On: I survived a missile strike in the Strait of Hormuz, but my friend has not been

Diary Entry

Another flare in the Strait of Hormuz - another ship struck, another life lost to the ceaseless friction of empires. The name “Sunil Puniya” will not echo through the halls of Parliament, nor stir the conscience of a continent grown weary of distant explosions. But it should. A first voyage, a last voyage - the arithmetic of war reduces all to numbers, yet it is the individual stories that reveal the true cost.

I have seen this pattern before - 1914, 1939 - when the machinery of conflict grinds forward, indifferent to the men caught in its gears. The Strait is not merely a waterway; it is the throat of empires, and when it tightens, the world gasps for oil and blood in equal measure. The missile that found the Skylight did not discriminate between veteran and novice. War never does.

They will call this “managed tension.” A neat phrase for a messy reality. Managed by whom? Not by Sunil Puniya, now lost to the depths. Not by the families who wait in vain for word. The sea does not return what it takes, and diplomacy too often arrives only to count the dead.

We stand again at the edge of a precipice, peering into the fog of what comes next. History offers no comfort, only warning: when the Straits tremble, the world shakes. And yet - we persist. We must. For the alternative is surrender to the chaos, and that I will never accept. The beaches, the landing grounds, the straits - they are all the same in the end. Places where men decide, by action or inaction, what kind of world they will inhabit.

Tonight, I drink to Sunil Puniya. And I resolve that his story - not the missiles, not the politics - will be the one I remember. The rest is noise. The man is the truth.