Mountain Warfare School

Tok
Tibet
Mountain Warfare School

"Come on you stinky girls, is that all you can do? And you call yourselves soldiers. Do you want tampons my dearies? Bloody fairies, the lot of you."

The Drill Sergeant is bellowing in the faces of two elite soldiers of Royal Cochin Special Forces.

A Battalion from 23rd Special Forces regiment has been training at this facility for the past three weeks.
While the first 2 days of acclimatisation to the sheer cold and thin air of the Tibetan plateau was hell itself, the days succeeding made them think their intensive training regimen of initiation was pure vanilla.

Now the two commandos, both combat vets and with ranks of E5 Sergeants are having their backsides chewed to a pulp by a Squad Sergeant E6. The Sergeants had to deactivate a nuclear warhead. That in itself would not have been overtly taxing to these elite soldiers who between them had enough working knowledge to shame a University Professor. However the fact that they had to hack a hole in a perma frost lake and dive 30 ft under the surface to reach the warhead and they had to all that with a bare standard dive suit, no underwater breathing apparatus and only a weak penlight definitely put a cramp in their working.

This two man team attempted their first test today and it failed miserably. After 30 minutes in the bone chilling water they both were recalled to surface on the verge of hypothermia.

"You sodden fools, in a live situation by now you would have been dead and your genitals would be flying in a cloud 9 kms up in the sky. Now let us see what went wrong." The admonition from the instructor was particularly harsh for its decrease in vulgarity and forceful delivery. The Captain commanding the course took the team through video tapes that recorded their performance. Instead of alternating between one on bottom deactivating and on on surface maintaining the breach, switching positions every 50 seconds they both dived and when after 60 seconds came up for air found the breach in surface ice closed leaving only a small air gap. They had to expend a further 60 seconds to breach the ice.

The Captain then delivered the team to the hands of Squad Sergeant who would educate in a more forceful manner.

The Mountain Warfare School was set up as a joint venture between Kingdom of Cochin and Tibet. Before his soldiers could be tested this way their officers had to undergo an even tougher regimen. They had arrived three weeks earlier itself and had gone through the regimen with an even greater thoroughness. The very same Squad Sergeant had in fact questioned the very same Captain about the estimate numbers of fathers he possessed. Only after passing the tests would an officer would be permitted to command his soldiers to do the tests.

While the underwater exercises were going in one section of the lake , intense survival tests were being performed by still more commandos at an other part of the shore. Here they had to swim in the ice cold lake wearing only their uninsulated swimming trunks. They had to swim a distance of 100 meters and back and then had to pass a shooting range. 

Meanwhile at some distance another group of commandos were doing a hard jog through the towering Himalayan mountains carrying a full combat load of 56 kgs. They were also being led by their officer who was packing a similar load. Shaming them and leading them were their drill sergeant a diminutive Sergeant First Class E7 who was jogging on the craggy and treacherous path carrying a non standard 60 kg path yet not breaking even a bead of sweat.

That was the standard these soldiers are aiming to attain.

For this was the toughest combat school devised for soldiers of Royal Cochin Defense Forces.

Only best units are permitted to come to the School and they must all be either combat veterans or have scored more than 500/550 in a Live fire field exercise. Even then enrolling for the program is voluntary as the School boasts a very high rate of attrition both in fail to pass as well as in deaths, for the harsh environs of Himalayan mountains test the commandos more than the craziest of the Instructors of the School.

The Mountain Warfare School is situated in a knoll of hills 13 kms west of the rustic village of Tok in northern Tibet. The lake of Dyap Tso is a perma frost endorheic lake. To further east of the school is a glacier that goes on to feed the lake Manasarovar further South.

On arriving at the rough landing strip supporting the base the recruits spend 2 full days acclimatising to the thin mountain air of Tok. During these days the recruits stay in well heated camp buildings and are fed with high protein and high fat diets.

On the third day the grueling initiation begins. Moved from their warm rooms to field tents adequately exposed to the nature they are henceforth given only standard combat rations. Each day begins at reveille at 0600 followed by a 5 mile run in the mountains. After 2 hours of running they come back for breakfast and freshing up.

At 0900 teams are assigned to various instructors for various physical tests of the day. Lunch will be at 1300 and will have to be carried to their test sites by the recruits themselves.

In the afternoon the recruits attend various lecture demonstrations and combat classes. In the evenings yet another endurance jogging is in store for the recruits now with full combat loads.

After the first week of joint training, recruits are divided into batches and tested batchwise. Their next lecture classes would be a hellish 21 days ahead.

The tests include further endurance marches, underwater weapon deactivation, Arctic endurance swimming, Arctic paradropping etc. On the 30th day of training the recruits board a couple of jeeps and are taken to a monastery nearby. There they shall be shown the spartan way of life followed by the monks. They would be taken then to several remote caves where ascetic Hindu sages would be in penance. These sages who live in the arctic conditions wearing only their bare loin clothes and swim in the freezing water and subsist on barely nothing would be visited by the soldiers. The sages had been persuaded to tolerate this interruptions by the King of Cochin himself who had come to visit them and seek their blessings when the camp was being set up.

On the next day individual commandos would be issued with a regular Special Forces combat load and paradropped into the Himalayas. They would be dropped individually at a distance of 100 kms from the base camp and have to find their way back alone. Each team of 4 shall have a particular base camp where they would have to reach successfully. They are given coordinates of base camp, a school atlas and a compass for navigation.

If a recruit found himself unable to cope with the harsh conditions or fell in some accident he could activate his alert beacon and be rescued by a team of CSAR helicopters on standby at the School.

Once the final endurance test is passed the recruits are given the Mountain Warriors Badge in a spartan ceremony at the Mountain Warriors School.

However that day is still far ahead in a distant future for these 2 Sergeants as they finally passed the test on their second attempt and moved on to the next test.