Khemkaran is a small town on the border in Tarn Taran district and it gave its name to the sector in which one of the largest tank battles of the 1965 war was fought.
Pakistan's 1 Armoured Division attacked here with Patton tanks in early September 1965. The Indian defence at Asal Uttar, a few kilometres away, was set in sugarcane fields deliberately flooded from the canal, and the tanks bogged.
Between sixty and a hundred Pakistani tanks were destroyed or captured over three days and the battlefield was called Patton Nagar afterward.
Company Quartermaster Havildar Abdul Hamid of 4 Grenadiers destroyed several tanks from a jeep-mounted recoilless rifle and was killed. He was awarded the Param Vir Chakra.
The villages of the sector were evacuated, shelled, and rebuilt. Their people came back to what was left.
The town is now a border settlement with a bus stand, a grain market and land beyond the fence.
The town was taken in the 1965 fighting and recovered. The armour battle at Asal Uttar, a few kilometres away, is where the thrust was stopped.
It sits in the border belt with land beyond the fence and a road that goes nowhere, since the crossing here has been shut since Partition.
A rail line ends at the town, built when the line continued into what is now Pakistan. A railway that stops in a field is the clearest picture of what the border did to this belt.