At 09.00 on March 5th, 1945, rifleman Banbakta Gurong crouched in the jungle undergrowth near Snowden East Hill as Japanese machine gunfire tore through the bamboo above his section.
He was 24 years old and had survived the brutal first Chindit expedition 2 years earlier.
But 3 months ago, he’d been stripped of his corporal rank for something that wasn’t even his fault.
B Company of the Third Battalion, Second Girka Rifles, had just watched 45 men fall trying to take this same hill the day before.
And now the Japanese 54th Division held the high ground with interconnected bunkers and foxholes.
The numbers told a grim story.
Of the 3,000 Girkas who’d crossed into Burma on Operation Longloth in February 1943, only 2,182 had returned.
818 men lost, 27% casualties.
Banbakta had been one of the lucky ones who made it back across the Chinduin River that spring.
Skeletal and half dead from malaria and dysentery, he’d earned his promotion to Nike during that nightmare expedition.
Corporal.
He’d led men through Japanese- held territory for three months, dynamiting railway lines and dodging enemy patrols.
Then came September 1944.
His platoon commander ordered him to secure a hill during operations in the Arakan.
Bonbagta took the hill exactly as ordered.
Problem was, it was the wrong hill.
The lieutenant had given him incorrect coordinates, but let Bonbagta take the fall.
Demoted back to riflemen, transferred to B company in disgrace.
Now he was back in Burma, back in the jungle.
And the 25th Indian Division needed the Girkas to clear Snowden East so the 82nd West African Division could evacuate their wounded through the On Pass.
The Japanese had retaken the hill on the night of March 4th.
Every approach was covered by interlocking fields of fire, mortars, light machine guns, grenades, a sniper in a tree 75 yd south who’d already killed three men from Bonbagda section.
The section commander was dead.
10 men pinned down in the elephant grass, unable to move forward or back.
The sniper kept firing.
Each crack of his rifle meant another Girka might die.
Bonbagda couldn’t get a clear shot from the prone position.
The angle was wrong.
He’d have to stand up fully exposed.
Under fire from the sniper, the machine gun bunker on the ridge, and at least four foxholes they could see.
His mates thought he was crazy.
Some of them had seen what happened to men who stood up in a firefight.
The 14th Army’s push toward Mandalay was grinding forward, but it was costing blood.
Every hill, every ridge, every bunker.
The Japanese 54th Division wasn’t retreating easily.
They’d fortified Snowden East with the same brutal efficiency they’d shown at Infall and Kohima the previous year.
Bonbakta checked his Lee Enfield rifle.
He had grenades.
His cookery hung at his side, the traditional curved blade every Girka carried, the knife that made Japanese soldiers nervous.
But right now, none of that mattered if the sniper kept picking them off one by one.
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Back to Burma.
The decision came fast.
Bonbuka pushed himself to his feet.
Machine gun bullets snapped past his head.
He ignored them, found the sniper in his sights, squeezed the trigger.
The sniper tumbled from the tree, dead before he hit the ground.
The section started moving again, pushing toward the objective.
20 yards from the crest, the Japanese opened up with everything.
The Girkas hit the dirt again.
Same problem, different position.
Bonbakta didn’t wait for orders this time.
He was done waiting.
Dun being the man who got blamed for other people’s mistakes.
Dun watching his mates die for hills in Burma.
He grabbed two grenades and charged the nearest foxhole.
The Japanese inside never saw him coming.
Both grenades, both men dead.
He kept running to the next position.
No grenades this time, just his bayonet.
Close quarters, brutal, fast.
The Japanese soldier died in seconds.
Two more foxholes still had clear lines of fire on his section.
Bunbukta went after them alone.
bayonet and grenades.
The same pattern.
Rush, kill, move.
The entire time, a light machine gun in a bunker at the north tip of the ridge hammered at him.
Point blank fire.
Continuous.
The gunner should have killed him 10 times over.
But Bunbukta kept moving, kept killing.
Four foxholes cleared, four positions taken.
But that bunker was still operational.
And it wasn’t just holding up his platoon.
Another Girka platoon advancing from the west was pinned down by the same gun.
For the fifth time that morning, Banbugda charged forward alone.
The bunker was solid, concrete, built into the hillside.
He reached the roof and leaped onto it.
His last fragmentation grenades were gone.
He pulled out two number 77 smoke grenades, the white phosphorus type the Chindits had used for signaling.
He shoved them through the bunker slit.
Thick smoke billowed inside.
Two Japanese soldiers stumbled out, partially blinded, coughing.
Bonbukda’s kukri flashed twice.
Both men dropped.
But the machine gunner was still inside, still firing at number four platoon.
The bunker was cramped, dark, filled with smoke.
Bunbuga crawled in through the slit.
He could barely see, barely breathe.
The gunner was right there, 3 ft away, hands still on the type 92 machine gun.
Bunbuga reached for his kukri.
No room to swing it.
The bunker ceiling was too low.
The walls too close.
He needed something else.
His hand found a rock on the bunker floor.
Baseball-sized, heavy.
The gunner turned toward him.
