappah was assassinated – was remembered well. I remember asking a young woman, a University lecturer, what she taught and where she had had her University education. She was lecturing in Business Administration, having got her first degree from Jaffna and her MBA from Sri Jayawardenapura. And all these were waiting, like Godot, in a ramshackle building, to be questioned and probed. They had all done this trip many times and were quite used to it; it was only the wasted time they complained about. How much this country was yet one! But all of us realized that one large segment of the Jaffna population had been plucked from the mainstream and was not part of this nostalgic picture.
"I am sorry if the story is a too-personal narrative."
At the time the letters were written, I had felt the need to put into words my experience of those six months. Mostly, I wanted to write about night in the jungle and the people who found it a refuge: the 'tigers' going about with deadly purpose, the soldiers on watch or in ambush, the villages hiding the night out in it, to escape the attacks on their villages. I wanted to go out on patrol, to spend a night with the villagers, to experience it all at first, not second-hand.
But it was not to be. The operation I had been called in to assist was successful, and in six months the north had been taken, our own operation was whittled down and I went home. So the work I wanted to do was left undone: what I had wanted to write, left unwritten.
Until the computer revealed the seed of the story that had been left unwritten.
(And - YES! - we did not lose a single volunteer!)
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