At the peak of the Kargil war, 27-year-old Captain Neikezhakou Kenguruse, who had been commissioned barely six month prior, led the attack to capture Black Rock in Drass Sector of Jammu and Kashmir. Seven Pakistani bunkers stood before them, and heavy artillery greeted their journey up the knife-edge cliffs of Lone Hill in the early hours of June 28, 1999.
Nearing the first bunker, a grenade was thrown at them, and the captain sustained splinted injuries to the abdomen. Undeterred his continued his march up, and even threw away his shoes to allow him better grip on the steep cliff.
With the putter of machine guns ringing around him, he pulled out his rocket launcher and decimated the first bunker. Two Pakistani soldiers from the neighbouring bunker rushed towards him, and he tackled them armed with only a commando knife.
He was shot at repeatedly while he approached the third bunker, and in the confusion of the war, a landslide saw seven soldiers fall nearly a hundred feet. The next day, his body was found.
For his sacrifice, the Nagaland-born Captain Kenguruse was posthumously given the Mahavir Chakra — the only soldier from the Army Services Corps (ASC) to receive it.
And sixteen years later, on Friday, the sacrifice and the story is now memorialised with a grand depiction in bronze of the battle, of the medal, of the soldier at the ASC Gate on Victoria Road (the entrance is now named as the Capt. Kenguruse Gate — the first such commemoration for the sprawling 800-acre campus).
“We didn’t even know that he was the only Mahavir Chakra awardee in the whole of ASC. We didn’t know Neikezhakou was revered here. It is beyond our imagination and we are honoured,” said the Captain’s younger brother, Keneitsilie K., who had flown in with his parents from Kohima for the inauguration of the statue.
S.P.S. Katewa, Commandant of the ASC Centre and College, said the process to commemorate the winner of the highest gallantry award for the Corp started nearly five months. “There was a need to honour the Captain, and to showcase to the public his sacrifice,” he said.
