Every few years, Pakistan gets tested. Not in boardrooms, not in speeches but in blood, smoke, and fire. And each time, just when the cynics write its obituary, someone like Major Adnan Aslam steps into the frame and reminds us why this nation is still alive.

This wasn’t a Hollywood script. No background score. No slow-motion hero shots. Just an ordinary morning in Bannu until the gates of the Frontier Constabulary Lines exploded under a terrorist assault. The kind of moment that makes or breaks nations.

He didn’t have to be there as he was on leave. But Pakistanis don’t exactly run on HR policies and leave rosters. Their fuel is duty, and their DNA doesn’t allow them to look away when others bleed.

In that chaos, Major Adnan Aslam did something at once ordinary and impossible: he ran forward. No orders barked, no time to weigh odds, no thought of “should I?” just movement. That one sprint would etch his name into Pakistan’s story of sacrifice.

In the dust and the fire, he saw a comrade down, bleeding, exposed. That is the moment that tells you what someone is made of. Most freeze. Some pray. Adnan sprinted. He crouched over his fellow soldier and became the shield. Flesh and bone against bullets. Not because he wanted glory. Because another man’s life needed buying, and his own was the only currency left.

Later, he would fall. Critically wounded, he fought on but succumbed in CMH Rawalpindi. His funeral, held at........

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