Barefoot on the Mountain: The Story of Captain Neikezhakuo Kenguruse—‘Nimbu Saab’

It begins far away from the icy cliffs of Kargil, in the green hills of Nagaland. Born in Nerhema village in Kohima district in 1974, Kengurüse grew up in a large family, in a region shaped by hardship, political unrest, and distance from the Indian mainland’s imagination. Yet those who knew him remembered a quiet young man with unusual determination. Before he wore olive green, he worked as a schoolteacher in Kohima, helping support his family while carrying dreams larger than the hills he came from.

The Indian Army was not always viewed with warmth in Nagaland during those years. Many Nagas had grown up amid insurgency and military presence, and the relationship was layered with distrust. That is what makes Kengurüse’s journey even more remarkable. He chose service anyway. He cleared the Combined Defence Services examination, entered the Indian Military Academy in Dehradun, and was commissioned into the army in December 1998. Barely six months later, he would find himself in the middle of one of India’s fiercest modern wars.

The Kargil War was unlike conventional warfare. Soldiers were fighting not just an enemy, but terrain itself. Peaks stood at dizzying heights. Oxygen was thin. Temperatures dropped below freezing. Every climb happened under enemy observation and machine-gun fire.

In the Drass sector, one of the bloodiest theatres of the war, the 2nd Battalion of the Rajputana Rifles was tasked with recapturing heavily defended enemy positions. Among its young officers was Captain Kengurüse.

His soldiers struggled to pronounce ‘Neikezhakuo Kengurüse’, and so affection reshaped the name into something easier: ‘Nimbu Saab’. Some accounts say the nickname came because he often carried lemon powder for his troops during gruelling deployments. The name stayed, warm and informal amid the brutal cold of war.

On the night of 28 June 1999, Nimbu Saab led a Ghatak platoon—an elite assault team—towards a fortified enemy position at Black Rock near Lone Hill. The mission bordered on impossible. Pakistani positions sat high above on near-vertical rock faces, protected by machine guns and bunkers. Indian troops climbing upwards were fully exposed to enemy fire.

As the platoon climbed higher, the rocks turned icy and treacherous. Their boots began slipping against the frozen surface. Somewhere in that freezing darkness, Captain Kengurüse made a decision that would turn him into a legend.

He removed his boots.

Barefoot, injured, and carrying weapons and ammunition, he began scaling the cliff with his hands and feet gripping the freezing rock. At nearly 16,000 feet and temperatures around –10°C, even standing still could numb the body into collapse.

There is something almost mythic about that image: a young officer from Nagaland climbing an ice-covered cliff barefoot under enemy fire. Yet the reality was harsher than legend. Bullets cracked through the darkness. Grenades exploded around the platoon. Men fell. Captain Kengurüse himself suffered injuries from splinters and gunfire, but he kept moving upward, leading from the front.

Why ‘Nimbu Saab’ Still MattersWhen he reached the enemy bunker, the battle turned savage and close. Accounts describe him engaging enemy soldiers in hand-to-hand combat after neutralising bunkers with grenades and gunfire. By then, he had already created the foothold his platoon needed.

Inspired by his assault, his men pushed forward and captured the position. Captain Kengurüse, however, was fatally hit during the attack. He was only twenty-five years old.

For his extraordinary bravery, he was posthumously awarded the Maha Vir Chakra, India’s second-highest wartime gallantry honour. The citation spoke of ‘indomitable courage’ and ‘supreme sacrifice’, phrases often repeated in military language. But in Kengurüse’s case, those words feel literal rather than ceremonial.

And yet, for years, his story remained strangely under-told outside military circles. Perhaps because he came from India’s Northeast, far from the centres that dominate national memory. Perhaps because wars produce so many heroes that some inevitably disappear into footnotes.

But among soldiers, especially in the Rajputana Rifles and in Nagaland, Nimbu Saab never faded.

In recent years, books and memorials have helped bring his story back into public consciousness, including the book Nimbu Saab: The Barefoot Naga Kargil Hero, written by Neha and Diksha Dwivedi along with his brother Neingutoulie Kengurüse. The book revisits not only the famous barefoot climb, but also the human being behind the legend—a teacher, a son, a brother, a young officer still learning army life when history demanded everything from him.
Buy Here: Nimbu Saab

Perhaps the real reason his story endures is that it captures something larger than battlefield heroism. In Captain Neikezhakuo Kengurüse, India saw a Naga officer leading Rajput soldiers in the mountains of Kashmir, fighting for comrades from regions and cultures entirely different from his own.

The Kargil War, in many ways, became a reminder that the Indian Army often creates a sense of unity that politics struggles to achieve.

Today, when people speak of Kargil, they remember peaks, victories, and medals. But somewhere in that memory remains the image of a barefoot soldier climbing ice in the dark, refusing to stop.

That is how legends are born—not from invincibility, but from impossible courage.

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