The Para SF and the 2016 Surgical Strikes

Some soldiers train to hold a line. A rare few train to vanish across it, strike in the dark, and disappear before dawn. These are India's Parachute Regiment Special Forces — the Para SF, whose maroon berets and "balidaan" (sacrifice) badge mark them out as among the most elite warriors on earth.

My poem Red Devils' Reflections is written as a Para SF soldier's private journal before a mission: "In the stillness where shadows creep, I pen these thoughts before I sleep."

The maroon beret

The Para SF are India's foremost special operations soldiers, drawn from the elite of the elite through one of the most punishing selection processes in any military. They specialise in direct action, deep reconnaissance, counter-terrorism and unconventional warfare — operating in small teams, far from support, where failure is fatal.^[1]

Patience and time forge the strongest steel, in every step, our truths reveal.

Uri, and the answer

On 18 September 2016, terrorists attacked an army base at Uri, killing nineteen Indian soldiers — one of the deadliest such attacks in decades. Eleven days later, on the night of 28–29 September 2016, India announced that its special forces had crossed the Line of Control and carried out surgical strikes on terrorist launch pads, then returned.^[2]

The operation was a statement as much as a tactic: that the cost of attacking India would be carried back across the border. It was the Para SF — soldiers like the one in my poem — who walked into the dark to deliver that message.

The ethos behind the badge

What I tried to capture in Red Devils' Reflections is that these warriors are not defined by aggression alone. Their badge reads balidaan — sacrifice. They fight, in the poem's words, "not in destruction, but what we preserve, in a future of hope, that we deserve."

That is the paradox of the special forces soldier: trained to be the sharpest instrument of war, yet motivated by the most ordinary human wish — for the people back home to sleep safely. "True honor lies in every deed," the poem says. The Red Devils sign off their missions and ask for nothing. We owe them at least our awareness that they exist.