Soldiers

5 Comments Posted on by Reji Koduvath Canada, Family, Indian Army, Kerala

Homecoming

Tears and Triumph on Screen

We all love watching surprise homecoming videos on YouTube, especially those featuring American and Canadian soldiers. Our eyes fill with tears as we watch service members being embraced by their loved ones after long deployments. A picture of a father in uniform holding his baby for the very first time – how can you not be emotional? These moments are undeniably powerful, stirring feelings of patriotism and deep respect for those who sacrifice so much.

Yet only those of us who have actually been on the other side of the camera know that while homecomings are fabulous in their own right, they also present unique and often surprising challenges.

Have you ever tried to fathom the stress that soldiers and their families endure – not just during deployment, but during the homecoming itself?

The Decompression Chamber

For me, coming home was like emerging from a deep-sea diver’s decompression chamber. The journey typically began seventy-two hours earlier in a bunker at twelve thousand feet above sea level in Kashmir or Sikkim, ending finally at my family home in Kottayam, a mere ten feet above sea level. The transition was jarring. It took time to accept that I was safely home, surrounded by loved ones, breathing the air of my childhood.

It took even longer to accept the new reality: I was no longer in an intense, life-threatening combat zone, but in the protective nest of my mother’s care. That adjustment brought its own share of stress, anxiety, and fear—for my family members and for me.

The depth of my stress was directly related to the dangers I faced while deployed, the length of time I was away, and was significantly worsened if I had lost any soldiers or if any had been injured—whether by enemy action or the vagaries of extreme weather. There was also the nagging fear of being unaware of changes in family dynamics, neighbourhood developments, shifting relationships with relatives, and even the comings and goings of animals and poultry at home. Nothing was too small to add to the anxiety.

A Mother’s Sigh of Relief

For my mother, my arrival was always a moment of profound relief. She would heave a long sigh, rush to thank God for bringing her son home safely, and then say, “Why did you write that you would be home next week? I always knew you would come earlier.”

Throughout this emotional welcome, our father maintained a stoic silence—until finally breaking it with a simple, “Welcome home.”

The Statue of Homecoming

The statue pictured above commemorates the homecoming of a sailor. It was unveiled on 4 May 2010 in Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, to mark the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Canadian Navy. The image captures the essence of reunion – the joy, the relief, the unspoken understanding between those who leave and those who wait.

A Lesson Learned Early

My journey of homecomings began when I joined Sainik School, Amaravathi Nagar, in Tamil Nadu. Traveling home on vacation was a day-long ordeal in the 1970s, owing to India’s poor rail and road connectivity. I would write a letter home a fortnight before my planned departure, then travel in a group with friends.

While I was in grade eight, my eldest brother offered me advice that I have followed faithfully ever since. “Never write the correct date of your arrival,” he said. “Always give a date a few days or a week later. Amma gets very stressed thinking about you on the train – whether you might miss a connection, whether you’ll get good food. Spare her that anxiety.”

I followed that advice through decades of military service, right up to my last homecoming from Canada. I never gave the exact date of my arrival. Often, I told no one at all about my travel plans.

The Taxi Ride That Gave Me Away

In 2015, I flew into Kochi Airport and took a taxi home. While still in the taxi, I called my eldest brother.

“How far away are you?” he asked.

“About forty-five minutes,” I replied.

My brother immediately announced to the household, “Reji will be home in forty-five minutes. Get lunch ready for him.”

My mother was utterly surprised and thrilled. “Which Reji?” she exclaimed. “Our Reji? I spoke to him in Canada yesterday. How can he be home in forty-five minutes?”

After lunch, I asked my brother how he had known I had landed in Kochi and was on my way home – before I could even say anything.

“The traffic horns,” he explained. “Blaring, chaotic. I know that in Canada you never hear that sound. So I guessed you were in a taxi, coming home.”

A Nephew’s Realisation

Our nephew serves as a Captain in the Corps of Engineers. After completing a gruelling six-month Young Officers’ Course in Pune, he and his friends vacationed in Goa for a week. Only then did he return home.

He called me shortly after arriving. “Now I realise why you never disclosed your travel plans,” he said. “My mother called constantly, demanding that I come home immediately.”