Bunbuckta swung once.
Twice.
The gunner stopped moving.
The machine gun went silent.
Snowden east belonged to the Girkas.
Bonbuka grabbed the Type 92 and shoved it toward the bunker entrance.
He yelled for the nearest Bren gunner and two riflemen.
They scrambled up the hill and into the position.
The machine gun was still warm, still loaded.
The Japanese had kept it well-maintained and now it belonged to the Girkas.
Bonbukta positioned the Bren gunner to cover the northern approach.
The riflemen took the flanks.
Most of B Company’s objective was clear, but the Japanese weren’t finished.
Enemy soldiers who had been driven off the ridge were regrouping at the base of the northern slope.
Bunbugda could hear them through the smoke and gunfire.
Officers shouting orders, equipment rattling.
They were massing for a counterattack.
Standard Japanese tactics.
Hit back immediately while the attackers were still disorganized.
The Girkas had maybe 5 minutes before the assault came.
The counterattack hit hard.
Waves of Japanese infantry charging uphill with bayonets fixed and grenades in hand.
The Bren gun shattered.
The captured Type 92 joined in.
Bonbagta worked his Lee Enfield, picking targets as they appeared through the jungle.
The Japanese came in groups of five or six.
Disciplined, determined.
They knew this ground.
They’d held it for less than 24 hours, but they’d fortified it well.
The Girkas held.
The bunker position gave them the advantage.
Now, what had been a death trap 30 minutes ago was now a fortress.
Every Japanese soldier who tried to retake the ridge ran into concentrated fire from three different weapons.
Bodies piled up at the base of the hill.
The enemy took heavy losses and fell back.
The counterattack broke.
Snowden East was secure.
By noon, the hill belonged to the 25th division.
The road to the on pass was open.
The 82nd West African Division could evacuate their wounded.
B Company counted their casualties.
45 men had gone down taking Snowden east.
45 Girkas killed or wounded.
But 66 Japanese lay dead across the hill.
The mathematics of infantry combat in Burma.
Trade blood for ground.
Hold what you take.
Move forward tomorrow.
Bonbakta’s company commander found him in the captured bunker.
The officer looked at the dead Japanese gunner, looked at the rock still on the floor, looked at Bonbacha’s kukri, unused and clean in its sheath.
He didn’t ask questions, just nodded.
Sometimes the weapon you needed wasn’t the one you trained with.
Sometimes it was whatever you could reach in the dark.
The story spread through the battalion by evening.
the riflemen who’d cleared five positions alone, who’d killed a sniper standing upright under machine gun fire, who’d used grenades, bayonet, kukri, and finally a rock to take down a concrete bunker.
Some of the men who’d known him since the Chindit operation weren’t surprised.
They’d seen what Bunbuga could do when the situation went bad.
Others were hearing his name for the first time.
What they didn’t know was the weight he’d been carrying since September.
The demotion, the transfer, the knowledge that he’d done exactly what his platoon commander ordered and still taken the blame.
That kind of injustice burns.
Banbaka hadn’t been trying to prove anything on Snowden East.
He’d been trying to keep his section alive.
But somewhere in those five charges, something had shifted.
The dishonor of the demotion meant less now.
The men who’d followed him up the hill knew what he was worth.
The kukri was the weapon that defined the girkas.
18 in of curved steel.
One edge sharp enough to take a man’s head off with a single stroke.
British officers loved telling stories about Girka soldiers and their knives.
The Japanese feared them.
Every enemy soldier in Burma knew what a kukri could do in close combat.
But inside that bunker, cramped and smoke filled, the blade Bonbakta had carried since basic training was useless.
No room to swing, no space to maneuver.
The rock worked better.
Night fell on Snowden East.
The Girkas dug in, strung wire, posted centuries.
The Japanese 54th Division was still out there in the jungle, still fighting.
The war in Burma had turned, but it wasn’t over.
General Slim’s 14th Army was pushing toward Rangon, and every division had a role to play.
The 25th division’s job was to tie down Japanese units in the Iraq while the main offensive drove south through central Burma.
Bonpaga sat in the bunker he’d captured and cleaned his rifle.
His hands were steady.
The adrenaline had worn off hours ago.
Now came the exhaustion, the weight of what he’d done.
Five positions, at least nine Japanese soldiers dead by his hand, maybe more.
The math got fuzzy in combat.
What mattered was the hill was secure and most of his section had survived.
The question everyone was asking was simple.
How does a man charge five fortified positions under continuous machine gunfire and live? Bunbuckta didn’t have an answer.
Luck timing.
The Japanese gunner’s aim being off by inches.
Divine intervention.
If you believed in that, he’d done what needed doing and somehow hadn’t died.
That was enough.
But the war wasn’t finished with rifleman Banbakta Gurang.
March 5th, 1945 was just one day, one hill, one battle in a campaign that had been grinding through Burma for 3 years.
What happened next would determine whether anyone beyond B company ever heard his name.
The third battalion, Second Girka Rifles, had a history that stretched back to 1815.
The Sirore rifles.
