Chapter 5 The Frozen Springs of Kangba Kunlun
In the spring of that year, the whole of China was under the cloud of war. The Soviet Union deployed three groups of armies totaling more than one million troops along China’s northern border, and China’s neighbor India also had constant friction with China’s border guards. The national army on the island saw this situation as an opportunity to take advantage of it, and prepared to counterattack, while the U.S. Seventh Fleet also entered into a state of war.
Chinese government executives felt the threat of international hostile forces, and constantly re-adjust the strategic deployment, military expansion, war preparations, deep digging holes, wide grain accumulation, the masses are actively carrying out nuclear defense, chemical defense, air raid prevention of the three defense drills.
When I went back to the city to visit my family, I was told that my parents’ problem would soon be clarified by the organization, which proved that my grandfather was not a landlord, but a middle peasant, so it was only a matter of time before they would be released, and at this time, due to the large number of conscripts in the People’s Liberation Army, an old comrade of my father’s had let me enlist as a “backdoor soldier”.
My father’s comrade-in-arms, Uncle Chen, is the chief of staff of the military division, when the Ninth Corps entered the war in North Korea, the ice and snow Gaima Plateau, more than 100,000 volunteers surrounded the U.S. Army’s most elite Marine Corps Division 1, the U.S. Army Aviation dropped a large number of aerial bombs, napalm bombs, the late-night sky are illuminated into the daytime, braving the U.S. Army’s steel curtain of bullets made up of fire barriers, the Volunteer Army, like a tidal wave, launched a wave after wave of The charge of the ……
In that brutal battle my father braved the low temperature of minus forty degrees to carry the seriously wounded Uncle Chen from the dead, and when they arrived at the ambulance, their bodies were frozen together by the blood on their bodies, and the nurses used scissors to cut through the flesh before they were separated. The friendship between them could no longer be measured by the words “life and death friendship”. Moreover, the historical problems of my parents were about to be solved, and it was now not difficult for a divisional chief of staff to arrange for the son of an old comrade to join the army. In a sense, it was in the army that the Chinese developed the habit of going through the back door first.
Uncle Chen asked me what kind of soldier I wanted to be, I said I wanted to be in the air force, I heard that pilots had good food. Uncle Chen laughed and gave me a brain adze: “Fighter which is so easy to open, you kid to me to the field army to go, good exercise for a few years, and so on to raise the dry, and then transfer you to the military district organs to work.” I said back to work in the organization even if it, I still willing to stay in the grass-roots troops, the office is not used to stay.
Want to go back to the Ganggang camp and small fat Yanzi they say goodbye, but the time is not allowed, wrote a letter to them, the heart felt quite upset, he went to the army as a soldier, leaving good friends in the ravine insertion, how to say a little bit can not be with the feeling of distress. But this kind of feeling I three months later there is no more, then I realized how comfortable in the mountains as a youth.
I was conscription office arranged to a soon-to-be-renovated for the armored division of the troops, I did not expect a mistake, just in the boot camp suffering three months, the Central Military Commission a paper order, this unit was transferred to the Tibetan Plateau of the Kunlun Mountain pass sixty-two Daoban military station, the whole division was reorganized into an engineering unit.
In fact, this incident is not surprising, the situation was the country’s troops are digging holes to engage in human defense construction, all kinds of holes, air defense, ammunition reserves, strategic concealment, etc., the whole army is almost no not digging holes in the army, the difference is that I was in the unit by amateur digging holes, transformed into professional digging holes, our mission is a level of secrecy, to build a huge underground battlefield facilities in the depths of the Kunlun Mountains, though The soldiers were not explicitly told the purpose of this facility, but anyone with a little bit of brains should be able to guess it. There are confidentiality regulations in the army, so people usually never talk about this matter. There were rumors that after completing this project, we would be returned to the field army.
Kunlun Mountain Pass, also known as the Kunlun Pass, 4767 meters above sea level, in terms of geology belongs to the “perennial permafrost desert landscape” is composed of ancient strongly corroded complex texture change rock, our division from top to bottom, in addition to digging trenches, on the civil engineering construction knows nothing about, so the troops sent a lot of engineers and technicians to guide the work. So the army sent a lot of engineers and technicians to guide the work and provide intensive training to the commanders for a period of five months, and one of my squads took the lead as the advance team to go south through the “Frozen Spring” into the deepest part of the vast Kunlun Mountains, and our task was to look for suitable hiding places for the construction.
The “Frozen Spring” is located on the north bank of the Kunlun River, also known as the Kunlun Spring, with granite slabs circling the walls of the pool, in which clear water gushes out non-stop for ten thousand years, and never freezes even during the harsh winters, and no one knows where the bottom of the spring leads to. The superior conveyed the discipline, ordered the soldiers not to bathe here, because the local Tibetans regarded the “Frozen Spring” as a sacred spring, often worshiping the spring. In the past, when Tibet was just liberated, the army into Tibet through this place, that time has not issued these rules, there are three soldiers in the spring bath, are drowned in the spring, the cause of death is said to be because the spring contains a lot of nitrate and sulfur, their graves are not far away from the military station, the last of our squad’s supply depot is also located there.
Finally entered the Kunlun Mountains, almost all the people have a serious plateau reaction, everyone’s face is suffocated purple, the eyes also become blurred, in our eyes seem to have hallucinations, the towering Kunlun’s thousands of hills and valleys, as a roll forward the silver gray dragon. And our small detachment of more than a dozen people appeared to be less than a tiny ant in the midst of this majestic and boundless mountain range.
On the way, I remembered the book passed down by my grandfather, which said that the five thousand peaks of the Kunlun Mountains are the ancestors of the world’s dragon veins, and these mountains from the ancient times until now, I do not know how many secrets are buried inside, and it is rumored that the mausoleum tower of the heroic king of the Tibetan myths and legends of King Gesar and the gate leading to the demonic kingdom are hidden in the undulating mountains.
(In the ancient Tibetan custom, sky burial is not the highest treatment, the highest specification is tower burial)