in India, Pakistan, and the United States, trying
to unravel an obscure but important mystery to
the Siachen saga. And now Cory and I had come
to Pakistan to see firsthand the consequences of
what can happen from the seemingly simple act
of drawing a line on a map. THE
GEOGRAPHEROn June 27, 1968, 21 years before Bilal led his
team up Peak 22,158, Airgram A-1245 was sent to
the Office of the Geographer, a little-known unit
buried within the U.S. State Department’s labyrin-
thine C Street NW headquarters in Washington,
D.C. It eventually landed on the desk of 45-year-
old assistant geographer Robert D. Hodgson.
Signed by William Weathersby, the chargé d’af-
faires in the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, the letter
began: “On various occasions ... the Government
of India has formally protested to the Embassy
about U.S. Government maps which were distrib-
uted in India showing the status of Kashmir as ‘in
dispute’ or in some way separate from the rest of
India.” It closed with a request for guidance on
how to represent India’s borders on U.S. maps.
For India and Pakistan, nations born from the
bloodshed that accompanied Partition—the offi-
cial term for the dissolution and subdivision of
British India—maps were a matter of national
identity. But for Hodgson and the other staff of
the Office of the Geographer, they were a pro-
fessional trade.
Every year the U.S. government published
thousands of maps—by many estimates it was
the largest map publisher in the world. Respon-
sibility for depicting international political
boundaries fell to the Office of the Geographer.
This mission gave the office considerable
influence over far-reaching corners of the U.S.
government, including the Department of
Defense and the CIA. The office held the ultimate
authority to depict the alignment of the world’sand Bilal watched him trudge away, panting for
breath, until he disappeared into the mist.
Few outside of Pakistan and India took notice.
And yet the Battle of Peak 22,158 bears a macabre
distinction: It’s the highest lethal ground combat
ever recorded.
On a bluebird morning 28 years later, photog-
rapher Cory Richards and I shuffled awkwardly
onto the boot-stomped snow of a helipad a few
miles from the spot of that encounter. As profes-
sional mountaineers, we both had climbed peaks
in the Karakoram and understood the effort and
skills required simply to survive here.
For more than three decades, India and Paki-
stan have sent young soldiers to this harsh
environment, where they remain for months
at a time, guarding a remote, uninhabited
wilderness. Observers began referring to the
confrontation as the Siachen Glacier conflict,
after the monumental sheet of ice that domi-
nates the landscape where the disputed borders
of Pakistan, India, and China meet.
Since 1984, the two sides have incurred thou-
sands of casualties. A cease-fire was agreed to in
2003, but dozens of soldiers still die here each
year—from landslides, avalanches, helicop-
ter crashes, altitude sickness, embolisms, and
other causes. Nevertheless, every year Indian
and Pakistani soldiers eagerly volunteer to serve
here. “It’s seen as an extreme badge of honor,”
one Pakistani official told me.
Shelves of books, news articles, and scholarly
papers have been written about the conflict, with
authors often remarking on the absurdity of
armies fighting over such useless territory. The
general assertion is that two stubborn enemies,
blinded by hatred, will go to the most extreme
lengths to oppose each other, a notion crystal-
lized by Stephen P. Cohen, an analyst at the
Brookings Institution, who famously summed
up the Siachen conflict as “a struggle of two bald
men over a comb.”
But the circumstances that prompted the two
bald men to start fighting have never been fully
explained. I’d spent four years following a paper
trail of recently declassified documents and inter-
viewing officials, scholars, and military personnel
FOR THREE DECADES, INDIA AND PAKISTAN HAVE SENT YOUNG
SOLDIERS TO THIS HARSH ENVIRONMENT FOR MONTHS AT A TIME102 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC