A citation records what an officer did. It cannot record what it cost him to do it, or what it asked of the people around him. This page is about the second thing — the psychology of fear and readiness, and the weight of command decisions — drawn from how Indian infantry officers, as a body of men, have described the weeks before, and the minutes before, an assault like the one on Jubar Top.
Nothing on this page claims to know Major Hari's private thoughts on Jubar Top. No diary or interview of his survives in the public record. What follows is drawn instead from the widely documented experience of Indian infantry officers in the Kargil War as a whole — the training every officer receives, and the conditions every unit in Batalik and Dras faced that summer. It is offered as context for the citation, not as a substitute for it.
When Indian troops were first inducted into Kargil and Batalik in May 1999, many units were told they were clearing out small parties of infiltrators — a policing action, in effect, on ground the Army knew well from decades of holding the Line of Control. What they found instead were prepared, interlocking defensive positions built by regular Pakistani Northern Light Infantry troops, equipped with heavy machine guns, automatic grenade launchers, and range-finding equipment, dug in over the winter while the heights sat unoccupied.
Commanders working from small-scale topographical maps — never designed for combat at this precision — found sheer cliffs rendered as flat contour lines, and discovered only through contact that they were outranged and fighting uphill into ground the enemy had shaped to its advantage for months. The mismatch between the mission as briefed and the mission as it actually was is one of the defining, well-documented shocks of the opening weeks of the war.
Proper acclimatisation to altitudes above 15,000 feet takes weeks of staged ascent. The emergency of Kargil gave units days, sometimes hours — men and officers were moved from around 5,000 feet to well above 15,000 feet at a pace no textbook would recommend, straight into contact.
The physical toll — splitting headaches, nausea, pulmonary distress, frostbite, all carried alongside 25–30 kg of ammunition, rations, and radio equipment up near-vertical rock — was only half the burden. The harder half was mental: an oxygen-starved brain still had to calculate firing angles, radio coordinates, and assault timing, while the body was simultaneously demanding it stop.
In Indian infantry battalions, soldiers move on their officer's example — a tradition, not a formality. In the earliest weeks of Kargil, before artillery observation was fully dialled in and before close air support was consistently available, the only way to break a fortified bunker on a cliff face was frequently a direct, uphill assault under fire, led from the front rather than directed from behind.
This is a large part of why the Indian officer corps suffered such a disproportionately high casualty rate in the war relative to their numbers. It reflects a widely reported shift, documented across many units in the campaign: officers moving from ordinary human anxiety into a kind of fatalistic clarity — the understanding that stepping out from cover was genuinely dangerous, and doing it anyway because the alternative was a stalled attack and a unit that stopped believing it could take the ground.
Across the Batalik and Dras sectors that summer, officers frequently lost friends and course-mates on neighbouring spurs and ridgelines while an operation was still under way — and had no time to process it before the next order had to be given. Grief, by necessity, was deferred: converted into focus, sometimes into a harder edge of resolve, because a company commander who stopped to absorb a loss mid-assault put every man still moving at greater risk.
For those directing an attack over the radio net — company commanders, seconds-in-command, adjutants — this carried a particular isolation: hearing a firefight develop on the other end of a handset, unable to close the distance themselves, while still needing to sound steady enough to keep directing artillery, reinforcements, and the boundaries of the fight.
As the initial disorientation of the war's opening weeks cleared, accounts from across the theatre describe a hardening into what might be called grim tenacity — the old regimental ethos, often summarised as Naam, Namak, Nishan (name, salt, and flag — one's honour, one's loyalty, and one's colours), reasserting itself as the operative logic. Defeat stopped being a live option, because regimental honour and sovereign ground were now both on the line in a way that could not be walked back from.
With that came a narrowing of focus: from the sweep of the war down to the next rocky outcrop, the next bunker, the next fixed rope, the next grenade — one tactical bound at a time, rather than the full scale of what remained to be done.
The romantic idea of the fearless officer gives way, in most first-hand accounts, to something more human: a disciplined mastery of fear rather than its absence. An officer carries the solitary weight of knowing his timing and his orders will decide who lives, surrounded by his men and yet alone in that particular responsibility.
The fear itself is described as universal — of death, of injury, but just as often of letting down the men who are about to follow him over the crest. Flashes of home, of parents, a spouse, or children, surface in the quiet minutes before contact, alongside the quiet acknowledgement that this might be a final farewell. Physically, it shows up as a racing heart, a dry mouth, and a strange hyper-awareness of sound and movement in the silence just before an assault begins.
What carries an officer across that line is, by most accounts, less a personality trait than a set of habits drilled in long before the shooting starts. Standard operating procedures, terrain rehearsal, and repetition give the mind something concrete to hold onto: checking weapons, confirming sectors of fire, verifying the casualty evacuation route, running the plan one more time. Nervous energy gets channelled into checklists rather than left to circle.
There is also a discipline of outward composure. An officer's men read his face, his voice, and his posture constantly; panic in a leader spreads through a unit far faster than calm does, so the calm is often manufactured first and only becomes genuine afterward. Regimental identity — heritage, tradition, and the invocations particular to each unit — plays a similar role, shifting the mind from individual self-preservation toward something shared and larger. And in the final minutes before movement, many describe a settling clarity: mortality accepted and set aside, not because it stops mattering, but because the only thing left to do is execute the next bound well.
Everything so far on this page has been about the officer who moves — the one climbing, crawling, and closing with the enemy. But combat leadership is not only found at the point of contact. Some of its heaviest moments happen a few metres back, on a radio handset, where a commander has to weigh an operational necessity against the near-certainty that saying "go" will cost a life he can see and hear but cannot reach.
That burden is well documented across the Kargil War as a whole: seconds-in-command and company commanders holding a steady, decisive voice over the net while casualty reports came in, because a leader's composure is often the only thing standing between a unit executing a plan and a unit coming apart. It asks a commander to subordinate his own instinct to protect a subordinate against that subordinate's own read of the situation on the ground — and to live afterward with whichever way that judgment call went.
1 Bihar's own record holds a real instance of exactly this. In the account of Point 4268 covered on The Battle page, the battalion's Commanding Officer, weighing whether to let a wounded Major Saravanan press a final assault into approaching daylight, turned to Major Hari for a second judgment before deciding. Hari's assessment — that Saravanan's conviction left no real room to hold him back — became part of what the Commanding Officer weighed before, in his own words, "reluctantly" giving the order to proceed. Leadership in that moment wasn't located in any one man: it was distributed across a Commanding Officer willing to consult, a fellow officer willing to give an honest read of a situation he had no power to change, and a wounded company commander whose own leadership was refusing to let his men finish the job without him.
Major Hari left no memoir of the hours before Jubar Top. What's on this page is the general shape of what officers in his position, in that war, in that terrain, are documented to have carried — offered so the bare facts of the citation sit inside some sense of their human cost, not as a claim about his private thoughts.