Gurtej Singh, VrC

Biography

Sepoy Gurtej Singh hailed from Birevala Dogran village in the Budladha tehsil of Mansa district, Punjab, born on 15 November 1997. He enlisted in 2018 at the age of twenty and was inducted into the 3 Punjab Battalion of the Punjab Regiment, completing a demanding tenure at Maloun Post on the Siachen Glacier before deploying to eastern Ladakh. During June 2020 the unit was deployed near the Line of Actual Control in Eastern Ladakh as part of Operation Snow Leopard, as tensions rose over the Galwan Valley along the route to Daulat Beg Oldie. On the night of 15 June 2020 the commanding officer of the 16 Bihar Battalion, Colonel Santosh Babu, led talks to defuse the standoff, but these turned into a brutal hand-to-hand clash as Chinese troops attacked with iron rods and clubs. In the fighting that raged for several hours along the freezing river, he and nineteen other soldiers laid down their lives for the nation. Twenty-three years old, Sepoy Gurtej Singh was awarded the Vir Chakra on 26 January 2021 for his exceptional courage and supreme sacrifice.