পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (ষষ্ঠ খণ্ড).pdf/৭৬১

725 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ ষষ্ঠ খণ্ড Several of the men chatted away in normal conversational tones, to my horror, but the talk faded as we went deeper in the boats grounded and everybody jumped into the water and waded to land, one party of men with a Bren gun and one mortar disappearing into the darkness to the left, and the rest of us, with two Bren's and two mortars, moving single file into a grove of trees. There were numerous inexplicable stops en route and the young guerrilla detailed to look after us kept saying rather pointlessly something like "Here we are in Bangladesh." After perhaps 20 minutes we came to a large village, passed quietly through and emerged on a river bank. The guns and mortars were set up, the bombs taken from the cardboard tubes. About 200 villagers in the huts nearest the firing party woke up pulled out quickly, presumably to huts at the other end of the village, carrying bedding and other bundles. Then the firing started, sounding incredibly loud after all the whispering and shuffling that had gone before-short bursts from the Bren's, whiumps and bangs from the mortars, single shots from the 303 rifles carried by the other men. The party to our left joined in. It lasted perhaps eight minutes. There was no response from the "enemy location" and the sergeant mysteriously announced "We fire now. In 20 minutes they fire." We returned to the boats at some speed. The warrant officer counted the party, and we pushed off into the water again. Twenty minutes later, to the minute-I looked at my watch-came the extremely nasty sound of a mortar bomb landing about 400 yards from the boats. The minutes later we were out of the boats and half an hour afterwards back at camp, freshening up by pouring pump water over our heads. The captain, confident that his jitter party would come to no harm, was sleeping soundly in his tent...The patrol, all in all, was a competent effort. The men knew how to work the weapons, and they moved quickly to and from the chosen position..... To be fair to the Mukti Bahini liberation fighters, jitter parties are not their main occupation. The captain's company of Niyomita Bahini claims to have killed 125 Pakistan soldiers, including two officers, in the four months it has been in existence. He also said that, during the whole four months, the Pakistanis had attempted no counter ambushes, done no counter mining and had "on only one occasion" attempted to outflank a Mukti party during an engagement.