Chapter 13: Main Text

Main Text Chapter Thirteen Leaving the Unit

As Churchill said, there are no eternal friends nor eternal enemies in the world, only eternal interests.

In 1969, due to the needs of the international situation, the unit I was in was dispatched to the deep parts of Kunlun Mountain for construction; because the environment was too harsh, the construction progress was slower than expected, and over three years, several dozen soldiers sacrificed on the construction site, yet the military facility we were building had only just completed two-thirds.

At this time, the world situation reshuffled again; in 1972 Nixon visited China, and Sino‑American relations thawed. China's strategic deployment was readjusted on a large scale; the construction in Kunlun Mountain was halted, and we, these halfway‑trained engineering soldiers, were all reassigned into the combat order of the field army, belonging to the Lanzhou Military Region.

Day after day, year after year of training, drills, exercises, study, and critique. Life in the camp was not only monotonous but also arduous. After a few more years, the Cultural Revolution ended; the Party Central promptly corrected the chaos, the Gang of Four was smashed, and after a full decade of catastrophe, social order finally returned to normal.

However, the unit is a special environment cut off from society; I didn't feel any major change in the barracks, except that we no longer had to recite Mao's quotations whenever we met, but whenever new recruits joined the camp, we still had to give them revolutionary education.

That morning, I had just returned from a meeting at battalion headquarters when the signal officer Xiao Liu came running, panting: "Report, Company Commander, today a platoon of new soldiers has arrived for duty, but the instructor is away studying at the military region, so please go and give the new recruits a talk on revolution and tradition."

Talking about revolution and tradition is actually just telling the new recruits the company's history. I am completely unfamiliar with this, but since I am now the company commander and the instructor is absent, I had no choice but to grit my teeth and do it.

I brought these thirty-plus new recruits into the company's Hall of Honor and pointed to a banner embroidered with the words "Bayonet Hero Company," telling them that this honor was earned by our Sixth Company's predecessors in the Huaihai Campaign, a title that has been retained to this day. I embellished the account of that brutal battle, describing how our Sixth Company fixed bayonets and drew blood, and how, in the situation of exhausted ammunition and rations, we used bayonets to repulse a frenzied full‑regiment attack by the Kuomintang reactionaries, gloriously fulfilling the superior's blocking mission.

Then I pointed to the black, broken iron pot in the glass case and told the new recruits: "Comrades, don't underestimate this broken pot; back on the Huaihai battlefield, our Sixth Company's revolutionary predecessors ate pork stew with vermicelli cooked in this very pot before going out to kill the enemy and earn merit. Look at the crack on the pot—it was blasted by the reactionary Kuomintang artillery, and to this day it silently recounts the deeds of those heroes and the atrocities of the reactionaries."

That's all I can talk about, since I'm not a specialist in ideological work, but I think I did okay; those rookie newbies had more than enough.

I let the new recruits disperse to the mess hall for dinner, and I walked behind them with Xiao Liu, asking him: "Company Commander, how was my lecture on revolution and tradition just now?"

Xiao Liu said: "Oh, Company Commander, it was superb—I was drooling listening to it. When will our company study the revolutionary martyrs, improve our meals, and also get to eat pork stew with vermicelli again?"

I swallowed, flicked Xiao Liu on the forehead, and said: "You didn't hear a bit of revolutionary tradition—all you heard was pork stew with vermicelli. Hurry to the mess hall and get rice; the hall is probably serving buns today, and if you're late those rookie newbies will snatch them all. I order you: run forward."

Xiao Liu acknowledged with a shout, swung his arms and sprinted toward the mess hall, when I suddenly remembered the most important sentence I had forgotten to tell him, so I hurriedly shouted from behind: "Pick me a few with big fillings!"

I lay in bed, eating buns while reading the letter my family had just sent; everything at home was fine, with no mention of anything important. After reading it twice I set the letter aside and picked up the family's inherited fragmentary book; those past experiences had sparked my great interest in feng shui, and whenever I had free time I would take it out and flip through.

Because this book mentions many terms like the Five Elements and Eight Trigrams numerology—such things as 'east, Jia and Yi wood; south, Bing and Ding fire; center, Wu and Ji earth; west, Geng and Xin metal; north, Ren and Gui water;' and the trigrams Qian, Kan, Gen, Zhen, Kun, Dui, Li, Wei, etc. —I found much of it puzzling. Over the years I have looked through many related books, and although my education is limited, I can still manage to grasp about thirty or forty percent.

