The artillery barrage that shattered his career, life
IT WAS THE civil war that drove the final nail on DW Prasantha’s career as an athlete. Training had been stopped and all athletes moved to action zones. It was 6.30pm on May 5, 2001. The sky was getting darker when guns suddenly boomed in the distance. Prasantha and 19 other sergeants, who were chatting around in a camp in Jaffna’s Nagercoil war front, were taken aback when shells started to rain down.
It was an attack on their camp by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Seven artillery shells slammed into the camp, killing five of them and injuring six. It was blood everywhere. Prasantha was soon knocked out as artillery shrapnel pierced his chest. A bleeding and unconscious Prasantha was immediately removed to a bunker.
“The injured were initially attended to in the bunker by surviving colleagues. Reinforcement arrived 45 minutes later and shifted the casualty in a truck to the Palali Military Hospital in Jaffna.
“I regained consciousness a week after I was operated upon in the Jaffna hospital where I spent 15 critical days in the ICU. The artillery piece damaged my liver,” Prasantha said. The long scar that stretches from the chest to beyond the navel — as if the body had been slit open — is a testament to the horror and agony he lived through. He was later airlifted to the Army General Hospital in Colombo where he spent one month recuperating. “That’s when my journey as an athlete ended and life as a coach started.
“I still have a half-inch piece of shrapnel lodged in the right side of my stomach, as a souvenir from those days. Doctors advised against removing it as the operation might paralyse my leg,” he added. “It’s just there, without giving any trouble.”
Friend Lalith Galappaththi was sad to find a diploma holder from the National Institute of Sports Science working on the road as a security guard. “I was happy to see him after so many years. At the same time, I was so sad to find him in that situation.
“We studied in the same school. We also competed in the same events. When we ran a cross-country race, he was already a national athlete while I was still at the district level. Yet I was able to beat him to take gold because cross-country wasn’t his event. He was a steeplechase runner,” said Lalith.