My eldest brother, now head of the family, offered him the same advice he had given me decades earlier: “Never write the correct date of your arrival. Always give a date a few days or a week later.”

The Unseen Side of Reunion

Homecoming videos capture only the embrace, the tears, the joy. They do not capture the decompression, the anxiety, the careful management of a mother’s worry, or the strategic withholding of arrival dates. They do not show the soldier learning to breathe again at sea level, or the family learning to accommodate a person who has been living in a different world.

Homecomings are wonderful. But they are also complicated. And for those of us who have lived through both sides of the camera, the real story is always richer – and more challenging – than the two-minute clip suggests.

8 Comments Posted on by Reji Koduvath Family, Parenting

How Did You Manage It?

child

Our father, a primary school headmaster, always believed that it would be better to have the children born in March (Pisceans) as it ensured that the child when joining school did not have to waste a few months. Nowadays it is mandatory that the child must be six years (in our school days it was five) old on the first day of school – 01 June. There had been many instances when the parents wanted the child to begin school early, especially those who missed the age barrier by a few days or a month or two. In the good old days, the parents and the headmaster mutually agreed to enter in records a suitable date of birth to ensure entry into school. This resulted many of our generation (including my wife Marina) ending up with two dates of birth – one the actual day they were born and the other the ‘official’ one. All four of us brothers were born Pisceans and we never had this problem of two dates to remember.

On taking over command of the unit, I went full steam automating the administrative functions in the unit and the priority was to automate the records of the soldiers under command.  This was to ensure that all their necessary documentation were up to date, they receive all their pay and allowances and are fully qualified for promotion to the next rank. The very first step was data capture from the existing manual records. After most data were transferred to the digital media, I called up each individual soldier for an interview to fill in the gaps. As we were deployed in the operational area at that time, these interviews went on till late at night. More than collecting the data, it helped me to a great extent to know the soldiers better as I was totally new to the regiment.

First use of the data captured was to make the weekly Regimental Order look more colourful. Not only that it was printed using a colour printer, the contents were also changed to be colourful. The routine stuff of Duty Officers, punishments etc were all printed in black and the goodies in colour. The goodies included wishes on festivals, compliments for achievements of the men and a special wish from the Commanding Officer (CO) on the soldier’s birthdays. With the data captured, I printed out the list of men celebrating their birthdays the week ahead.

On analysing the data of the unit, I realised that about 20% of the men were born on the first day of the year (01/01) and about 30% born on the first day of the month, especially March, April and May. I concluded that like our father, their school headmasters did the trick.

Case of Marina and her sibling is even better – they all have one ‘official’ birthday – 25 May. The secret was that their grandfather was the headmaster of the primary school and he had taken some liking to that date, like most headmasters of that time.  That is why many in our generation have their official birthdays in and around 25 May – a few days before 01 June. Now in case I got to get them all for our daughter’s wedding in Canada and when I apply for their Visas, the Canadian Immigration will have a lot of questions and lot to analyse.

During my bachelor days, on a vacation home, along with our father, we went to attend a baptism in the family. In those days we had a Bajaj scooter at home and we took off. Being the month of June, the monsoon was in full fury and we had to stop enroute and take shelter in a tea-shop. I ordered two cups of tea and our father said “That is why I always say you should plan your children to be born in March.” I immediately asked him “How did you manage it?” and he gave out his characteristic sly smile.

Years rolled by and in 1997, we were blessed with our son Nikhil on 16 March. At that time, we were located at Pune as I was attending the Technical Staff Officers Course. As customary of the Syrian Orthodox Christians, the baptism had to be done after two months and our son had to take on our father’s name and our father had to be the God Father. During the baptism ceremony, it is the God Father who carries the child to the church and also say the pledges for the child. The entire family congregated at Pune for the occasion. After the ceremony got over, our father asked me “How did you manage it?” and I too passed a sly smile. (Our daughter Nidhi was born on 20 March and I was born on 13 March).

The secret is that both our children were due on 13 March, my birthday, but the gynecologist decided to delay their arrivals.

8 Comments Posted on by Reji Koduvath Canada, Indian Army, Kerala, Sainik School

Why Do Soldiers Break Step On A Suspension Bridge?

