is measured in cigarettes and cups of tea, games
of volleyball or cricket, prayers and daily chores.
Both India and Pakistan have learned from
their 35 years of mountain warfare how to care
for their soldiers in this environment. Army doc-
tors identified carbon monoxide poisoning and
embolisms as common issues caused by soldiers
spending too much time sedentary in snowbound
posts. Soldiers now are required to exercise every
day. “Every S.O.P. [standard operating procedure]
is written in blood,” one colonel said.
Before coming here, many of the soldiers we
met had seen combat in Pakistan’s tribal areas
bordering Afghanistan, part of the Pakistani
government’s effort to confront Islamic terror-
ism. “We have to fight nature here, and nature
is unpredictable,” the doctor said ruefully.
“Humans are easier.”IN THE AUTUMN OF 1985, more than a year after
India had seized the Siachen and 17 years after
Hodgson’s line was published, an Indian diplomat
sent an official inquiry. It eventually reached the
desk of the State Department Geographer at the
time, George Demko, who, like Hodgson, was a
former marine and had served in Korea.
More than a year later, Demko issued an
update to the mapping guidance that stated the
Office of the Geographer had reviewed the depic-
tion of the India-Pakistan border on U.S. maps
and had found “an inconsistency in the depiction
and the categorization of the boundary by the
various [map] producing agencies.” To correct
this depiction, he wrote, “the Cease-Fire Line will
not be extended to the Karakoram pass as has
been previous cartographic practice.”
Hodgson’s line had been erased. Although the
line was removed from U.S. maps, the Office of
the Geographer offered no explanation for why
it had appeared on them in the first place.
A few years after Demko’s correction, Robert
Wirsing, a scholar at the University of South
Carolina who’d been closely following the Sia-
chen conflict, began inquiring about the line
that had once appeared on U.S. maps and then
disappeared. Wirsing, who’d learned from an
Indian general that the Indian government hadbut we do this every day,” one soldier told me
on our first morning of walking. By the time we
reached a camp known as Paiju, our joints were
stiff and our feet tender.
The living conditions there are relatively com-
fortable. A generator and some satellite dishes
provide an unreliable connection to the outside
world. In the officers’ quarters, a tangle of ten-
uously spliced wires connected to a small TV
allows for evening entertainment.
“We use it for watching motivational movies,”
one man told us. “Like Rambo?” Cory joked.
“Yes, exactly,” the man replied, straight-faced.
Other posts don’t have it so easy. Urdukas, a
tiny outpost of three prefabricated Styrofoam
igloos set on a spectacular perch at 13,200 feet,
is occupied by just four enlisted men. “It’s very
boring,” one soldier whispered over roti and
sinewy chicken stew. “There’s no mobile, no
movies.” During winter, Urdukas receives only
four and a half hours of sunlight a day. The camp
is surrounded by hundreds of jerry cans hold-
ing kerosene—the soldier’s lifeblood, providing
cooking fuel and warmth. Inside each shelter,
everything is covered with soot. Here the only
extravagances are naswar—a coarse variety
of chewing tobacco—and ludo—a Pakistani
version of pachisi played on homemade game
boards. “If there are officers, it’s more comfort-
able,” one soldier said.
The next day we met a dozen soldiers heading
down after a three-week patrol. Their demeanor
was festive. I chatted with a friendly captain, a
doctor, as he smoked a cigarette.
“It was OK on this patrol,” he said. “We had to
evacuate three men for high-altitude cerebral
edema, but this is normal.”
Until 2003, the two sides regularly traded
artillery barrages and sniper fire, but a cease-
fire agreed to that year has left little for soldiers
to do other than watch one another and survive
the elements. “It’s like a football match,” another
captain told me of life on the front line. “Usually
we warn by raising a red flag. We warn, ‘Please
stop whatever you’re doing. Our guns are ready
to fire.’ As an answer, they raise the white flag to
say, ‘OK, we’re stopping.’ ” Otherwise, each day
‘WE HAVE TO FIGHT NATURE HERE, AND NATURE
IS UNPREDICTABLE,’ THE DOCTOR SAID RUEFULLY.120 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC