Chapter 5: Main Text Chapter Five Kangba Kunlun Unfrozen Spring

Main Text Chapter Five Kangba Kunlun Unfrozen Spring

That year's spring, the whole country was shrouded in the shadow of war. The Soviet Union deployed over a million troops in three army groups along China's northern border, and China's neighboring India constantly had friction with China's border troops. The Nationalist troops on the island saw an opportunity and readied themselves for a counteroffensive, while the Meiguo Seventh Fleet also entered a state of readiness.

The senior leadership of the Chinese government felt the threat from hostile international forces, continually making strategic adjustments, expanding the army, preparing for war and famine, digging deep holes, stockpiling grain, and the masses actively carried out the three-defense drills against nuclear, chemical, and air attacks.

When I returned to the city to visit my relatives, someone told me the internal news that my parents' issue would soon be cleared up by the organization, proving that my grandfather was not a landlord but a middle peasant, so their release was only a matter of time. At that time, due to the PLA's massive conscription, an old comrade of my father let me join as a "backdoor recruit".

My father's comrade Uncle Chen was the chief of staff of the military district. In that year, the Ninth Army Corps entered the Korean War; on the icy, snowy Gaema Plateau, over ten thousand volunteer troops surrounded the Meiguo First Marine Division, the elite of the Meiguo military. The Meiguo military dropped large numbers of aerial bombs and napalm, lighting up the midnight sky like daytime. Under the fire barrier formed by the Meiguo steel shell barrage, the volunteer troops surged forward like waves, launching one charge after another.

In that brutal battle, my father braved minus forty-odd degrees, carrying the seriously injured Uncle Chen out of the pile of corpses. When they reached the aid station, their bodies were frozen together by blood on their clothes; the nurses used scissors to cut through flesh and blood to separate them. Their friendship could no longer be measured by the four words "life-and-death comrades," and moreover, my parents' historical issue was about to be resolved. Now arranging for the old comrade's son to join the army was no trouble for a district chief of staff. In a sense, the Chinese habit of using backdoors started first in the military.

Uncle Chen asked what kind of soldier I wanted to be; I said I wanted to join the air force, hearing that pilots had good meals. Uncle Chen laughed and gave me a rap on the head: "Fighter jets aren't that easy to fly; go to the field army, train hard for a few years, and when you become an officer, I'll transfer you to work at the military region headquarters." I said working at the headquarters was no good; I'd rather stay in a grassroots unit, I can't stand being stuck in an office.

I wanted to return to Ganggang Yingzi and Xiao Pang Yanzi to say goodbye, but time didn't allow it, so I wrote them a letter, feeling guilty inside. I went to the army myself, leaving my good friends behind in the mountains to reclaim land; no matter how you say it, I felt a bit unable to share hardship with them. However, this feeling disappeared after three months, when I finally knew how comfortable it was to be an educated youth in the mountains.

I was assigned by the conscription office to a unit about to be reequipped as an armored division. Who would have thought that, after bitterly enduring three months in the recruit training camp, a single order from the Central Military Commission reassigned the unit to the 62nd Platoon Station at the Kunlun Pass on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and the entire division was reorganized into an engineering unit.

Actually, this isn't strange; at the time, all units nationwide were digging holes for civil defense construction—various shelters, ammunition depots, strategic concealment, etc. —and almost no unit avoided digging. The difference was that our unit shifted from amateur digging to professional digging; our mission was top secret: to build a massive underground war readiness facility deep in the Kunlun Mountains. Although they never explicitly told the soldiers what the facility was for, anyone with a little sense could guess. The unit had confidentiality regulations, so nobody ever talked about it. There were also rumors that after completing this engineering task, we would be reassigned back into the field army's sequence.

The Kunlun Pass, also called Kunlun Fenkou, sits at an altitude of 4,767 meters. Geologically, it belongs to "permafrost desert landscape," formed by ancient strong corrosion of complex metamorphic rock. Our division, from top to bottom, knew nothing about civil engineering construction except how to dig trenches, so many engineers and technicians were sent to guide the work, giving the troops five months of intensive training. My squad served as an advance detachment, first heading south through the "Unfrozen Spring" into the deepest part of the vast Kunlun Mountains, tasked with finding a suitable concealed site for construction.

The Unfrozen Spring lies on the north bank of the Kunlun River, also called Kunlun Spring, its granite rim forming the pool walls; the clear spring water surges out year after year, never freezing even in the harshest winter, and nobody knows where the spring eye leads. Higher authorities issued orders forbidding soldiers from bathing there, because the local Tibetans regard the Unfrozen Spring as a holy spring and often worship its water. When Tibet was first liberated, the PLA entering Tibet passed through this place; before these regulations were issued, three soldiers bathed in the spring and all drowned in the spring eye, supposedly because the spring water contains large amounts of nitrosulfur; their graves lie not far from this station, and our squad's final supply point was also set there.

Finally entering the Kunlun Mountains, almost everyone suffered severe altitude sickness; faces turned purple from strain, vision blurred, and in our eyes it seemed as if hallucinations appeared—the endless ridges of the majestic Kunlun looked like silver-gray dragons rolling forward. Meanwhile, our detachment of over a dozen people seemed no more than a tiny ant in this boundless mountain range.

While marching, I recalled the book passed down from my grandfather, which said that the Kunlun peaks numbering five thousand are the ancestor of all dragon veins under heaven; within these ranges, since ancient times untold secrets have been buried, and it is said that the mausoleum of the heroic King Gesar of Tibetan legend and the gate to the demon realm are hidden among these undulating mountains.

(In Tibetan custom, sky burial is not the highest honor; the highest is pagoda burial.)