They’d earned their first battle honor at Baratpur in 1826, fought in the Indian mutiny, served on the Western Front in the First World War.
Now they were in Burma, part of the largest British Indian force ever assembled in Southeast Asia.
Over half a million men, fighting a Japanese army that had conquered Malaya, Singapore, and most of Burma in less than 6 months back in 1942.
Bonbakta had joined the regiment in 1940 when he was 18 years old.
recruited from Falpu, a village in the Gora district of Nepal.
Hill Country, poor farming land.
Most young men from his village either joined the army or worked the same terrace fields their families had farmed for generations.
The British paid well.
Girka soldiers sent money home.
It was steady work if you survive.
Basic training at the depot in India lasted 4 months.
marksmanship with the Lee Enfield rifle, bayonet drill, hand-to-hand combat with the cookery, physical conditioning that broke weaker recruits.
The instructors pushed until men dropped.
Only the toughest made it through.
Banbakta passed easily.
He was built for this.
Compact, strong, the kind of endurance that came from growing up in the Himalayan foothills, where every trip to the next village meant climbing a mountain.
By early 1943, he’d made Lance Nike, Lance Corporal.
Then came Operation Longloth.
Brigadier or Windgate’s experiment in long range penetration, take 3,000 men deep into Japanese-held Burma, cut railway lines, destroy communications, prove that British and Indian troops could operate behind enemy lines.
The Chindits, named after the Chinta, the lion-like creatures that guarded Burmese temples.
Bonbakda’s column crossed the Chinduin River on February 14th, 1943.
They marched over a thousand miles through jungle, blew up bridges, ambushed Japanese patrols, lived on airdrop supplies, and whatever they could forage.
The operation lasted 3 months.
When it ended, 818 men were dead, missing, or captured.
Of those who made it back, only 600 were fit for further service.
The rest were invalided out.
Malaria, dysentery, exhaustion, malnutrition.
Some men weighed 30 lbs less than when they’d crossed the border.
Bon Paka survived.
Got promoted to Nike during the operation for leading his section through an ambush.
Full corporal.
That promotion meant something.
Recognition that he could handle responsibility under fire.
The Chindid veterans were a tight group.
They’d seen things most infantry soldiers never experienced.
starvation, disease, watching wounded men die because evacuation was impossible.
The regiment respected them.
Then came the Iraq campaign in late 194044.
The third battalion was part of the 25th division’s advance down the coast.
September 19th, Bonbakta’s platoon commander gave him orders to secure a specific hill.
Banbakta took his section up the designated coordinates.
They held the position, dug in, waited for the rest of the company.
When the company commander arrived, he was furious.
Wrong hill.
The battalion commander wanted answers.
Someone had to take the blame.
The platoon commander pointed at Bunbukta.
Said the Nike had misunderstood the orders.
Bunbugta tried to explain.
He’d gone to the exact coordinates he’d been given.
The lieutenant had made the mistake, not him.
Didn’t matter.
The officer’s word carried more weight than a Girka NCO’s.
Bunbugda was charged with neglect of duty, stripped of his rank, reduced to riflemen, transferred to B company.
It was the kind of injustice that broke some men.
Bunbuga kept quiet, accepted the punishment.
He knew the truth.
His section knew the truth.
That had to be enough.
He’d been a corporal for less than 2 years.
Now he was back where he’d started.
riflemen.
No authority, no respect from men who didn’t know his record.
Just another girka in a company full of them.
The demotion followed him.
Other riflemen who’d served less time seen less combat.
They were getting promoted while Bunbuckta stayed at the bottom.
February 1945 rolled around.
2 years since Operation Longlo, the third battalion landed at Ruiwa and pushed inland toward Tamandu.
The Japanese 54th Division was dug in across the high ground.
Every hill was a fortress.
Every advance caused casualties.
B Company drew Snowden east.
March 4th, the Japanese retook the hill at night.
45 Girkas went down trying to hold it.
March 5th, B Company got orders to take it back regardless of cost.
Bonbakta’s section was in the lead element.
That’s where the story really began.
Not with the rock or the kukri or the bunker.
It started with a rifleman who had nothing left to prove but everything to lose.
The question hanging over Snowden east wasn’t just tactical.
Could the Girkas hold the position against Japanese counterattacks? Would reinforcements arrive before the enemy masked enough force to push them off the ridge? What happened in the next 48 hours would determine whether Banbakta’s actions on March 5th mattered at all.
The third battalion held Snowden east for the next week.
Japanese patrols probed their defenses every night.
Mortar fire, snipers, small-cale attacks designed to test the Girka’s resolve.
None of them succeeded.
B Company had paid too high a price for that hill to give it back.
They strengthened the bunkers, improved the firing positions, turned the ridge into exactly what the Japanese had built before losing it.
By mid-March, the 25th Division was pushing deeper into the Iraq.
The Japanese 54th Division was falling back, not retreating in panic, but conducting a fighting withdrawal.
They’d hold a position for 2 or 3 days, inflict maximum casualties, then pull back to the next defensive line.
It was the same pattern they’d used throughout Burma, make the British pay for every mile.
