www.exile.ru/2007-July-27/war_nerd.html
Previous (119) FRESNO, CA - I think I've finally found a religion I can convert to. And we'll just slide right by all the puns popping into your little heads, if you don't mind. My Bible goes on about beating swords into plowshares - I always hated that bit, because all you'd get was a wrecked sword and a lousy plow. But the Sikh scripture actually says that the sword predates the universe: "After the primal manifestation of the sword, the universe was created." No doubt about it, I'm letting my beard grow and practicing wrapping old socks around my head. It all started when I got a letter from a guy named Gill, a Sikh in the UK, whining about how I'd talked up all the other warrior tribes but never had a word to say for the Sikhs. Well, the War Nerd makes war, not love, but after weeks of looking into this Sikh thing, I gotta give the bearded boys their due. The Sikhs have one of the most amazing military histories on the planet. And they're still living through their Golden Age right now. One of the great last stands in Sikh history happened less than 25 years ago, when 200 Sikh militants holed up in their version of the Mormon Tabernacle, the "Golden Temple" in Amritsar, India. Anybody with sense knew those 200 Sikhs were going to fight like demons, because that's what Sikhs have been doing for the past 400 years. Sikh military history is so packed with glorious last stands that George Armstrong Custer would be a smalltime footnote if he'd worn a big turban to go with that long hair and beard of his. It was 1984, and the Indian Army must have known it was in for a big bloody mess to get the temple back, especially since its upper ranks are filled mostly with Sikh generals, Sikhs being the designated hitters of the Indian war game. But Indira Gandhi was PM, and she was a lady who didn't like being disobeyed, so she ordered her Sikh Commanding General to overrun the temple. The Sikh CO inside the temple was a dude named Shahbeg Singh, who pretty much single-handedly engineered the collapse of the Pakistani Army in the 1971 Indo-Pak War. It was Shahbeg who organized the Mukhti Bahini, the Bangladeshi guerrillas who made history by being the first Bengali armed force in history not to pee in their dhotis and flee at the sound of gunfire. In fact, this Sikh must've given the Bengalis some kind of Sikh blood transfusion because they fought well enough to make the West Pak garrisons surrender en masse even before Indian troops crossed the Bengal border. After that it was the end of history for East Bengal, except for a bunch of whiney George Harrison begging chanteys, and a tidal wave or two. Well, this same Shahbeg arranged the defense of the Golden Temple so well that at the end of a seven-day battle with the Indian Army's best units, his 200-odd amateur militants had inflicted 83 KIA on the army and even managed to blast the first tank to enter the compound. They paid a price, naturally - at least 500 Sikh dead and the Temple blasted into gold dust. But Sikhs - well, if there's one thing you can say about 'em, it's that they're willing to pay any price. Less than five months after Indira Gandhi ordered the attack on the Temple, she was strolling into her garden to be interviewed by that fat old Brit with the Russian name, Peter Ustinov, when the Sikhs got their revenge. It must have been a pretty scene, the fat man sweating in the Delhi heat, Indira swirling up in her best sari - when BOOM! Two of her bodyguards, who were Sikhs, naturally, opened fire on her with machine guns, turning her into human chutney. And then, just to add to Ustinov's fun, her other non-Sikh bodyguards started blasting at the Sikh shooters, killing one and wounding another. The Compassionate Guru: Founding Sikh, Nanak Sahib Shortest - and loudest - interview the old battle-ax ever gave. That was the Sikh revenge for "Operation Bluestar," the temple raid. By the way, that's another of these lame ops titles they keep coming up with. Should've called it "Operation Blowback," or "Operation Indira, Are You Sure?" For the Sikhs, this was just like Chapter Two Million in a long and glorious series of battles, assassinations and massacres. The Sikhs were born in the Punjab, the coolest part of India. Every conqueror in history headed that way as soon as he got his learner's license at 15. Punjab was the last, and the toughest place Alexander himself ever tried to take. He was so impressed with the army of Pontus, as they called it then, that he said every Punjabi deserved to be called Alexander. Which was high praise, since Alex was never known for modesty. Before him even those lazy necrophiliac Egyptians had a stab at the Punjab. I couldn't believe it when I read it, but apparently those Nile-side loungers had the energy to attack the Punjab. Everybody had a turn, though it was the Persians and the Afghans who turned invading the Punjab from a healthy, occasional fun evening into an unhealthy obsession. And that was before Islam was added to the subcontinental mix. By the time Sikhism started, about 400 years ago, the Mughal emperors, basically a bunch of land pirates who swooped down out of Afghanistan to plunder the plains, had tried to convert India to Islam by using the time-honored method of appealing to the prospect's common sense: "Convert or we'll hack you into a million tiny pieces." The Hindu majority, under the thumbs of hundreds of feudal kings, tried to weasel out of conversion so they could hang on to their own homegrown miseries, like the caste system. The Hindus' ultimate weapon was simple inertia and birthrate. The Afghans' sword arms just got tired after a while, hacking in that heat, and they said, "Aw, the Hell with it." Northern India settled into a lazy routine with the occasional massacre, a lot of bribery, nasty little village snobs hating each other. A brave Sikh martyr takes a Moghul bath Then along comes the founder of Sikhism, Nanak, and says, "There is no Muslim, there is no Hindu." All the little traditions people know about them started out as in-your-face rebel yells in the Punjab. Like those beards: only the Mughal were allowed to wear long hair and beards. So the Sikh all let theirs grow longer than John and Yoko's. It means "Lion" but the real point is that it replaced all the caste names they had before. Take the early career of the sixth Sikh guru, an orphan named Gobind Rai. It was the Mughals who made him an orphan, by torturing his dad to death. See, in the old Punjab death was nothing, death was what you got if the head man was in a good mood. Most of the time they weren't in a very good mood, so you got real slow, horrible deaths. At least somebody at the Mughal court was nice enough to FedEx Gobind a package with his dad's head in it, Seven-style. Gobind decided right about then to end the whole peacenik tradition of Sikhism. He had a sense of style, so to set the mood he called all the Sikhs together and came onstage with a big huge sword and said, "My sword wants blood. Well, he would've bombed as a stage magician because there was a looooooong silence, no hands raised, till an Untouchable convert came up. Gobind took him into a tent and came out alone, bloody as an apprentice butcher. Four more volunteers and the crowd was beginning to grumble. Then Gobind revealed the trick, which you've all probably guessed already especially if you remember Sunday school, Isaac and Abraham: the five dudes were alive! These "Five Beloved" were the core of the Akala, the Immortals, an elite Sikh unit that wore these ridiculous Harry Potter turbans with metal rings on them. The rings, called "quoits," were supposedly sharp and you can throw them as weapons. But I'm sorry, I'd be willing to stand all day in front of some dude in a wizard's hat throwing sharpened frisbees at me.
invented the musket, and nobody knows these weapons better. These bad-tempered people discharge hundreds of bullets on the enemy, on the left and right and back." Those pesky bad-tempered Sikhs, shooting at you when all you want to do is massacre them for their unbelief and steal their stuff along the way! The Sikhs were more than happy to fight hand-to-hand whenev...
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