Dispatches from the field

Last week, my phone crackled well past midnight. My thoughts drift to my tenure in Lebanon where we all spent a princely sum of our hard-earned “foreign salary” on the costly telephone calls to our families back in India. It was not long back when soldiers communicated through red- and green-coloured “Forces Letters”, which used to take days to reach them. Those were the snail-mail days in the Army when the information of safe arrival reached families days after the individual had even moved on to the next location. The joy we sensed during NDA or IMA evening order fall-ins when our Cadet Sergeant Major used to call out our names holding our letters from home was indescribable.