Banbakta’s company commander wrote up the action report from Snowden East.
The details were specific.
Times, locations, casualties, the number of enemy positions cleared.
Witnesses confirmed every part of the story.
The sniper kill, the four foxholes, the bunker assault, the rock.
Officers who’d served in Burma for 3 years had seen plenty of bravery.
This was different.
Five positions cleared by one man under continuous fire.
It met the standard for the highest recognition.
The recommendation went up the chain.
Battalion Commander, Brigade Commander, Division Commander.
Each level added their endorsement.
By April, the paperwork reached India Command.
The citation was drafted in formal language, clinical, every action described in passive voice.
The violence reduced to bureaucratic pros.
Rifleman Banbakta Gurong had displayed outstanding bravery and complete disregard for his own safety.
His courageous clearing of five enemy positions single-handed was decisive in capturing the objective.
The Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest military award for gallantry in the face of the enemy.
Established in 1856 by Queen Victoria.
Only 10 Girkas had received it during the entire Second World War.
The medal was made from bronze taken from Russian cannons captured during the Crimean War.
Or so the story went.
Some historians disputed the origin, but the symbolism remained.
The cross itself was simple, plain, no elaborate design, just a cross with a crown and lion above it and the words for valor underneath.
The official announcement came in the London Gazette on June 1st, 1945.
By then, the war in Europe was over.
Germany had surrendered on May 8th.
Japan was still fighting, but the end was coming.
American forces were closing in on the home islands.
The British 14th Army had taken Rangon on May 3rd.
Burma was nearly liberated.
The Japanese were pulling back to Thailand and Malaya, trying to consolidate what remained of their Southeast Asian Empire.
Banbucka didn’t know about the Victoria Cross recommendation until weeks after Snowden East.
Officers didn’t tell enlisted men about award nominations.
Too many things could go wrong.
The paperwork could get lost.
Higher command might downgrade it to a lesser medal.
Better to wait until it was official.
He kept doing his job.
Patrols, guard duty, cleaning weapons.
The same routine every infantry soldier followed between battles.
The third battalion pushed south through April and May.
The Japanese resistance was crumbling but still dangerous.
Ambushes, booby traps, the occasional firefight when a Japanese unit decided to make a stand.
Bonbakta section took casualties.
Not as heavy as Snowden East, but enough to remind everyone the war wasn’t finished.
One man lost to a landmine, another to a sniper, two wounded by grenade fragments.
The grinding attrition of infantry combat.
June brought monsoon rains.
The jungle turned into a swamp.
Rivers flooded.
Roads became impassible.
Military operations slowed to a crawl.
The 14th Army consolidated positions and prepared for the next phase.
The invasion of Malaya was being planned, Operation Zipper, an amphibious assault that would put British forces on the Malay Peninsula and drive towards Singapore.
The third battalion would be part of it.
Then came August.
Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Soviet declaration of war against Japan.
Emperor Hirohito’s radio broadcast on August 15th.
The war was over.
Japan had surrendered.
After 6 years of global conflict, it was done.
The men of B company heard the news in a base camp south of Rangon.
Some cheered, others just sat quietly trying to process it.
They’d survive.
They were going home.
Bonbukda’s company commander called him in 3 days later, told him about the Victoria Cross, explained what it meant.
The presentation would happen in India, probably at division headquarters.
King George V 6th would present the medals in person once Bonbuka got back to England, but that might take months.
The war was over, but the army still moved slowly.
Demobilization, repatriation, processing thousands of men through the system.
The news spread through the battalion immediately.
The riflemen, who’d been demoted 6 months ago, was getting the Victoria Cross.
Some of the older NCOs’s who’d known him since the Chindit operation weren’t surprised.
They’d seen what he could do.
Others were learning his story for the first time.
The rock in the bunker became legendary.
British officers told it at me dinners.
Girka soldiers passed it around their own networks.
By September, everyone in the regiment knew.
But Bhanbakta had a problem.
His mother was widowed and frail back in Falpu.
His wife was young and needed support.
He had responsibilities in Nepal that the army couldn’t fulfill.
The company commander tried to convince him to stay in.
Offered to restore his Nike rank immediately, suggested he could make Havdar within a year.
The Victoria Cross changed everything.
He could write his own ticket now.
Mahanbakta said no.
Politely, firmly.
He’d done his duty.
Four years of service, Operation Longlo, the Iraq campaign, Snowden East.
It was enough.
He wanted to go home.
The army accepted his decision.
When he was discharged in January 1946, they restored his Nike rank and gave him the honorary rank of Havdar.
The paperwork was clean, an honorable discharge, the Victoria Cross citation officially approved.
The presentation ceremony happened before he left India.
Division parade ground.
Full dress uniform.
Officers lined up.
The general pinned the metal to Bonbaka’s chest and shook his hand.
Photographers took pictures.
The images would appear in British newspapers later.
The Girka who used a rock to kill a Japanese machine gunner.
Good for morale.
Good for recruiting.
Proof that Britain’s colonial troops were fierce warriors.
What the newspapers didn’t mention was what came next.
