CRPF jawan Chandan Kumar is recuperating at a hospital in Raipur.
"Sir, you should see the conditions that we work in."
"I can't," I tell Chandan Kumar. "Men like you fight in places where angels fear to tread."
These were small words of support for a man who saw his entire life flash in front of his eyes as he lay on the ground pinned by Naxal gunfire, clutching his thigh which had been shattered by a high velocity burst from an AK-47.
Today, 48 hours after he survived the vicious ambush by Naxals in the Chintagufa area of Bastar Chhattisgarh, Chandan Kumar, a jawan with the CRPF, told me, "I didn't know I was hit. I kept firing. I was told by another jawan that there was blood. I walked 9 km with the support of a friend to our post at Chintagufa."
Chandan was one of the lucky ones. All around him, jawans of the CRPF's 223 battalion and its COBRA commando force were falling.
They had been ambushed on their way out of a village in Kasalpada, a spot on the map now covered in infamy. By the time the bloodbath was over, 14 jawans had been killed - the worst instance of Maoist violence in Chhattisgarh this year.
"They were hiding in homes in the villages. These homes were locked. We had left the village when they opened fire. At the same time, villagers came screaming towards us. We didn't fire. In the process, they surrounded us. We killed 20-25 Naxal fighters. I saw this with my own eyes."
Today Chandan, who still hasn't told his family in Bihar's Jehanabad what had happened, is recuperating at the Ramkrishna Care hospital in Raipur. Some of the other jawans are in far worse condition and are undergoing surgeries to remove shrapnel and bullets lodged in them.