The sixteen‑character secret of yin‑yang feng shui refers respectively to: heaven, earth, person, ghost, god, Buddha, demon, beast, intimidate; suppress; escape; thing; transform; yin; yang; void.

I don't know what era this book is from or who wrote it; its content is merely profound. The sixty‑four transformations of Fuxi's eight trigrams should actually be sixteen trigrams; transmitted to the Shang dynasty, these sixteen trigrams leaked heavenly secrets, so the gods wiped out half of them, and even the remaining eight trigrams are incomplete in number. Yet anyone who understands even a tenth or a fifth is already extraordinarily capable—take Zhuge Liang, who knew a little and could safeguard Liu Bei's strategic planning, establishing a tripartite balance of power; Liu Bowen only understood three‑tenths, yet he assisted Zhu Yuanzhang in founding the Ming dynasty's four‑hundred‑year foundation. But I don't believe it—could there really be such sorcery?

The only regret is that this book is only half a volume on the layout structure of feng shui and Five Elements graves; the other half, on yin‑yang eight trigrams and taiji numbers, has been missing since it was passed down to my grandfather. Reading the fragment, the content is sometimes discontinuous, and the wording is obscure and hard to understand, making it difficult to probe the deeper meaning. I think if it were a complete volume, comprehension would be easier.

Suddenly a three‑long, three‑short assembly call rang out, tearing through the quiet air of the barracks; my first thought was: "Surely something has happened—there's no reason for the whole camp to muster urgently in broad daylight for no cause." I stuffed the remaining two buns into my mouth, sprang up from the bed, and rushed out the door.

Rows of neatly aligned columns formed; I saw that not only our battalion was assembling, the entire regiment had gathered. As a junior officer like me, I had no right to know what operation this was—I only had to obey orders and follow commands. The order we received was to wait at the train station and set out together with sister units.

Over ten thousand, like mountains and seas, the military train station was packed with more than ten thousand soldiers; from afar it looked like a green tide, suggesting the whole division had been mobilized—mobilizing an entire division back then was a huge deal. Our kind of main‑force division establishment is enormous, comprising three infantry regiments, plus an artillery regiment, a tank regiment, and the division headquarters' organ logistics troops, altogether amounting to over twenty thousand. What could such a massive operation possibly be for? Surely not disaster relief—I haven't heard of any disaster nearby lately.

We were dazedly hauled in tin‑can trucks all the way to the Yunnan border, and only then did everyone realize we were going to fight—many people burst into tears then……

At the same time, Deng Xiaoping, who was visiting the United States, made an astonishing remark at the White House: "If little kids don't listen, they deserve a spanking." He also publicly admitted that Chinese troops had massively assembled on the China‑Vietnam border.

At dawn on February 17, 220,000 PLA troops from seventeen divisions launched a full‑scale offensive, fighting all the way to Understanding Mountain, and on March 4 China announced a withdrawal.

My company was the shock company of the main‑force division, the tip of the spear; after ten days of combat we had suffered over half casualties. During another march we were ambushed by Vietnamese special agents, who used a woman holding a child as cover and threw a satchel charge into our armored personnel carrier; the eight soldiers under me were all killed inside the APC. At that moment my eyes turned red—I killed three and captured alive the remaining two, an old man and a young woman, Vietnamese militiamen.

They were a Vietnamese man in his fifties and a woman in her twenties, apparently father and daughter. A subordinate told me that the woman had disguised the explosive pack as a baby held in her arms, and when she passed the armored vehicle she tossed the pack inside. There's no doubt—she was the one who did it.

What I fear most is watching my comrades die before my eyes; in a rage I forgot the Three Major Disciplines and Eight Points of Attention, as well as our army's policy toward prisoners, completely. I had someone tie an explosive pack to the Vietnamese woman's buttocks and made her ride a soil‑plane. Then I bound the old man tightly and threw him from a cliff into the minefield.

This matter seriously violated the unit's discipline, even alarming Chief Xu of the headquarters. If it weren't for my family's deep connections in the military district, I would have long been sent to a military court, my military career forced to end, holding a discharge order, I returned to my hometown.