Ban Pagda traveled to London in 1946 for the official Victoria Cross presentation.
King George V 6th conducted the ceremony at Buckingham Palace.
Dozens of servicemen lined up to receive medals.
Army, Navy, Air Force, British, Commonwealth, Girkas.
The war had produced thousands of acts of bravery, but only a handful earned the Victoria Cross.
Bonpaga stood in line with men who’ done extraordinary things under fire.
Each one had a story.
His involved a rock.
The king pinned the medal to his uniform and said a few words.
Bonbakta didn’t speak much English.
The translator conveyed the king’s congratulations.
The ceremony lasted less than 5 minutes per recipient.
Efficient, formal, very British.
Photographs were taken.
Paperwork was completed.
Then Bonbakta was free to return to Nepal.
He’d seen London, met the king, received Britain’s highest military honor.
Now he wanted to go home.
Falpu hadn’t changed.
Same terrace fields, same stone houses, same mountains rising in every direction.
The village had sent men to serve in the British army for generations.
Most came back, some didn’t.
Banbagda was one of the lucky ones who returned in one piece.
The Victoria Cross didn’t mean much to villagers who’d never heard of it.
What mattered was he’d sent money home during the war, and now he was back to help work the family land.
Life in Falpu followed rhythms that hadn’t changed in centuries.
Plant rice in the monsoon season, harvest in autumn, tend livestock, repair terraces.
The work was hard but predictable.
Nothing like Burma.
No snipers, no Japanese, no officers giving contradictory orders, just the daily routine of subsistance farming in the Himalayan foothills.
Bonbugta settled into it easily.
His wife had waited through four years of war.
They’d married young before he’d enlisted.
She’d managed the household while he was gone, relying on his army pay and help from extended family.
Now they could start a proper life together.
Three sons came over the next decade.
All of them would eventually join the second Girka rifles, following their father into British service.
The tradition continued.
The regiment didn’t forget Banbukta.
They invited him back several times over the years.
Malaya in the 1950s when the battalion was fighting communist insurgents during the emergency.
Hong Kong in the60s, England in the 70s.
Each visit was ceremonial.
The Victoria Crossholder living proof of Girka courage.
The army paid for everything.
Transportation, accommodation, meals.
They treated him well.
In 1994, the second Girka rifles amalgamated with other regiments.
Budget cuts, downsizing, the end of an era.
The Surmore rifles ceased to exist as an independent unit after 179 years.
March 5th, Tamandu Day, had been celebrated as a regimental holiday since 1945.
After amalgamation, the tradition faded.
New regiments had their own histories, their own heroes.
Banbakta’s story became part of the past.
The year 2000 brought one final honor.
The British Army named a training facility at Katar Garrison after him.
The Banbakta Gurong block, a permanent reminder for young Girka recruits going through basic training.
This is what one of your own did in Burma.
This is the standard.
Every recruit would walk past that sign and know the story.
the riflemen who cleared five Japanese positions with grenades, bayonet, kukri, and a rock.
Banbakta developed asthma in his later years.
The condition worsened gradually.
By 2004, he was housebound, living with his youngest son in Darapani, Gora district, the same hills he’d grown up in, the same mountains he’d left 64 years earlier to join the army.
He was 86 years old.
The last years were difficult.
His breathing deteriorated.
Simple activities became exhausting.
But he had his family around him.
His sons, grandchildren, great grandchildren.
March 1st, 2008.
Bunbukta Gurong died at his son’s house.
The news reached the Girka Museum in Winchester, England within days.
Obituaries appeared in British newspapers, the Telegraph, the Times.
Military historians wrote tributes.
The last of the Burma Victoria Cross recipients was gone.
Only a handful of Second World War Girka VCs had still been alive.
Now there was one fewer.
His Victoria Cross went to the Girka Museum.
The medal sits in a display case alongside nine others earned by Girka soldiers during the Second World War.
Visitors can see it, read the citation, look at photographs of a young rifleman Gurang in uniform.
The museum preserves the story.
Make sure new generations understand what happened on Snowden East.
But the rock isn’t there.
No one kept it.
Why would they? It was just a rock.
Baseball-sized, heavy enough to kill a man in close quarters.
Dark with blood when Bunbukta dropped it in the bunker.
Probably still on the floor when B company moved out days later.
Maybe a Japanese burial detail found it when they recovered their dead.
Maybe it’s still there, buried under 60 years of jungle growth on a hill in Burma that’s now called Myanmar.
The thing about improvised weapons is they disappear.
Grenades explode.
Bayonets stay with the rifle.
Kukre get passed down through families.
But a rock is just a rock until it saves your life or ends someone else’s.
Then it becomes something more.
A tool, a weapon, a piece of history that no one thought to preserve because no one imagined it mattered.
The men who served with Bonbakta on Snowden East are all gone now.
The last veteran of B company died years ago.
No one alive remembers watching him stand up under sniper fire.
No one saw him charge those foxholes firsthand.
No one crawled into that bunker behind him.
The story survives through official records, war diaries, Victoria Cross citations, museum displays, secondhand accounts written by people who weren’t there.
