Reader & frequently thoughtful commentor KXB wrote into the Tip Line with a link to War Nerd’s column on the Kargil incident. The writing is entertaining and provocative to say the least –

Some guy in India asked me to write about the 1999 Indo-Pakistani fighting in Kargil, a patch of high-altitude ice in Kashmir at the northern tip of the Subcontinent. This is some of the most worthless and fought-over ground in the world, up where the borders between Pakistan, India and China smear together like the middle of a pie sliced by a spastic. … hand-to-hand fighting 18,000 feet up in the Himalayas makes me tired just thinking about it. It must’ve been some pretty slow-motion combat, like Tom and Jerry on valium. Lunge, take a five-minute breathing break, lunge again. …Kargil was the only time two modern armies fought at such an insane altitude. …And that’s where losing 400 men in a high-profile, harmless little war like Kargil comes in handy. Those websites I mentioned list the names of every single Indian soldier killed up there. When you consider how many Indians die every day, with nobody giving a damn at all, it’s pretty amazing that these 400 dead guys get so much adoring press. When you look at the list of names, you see why. Some of the names are obviously Sikhs (Sikhs love armies), but there are plenty of Hindu names, Muslim names — for all I know there are Zoroastrian names in there too. It’s a chance to sob together over those dead integrated units — like those good old corny WW II movies where every platoon has this melting-pot roll call: “OK, lissen up, Bernstein, deNapoli, O’Brien, Kowalski, and Running Bear!”

Heh. For a more balanced discussion, there’s always Wikipedia’s entry on the Kargil War.