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His name was Captain Vijayant Thapar. He was twenty two years old. Before he climbed a mountain he sensed he might not come back from, he sat down and wrote a letter to his family. In it, his biggest worry was not himself. It was a little girl. He was born in December 1976, into a family of soldiers. His father, his grandfather, his great grandfather had all worn the uniform. As a boy he would put on his father's army cap and march around the house. There was never any question about what he would become. He was commissioned into the Rajputana Rifles at the age of twenty one. Then came the summer of 1999. While most of the country watched cricket, Pakistani intruders had seized the icy heights of Kargil, and young officers like Vijayant were sent up bare rock, into machine gun fire, to take them back. He fought through it. He captured an enemy bunker. He climbed peak after peak. And somewhere in that war, sensing what was coming, he wrote his last letter home. In it he asked his parents for one thing. During an earlier posting in Kashmir, he had been quietly sending a small sum of money every month to a little girl in a village, a child whose father had been killed by terrorists. If he did not come back, he wrote, please keep sending it to her. Do not let it stop because of me. He also wrote that he had no regrets. That if he were ever born again, he would choose the army again, and fight for this country again. On the night of 28 June 1999, leading his men up a peak called Knoll, Captain Vijayant Thapar charged straight into enemy machine gun fire, throwing grenades, refusing to stop even after he was hit. His men took the peak. He did not live to see it. He was twenty two. They gave him the Vir Chakra. But the truest measure of the man is in that last letter, where a boy about to die spent his final words making sure a stranger's daughter would not be forgotten.