But here’s what the records can’t capture.
The weight of a decision made in less than a second.
Bhanbakta standing up under machine gunfire.
That moment when survival instinct screams to stay down and training says eliminate the threat.
Most men freeze, some run, a few attack.
Bhanbakta attacked not because he was fearless.
Fear is what keeps soldiers alive.
But because staying pinned meant watching more of his section die.
The mathematics were simple.
One life against many, he chose to risk the one.
Military historians study these moments, try to quantify courage, break it down into factors, training, leadership, unit cohesion, battlefield conditions.
All of it matters.
But none of it fully explains why one man charges a machine gun bunker while others stay in cover.
The Victoria Cross citations from Burma read like a catalog of impossible actions.
Men who should have died but didn’t.
Bonbaktas was one of hundreds.
Each one a small miracle of survival.
The Girkas had a reputation that preceded them into battle.
The Japanese knew about the kukri, knew about girka aggression in close combat.
British propaganda played it up.
the fearless hillman from Nepal, natural warriors, born fighters.
The reality was more complicated.
Girka soldiers were professionals, well-trained, disciplined.
They fought effectively because the British army invested in their training and treated them better than most colonial troops, but the mythology persisted.
Useful for morale, useful for intimidation.
Bonbacha’s action on Snowden East fit the narrative perfectly.
The lone girka charging Japanese positions, killing with traditional weapons, using a rock when modern weapons failed.
It was the kind of story that newspapers loved.
Primitive warrior defeats modern military with stone age tactics.
Never mind that he’d also used grenades, a rifle, and a bayonet.
The Rock was what people remembered.
The Rock made it exotic, made it foreign, made it other.
But strip away the mythology and what remains is infantry combat at its most basic.
Close quarters, poor visibility.
Weapons malfunctioning or running out of ammunition.
Soldiers improvising with whatever they can grab.
The rock wasn’t primitive.
It was practical.
Banbakta needed to kill a man in a cramped space where his kuker was useless.
The rock worked.
Simple as that.
Any soldier in the same situation would have done the same thing.
The Burma campaign produced this kind of fighting constantly.
Jungle warfare, bunker assaults, hand-to-hand combat in conditions where visibility was measured in feet.
The Japanese built their defensive positions into the terrain, bunkers covered by jungle growth, foxholes connected by trenches, interlocking fields of fire that turned every approach into a killing zone.
Taking these positions required infantry to close with the enemy, get inside grenade range, clear each position individually.
Brutal, slow, costly.
The 14th Army lost thousands of men in Burma.
Disease killed more than combat.
Malaria, dysentery, typhus.
The jungle was as much an enemy as the Japanese.
Soldiers rotated out of frontline units regularly just to recover from illness.
The lucky ones got evacuated to hospitals in India.
The unlucky ones died in aid stations or on the march.
Medical care improved as the campaign progressed, but the early years were a nightmare.
Men died from infected cuts, dehydration, starvation when supply lines broke down.
Banbakta survived all of it.
Operation Longlo, the Iraq campaign, Snowden East.
Four years in Burma and he came home intact.
No serious wounds, no permanent disabilities.
The asthma came later, probably unrelated to military service.
He was extraordinarily lucky.
Most Chindid veterans never fully recovered from the first expedition.
The physical toll was too great.
Bunbuga walked away and went back to farming.
That alone put him in a minority.
The second Girka rifles recruited heavily from the Gurang ethnic group, Hill tribes from central Nepal.
The British had specific recruiting standards, height minimums, physical fitness tests, educational requirements.
They selected the best candidates and trained them to British Army standards.
The result was a highly effective infantry force that served throughout the empire.
India, Malaya, Hong Kong, Cyprus, the Faullands.
Wherever Britain needed reliable troops, the Girkas went.
The relationship was transactional.
Nepal allowed recruitment in exchange for British support and military training for Nepalese officers.
Girka soldiers earned good wages by Nepalese standards and sent money home.
Britain got tough, disciplined infantry who performed well in difficult conditions.
Both sides benefited.
The arrangement lasted over 200 years.
It continues today in modified form.
The British army still recruits girkas.
Smaller numbers now, different terms of service, but the tradition survives.
Bonbakta’s three sons all joined the second Girka rifles.
They followed him into British service, served their terms, came home.
The cycle repeated.
His grandson became a captain in the Royal Girka rifles, the family tradition spanning three generations, each one carrying the knowledge that their father or grandfather had earned the Victoria Cross.
That kind of legacy creates pressure.
Live up to the standard, match the achievement, or at least don’t embarrass the family name.
None of them earned a Victoria Cross.
Very few soldiers do.
The medal is rare by design, only awarded for the most extreme acts of valor.
Bonbach’s sons served honorably.
That was enough.
They didn’t need to single-handedly assault five enemy positions to prove their worth.
They did their jobs, came home, raised families, the same pattern their father had followed.
In 2020, Bonbaka’s grandson visited the Girka Museum, Captain Booty Gurang.
He saw his grandfather’s Victoria Cross for the first time.