SuspBridge

Our son Nikhil and I had a discussion about the phenomenon of resonance about which he had a class that day. My mind wandered back to Mr PT Cherian’s high school physics classes. Mr Cherian had a knack of explaining basic principles of physics by citing real life examples which were simple and easy to assimilate. For more about Mr Cherian, please refer my blog https://rejinces.net/2014/07/15/guru-dakshina/.

Mr Cherian explained resonance by using a simple experiment.

He had three pendulums of different lengths and two of the same length (B & D) tied to a rubber hose. He swung one of the two pendulums of equal lengths and after a few minutes, all the other pendulums begun to swing with the other pendulum of equal length swinging as much as the other. This he explained was as a result of resonance and the frequency of the two pendulums with equal lengths were same and hence they resonated.

Bridges and buildings have a natural frequency of vibration within them. A force applied to an object at the same frequency as the object’s natural frequency will amplify the vibration of the object due to mechanical resonance. Mr Cherian explained that while on a swing, one can go higher with a jerk of a bend knee or a swing of the legs and a car wobbles at a particular speed; are all examples mechanical resonance. The shattering of glass by singers with their voice is also by the same principle.

Mr Cherian then narrated an incidence which took place in 1831 when a brigade of soldiers marched in step across England’s Broughton Suspension Bridge. The marching steps of the soldiers happened to resonate with the natural frequency and the bridge broke apart, throwing dozens of men into the water. After this, the British Army issued orders that soldiers while crossing a suspension bridge must ‘break step‘ and not march in unison.

If soldiers march in unison across a,suspension bridge, they apply a force at the frequency of their step. If their frequency is closely matched to the bridge’s frequency, soldiers’ rhythmic marching will amplify the natural frequency of the bridge. If the mechanical resonance is strong enough, the bridge can vibrate until it collapses due to the movement.

A similar tragedy was averted in June 2000 when a large crowd assembled at the opening of London’s Millennium Bridge. As crowds packed the bridge, their footfalls made the bridge vibrate slightly. Many in the crowd fell spontaneously into step with the bridge’s vibrations, inadvertently amplifying them. The police swung into action to clear the crowd off the bridge. Though engineers insist the Millennium Bridge was never in danger of collapse, the bridge was closed for about a year while construction crews installed energy-dissipating dampers to minimise the vibration caused by pedestrians.

Another example of mechanical resonance was the destruction of Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington in 1940. Even though the bridge was designed to withstand winds of up to 200 kmph, on that fateful day the wind speed recorded was mere 60 kmph. A mechanical resonance resulted due to the wind at that particular speed hitting the bridge perpendicularly.   Continued winds increased the vibrations until the waves grew so large and violent that they broke the bridge apart.

In May 1999, two girls were drowned and 15 others injured when a suspension bridge across a river collapsed in Panathur, Kasargod in Kerala State of India. The incident occurred when a group of people taking part in a funeral procession entered the suspension bridge  The bridge tilted and collapsed, again due to mechanical resonance.

In a similar incident in February 2014, eight people died and more than 30 injured when a suspension bridge collapsed over a dry stream in the North-Western province of Lai Chau in Vietnam. The accident happened as a group of local residents walked across the bridge to bring the coffin of a local official to a graveyard. The group had walked 15 meters on the bridge when it suddenly collapsed.

What could have triggered off the mechanical resonance in the above two cases? The villagers participating in the two funerals were surely never drilled down by any Sergeant Majors.

It is felt that anyone while on a funeral procession walks slowly and is often accompanied by the drums or hymns being sung at a melancholic pace. The funeral participants tend to bunch together, mainly due to their sadness. These factors could have forced the funeral participants to march in step, without their knowledge. Another reason of marching in step could be that one does not want to step on another’s foot and the best way to avoid is to walk in step with the person in the front. In both the cases, the coffin was carried by the coffin bearers with their hands. This needed the coffin bearers to walk in unison.

In all probability, the frequency of walking of the mourners in the funeral procession could have resonated with the natural frequency of the bridge, causing the bridge to swing violently. The pandemonium that could have set out must have caused panic, resulting in the mourners rushing to get off the bridge causing a stampede.

Hence in future the rule must be that not only the soldiers need to break steps on a suspension bridge, but also a funeral procession.