The medal his family had known about for 75 years, but never actually seen.
It had been donated to the museum after Bonbacha’s death, preserved for history.
The museum staff arranged a private viewing.
Photographs were taken.
The circle closed.
The question that remains is simpler than it seems.
What made March 5th, 1945 different from any other day? Why did Bonbacha survive when so many others died? Was it skill, luck, divine intervention, or just the random chaos of combat where bullets miss by inches and grenades land exactly where they need to? The answer matters less than the fact that he lived to tell the story.
Someone had to survive.
It happened to be him.
That’s the nature of war.
Arbitrary, brutal, occasionally heroic, mostly just violent and sad.
But there’s one more piece to the story that changes everything.
The demotion.
That’s the piece everyone overlooks when they tell Bonbach the story.
They focus on the rock, the bunker, the five positions cleared under fire.
But the real story started 4 months earlier when a lieutenant made a mistake and let a rifleman take the fall.
That injustice was still fresh on March 5th, still burning.
The kind of anger that doesn’t fade quickly.
Military discipline depends on hierarchy.
Officers give orders, enlisted men follow them.
When something goes wrong, blame flows downward.
It’s not fair, but it’s how armies work.
Bonbakta understood this.
He’d served long enough to know the system, but understanding doesn’t make it easier to accept.
He’d done exactly what he was told and still lost his rank.
That stays with a man.
The platoon commander who gave the wrong coordinates survived the war.
Made captain, served another 5 years before retiring.
His career wasn’t affected by the incident.
Why would it be? He’d successfully deflected blame onto a Girka NCO who had no political connections and limited ability to defend himself.
The system protected officers, always had.
Bonbakta knew this, too.
He didn’t fight the charges, didn’t appeal, just took the demotion and moved to a new company.
Some historians argue the demotion motivated Bonbakta’s actions on Snowden East, trying to prove his worth, reclaim his honor, show everyone he’d been wrongly punished, maybe.
But that analysis imposes Western concepts of individual achievement onto a man from a completely different culture.
Bonbakta came from a village where community mattered more than personal glory.
His actions were about keeping his section alive, not personal vindication.
The Victoria Cross didn’t erase the demotion.
It couldn’t.
The records show both.
Promoted to Nike in 1943, reduced to rifleman in September 1944, earned Victoria Cross in March 1945.
The army eventually restored his rank, but the gap remained.
6 months as a disgraced rifleman.
That period shaped everything that came after.
Without the demotion, Bonbagda might never have been in B company, might never have been on Snowden East.
The entire sequence of events trace back to one lieutenant’s mistake.
The irony is sharp.
The officer who destroyed Bunbugda’s career inadvertently put him in position to earn Britain’s highest military honor.
If Bunbugda had stayed in his original company as a Nike, he wouldn’t have been in the lead section on March 5th.
Someone else would have faced that sniper.
Someone else would have charged those bunkers.
The Victoria Cross would have gone to a different man or not been awarded at all.
Random chance.
Wrong place, right time.
10 Girkas earned the Victoria Cross during the Second World War.
Ban Pakta was number eight.
The first was Subadar Lal Bahadur Tapa in 1943 in North Africa.
The last was rifleman Lachiman Gurong in May 1945, just 2 months after Snowden East.
Lachiman’s action was even more extreme.
Alone at a forward post, enemy grenade landed in his trench.
He threw it back.
It exploded, blew off his hand and fingers, partially blinded him.
He kept fighting with his remaining hand for 4 hours, killed 31 Japanese, survived.
That kind of bravery seems superhuman.
It’s not.
Its desperation mixed with training and a refusal to quit.
Lachiman couldn’t retreat.
Nowhere to go.
Stay and fight or die.
He chose to fight.
Same calculation Bonbuga made.
Different circumstances, same result.
Survival against impossible odds.
The Victoria Cross recognized both men, gave them pensions, made them famous in certain circles, but it couldn’t change what they’d endured to earn it.
The Burma campaign killed 32,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers, wounded over 87,000 more.
The Japanese lost even more.
Estimates range from 150,000 to 200,000 dead, most from disease and starvation rather than combat.
The war in Burma was a meat grinder that consumed entire divisions.
Snowden East was one hill among hundreds.
The 66 dead Japanese were a statistical footnote in a campaign that killed thousands daily.
But statistics don’t capture individual experience.
Bonbakta didn’t fight for Burma or the British Empire or abstract concepts like freedom and democracy.
He fought for the men in his section, for the soldier next to him who’d shared rations yesterday.
For the riflemen who’d helped carry ammunition up the hill.
That’s what infantry combat reduces to.
Protect your mates.
Complete the mission.
Survive if you can.
Everything else is propaganda and politics.
The third battalion’s war diary from March 5th is clinical.
Timed entries, grid coordinates, casualty reports.
B Company attacks Snowden East at 0900 hours.
Encountered heavy resistance.
Secured objective by 1200 hours.
45 friendly casualties.
Estimated 66 enemy killed.
The entry doesn’t mention Bonbagta by name.
doesn’t describe the bunker assault, just dry facts for the historical record.
The human drama came later when officers wrote up the Victoria Cross recommendation.
Modern military study Snowden East in infantry training courses.
The tactical problem is clear.
Fortified position, interlocking fields of fire, attacking force pinned down.
Solution: Aggressive individual action to suppress enemy fire and allow the main force to advance.
Textbook stuff.
What makes it remarkable is that Bonbagta executed the solution alone, without support, under continuous fire.
Most infantry assaults require coordinated team action, fire and maneuver, covering fire, buddy rushes.
Bonbagta just went.
The Japanese defenders on Snowden East were probably from a veteran unit.
The 54th Division had fought in Burma since the invasion in 1942.
They knew the terrain, knew how to build defensive positions.
Their bunker was well constructed, concrete, good fields of fire, properly sighted.
They’d done everything right.
They still lost because one Girka rifleman decided the bunker had to fall and made it happen.
No amount of training or preparation can account for that level of individual determination, which brings the story full circle.
March 5th, 1945.
A hill in Burma, a rifleman with a rock.
The moment that defined Bunbukta Gurang’s life and gave the Girkas another legend.
But the real question isn’t what happened that day.
It’s what it meant.
Not just for Bunbukta, but for everyone who heard the story afterward.
For Girka recruits a catar who walk past his name.
For historians who study the Burma campaign.
For anyone trying to understand what soldiers endure in combat and why some become heroes while others just become casualties, the answer is waiting in what happened after Banbaka went home.
Bonbacha lived 63 years after Snowden East.
Farmed his fields, raised his sons, watched grandchildren grow up.
The Victoria Cross sat in a drawer most of that time.
He didn’t talk about the war much.
Most veterans don’t.
What’s there to say? He’d done what needed doing and survived.
The rest was just life.
Plant rice, harvest crops, fix the terrace walls when monsoon rains washed them out.
Simple work, honest work, the kind that doesn’t make headlines.
He visited England three times.
Official ceremonies, regimental reunions, the Girka Museum opened in Winchester and invited him for the dedication.
Each trip meant putting on his old uniform, pinning the Victoria Cross to his chest, shaking hands with officers and politicians who wanted to meet a living legend.
Then back to Nepal, back to the quiet life he preferred.
The story survived because it meant something.
Not just to the Girkas, not just to the British army, to anyone who understands what it takes to stand up when everyone else is pinned down.
to move forward when survival instinct screams to stay in cover.
That’s not about rocks or kukeries or primitive weapons.
It’s about the decision one man makes in a moment of crisis.
Do I act or do I wait? Do I risk everything or protect myself? Bunbukta chose to act five times that morning.
Each time expecting to die, each time surviving.
The mathematics of courage.
Calculate the odds.
Ignore the calculation.
Do it anyway.
That’s what the Victoria Cross recognizes.
Not superhuman ability, not fearlessness, just the willingness to do what needs doing regardless of cost.
Most recipients don’t survive.
Bunbuga did.
That made him lucky and exceptional in equal measure.
His son served.
His grandson serves.
The tradition continues.
But none of them had to clear five Japanese positions alone.
None faced the same test.
Different wars, different enemies, different circumstances.
The Second World War created conditions that forced ordinary men into extraordinary situations.
Burma was one of the worst theaters.
Jungle, disease, an enemy that fought to the death.
The men who survived came home changed.
Banbakta was no exception.
The asthma that killed him at 86 might have started in Burma.
smoke inhalation, tropical disease, poor nutrition during Operation Long Cloth, or maybe just age, lungs wear out, bodies fail.
He lived longer than most Chindit veterans.
Many died in their 50s or 60s, their health ruined by what they’d endured.
Bonbaga made it to 86, saw his great grandchildren died at home, surrounded by family.
Better than dying in a bunker in Burma.
The Girka Museum keeps history alive.
School groups visit.
Military historians study the displays.
Veterans pay respects.
The Victoria Cross sits in its case, polished, protected.
A piece of bronze that represents one morning in March 1945 when a rifleman from Nepal decided a hill in Burma needed to be taken and made it happen with whatever weapons he could reach.
That’s the real legacy.
Not the medal, not the ceremonies, not the training facility named in his honor.
The legacy is the example, the proof that one person can make a difference when it matters most.
Bonbucka didn’t set out to be a hero.
He set out to keep his section alive and complete the mission.
Everything else followed from that simple goal.
The demotion never really mattered.
The promotion back to Nike was symbolic.
The honorary Havdar rank was a gesture.
What mattered was March 5th.
What he did when it counted.
The rest was just paperwork and politics.
The men who served with him knew his worth.
That was enough.
Rifleman Banbakta Gurong, Victoria Cross, Third Battalion, Second Girka Rifles, born September 1921, died March 1st, 2008.
86 years.
Four of them spent in uniform.
One morning spent changing history.
The rest spent living a quiet life that proved heroes don’t need to be extraordinary every day.
They just need to be extraordinary once.
The rock wasn’t primitive.
It was practical.
In that bunker, in that moment, with no room to swing a kukri, it worked.
That’s enough.
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