Chapter 13 Leaving the Army

As Churchill said, there are no eternal friends and enemies in the world, only eternal interests.

In 1969 due to the needs of the international situation, my unit was sent to the depths of the Kunlun Mountains construction, due to the environment is too harsh, so that the progress of the project beyond the expected slow, three years, there are dozens of commanders and fighters died on the construction site, however, we are building this military facility has just completed two-thirds.

At this time, the world situation is reshuffled, seventy-two years Nixon visited China, China-US relations thawed. China’s strategic deployment, re-adjusted on a large scale, the project in the Kunlun Mountains was stopped, we halfway out of these engineers, are organized back into the field army combat sequence, under the Lanzhou Military Region.

Day after day, year after year of training, drill, maneuvers, study, evaluation. Life in the barracks is not only monotonous, but also grueling. After a few more years, * ended, the Party Central Committee in a timely manner, the Gang of Four was crushed, a whole decade after the catastrophe, the social order finally returned to normal.

But the army is a special environment disconnected from society, I didn’t feel any great changes in the barracks, except that I didn’t need to read Chairman Mao’s quotations as soon as we met as in the past, but whenever there were new recruits entering the battalion, it was still necessary to educate them about the revolution.

That morning, I had just returned from a meeting at the battalion headquarters, when correspondent Xiao Liu came panting over, “Reporting to the company commander, a platoon of new recruits came to report today, but the instructor went to the military district to study, so I’d like to ask you to go and give the new recruits a lecture on the revolution and traditions.”

Lecturing on revolution and tradition is actually telling the recruits about the history of the company. I’m really an amateur at this, but at least I’m now the head of a company, and the instructor isn’t at home, so I have to tough it out.

I took the more than thirty new recruits into the company’s honor showroom, pointing to a banner embroidered with the words of the Heroic Company of Stabbing, told them that this is in the Battle of Huaihai, our predecessors in the Sixth Company of the honors, this title has been retained to this day, I put the grueling battle through the oil and vinegar said once again, our Sixth Company is how the bayonet to see the red, but also how in the case of running out of ammunition and food, the bayonet fought back the Kuomintang counter-insurgency, the company’s history. bayonets repelled the frantic attack of an entire regiment of Kuomintang reactionaries, and honorably completed the blocking mission set by our superiors.

Then I pointed to a black broken iron pot in the glass cabinet and told the new recruits: “Comrades, you can not underestimate this broken pot, yo, when in the battlefield of Huaihai Campaign, our six companies of the revolutionary predecessors, is to eat pork stewed vermicelli burned out of this broken pot, to go to the battlefield to kill the enemy and make a success. You see, the cracks on this pot were blown apart by the reactionary artillery fire of the Kuomintang reactionaries, and to this day, it is still silently telling of the deeds of the heroes and the bestial behavior of the reactionaries.”

That’s all I can say, after all, I’m not professionally in charge of catching ideological work, but I think I can speak quite well, and it’s more than enough to blindside these new recruits.

I let the recruits dismissed to eat in the cafeteria, himself and Xiao Liu walked behind them, I asked Xiao Liu: “Just now the company commander of the revolution and traditions, how is the level of speech?”

Xiao Liu said: “Aiya, the company commander, speak of the thief good ah, listen to me straight streaming lah, our company when to learn from the martyrs of the revolution, improve food, also eat back to the pork stewed vermicelli son ah?”

I swallowed my saliva, popped Xiao Liu a brain adze: “Revolutionary tradition half did not hear, light fucking hear pork stewed vermicelli son, quickly go to me to the canteen to play food to go, today’s canteen seems to eat buns, to go late to let those new recruits grabbed no. I order you to run forward. I order you, run forward.”

Xiao Liu promised and threw off his big stride to storm towards the cafeteria, I suddenly remembered that I forgot to instruct him on the most important sentence and hurriedly shouted after me, “Pick me a few stuffed ones ah!”

I lie on the bed, eating buns, while looking at my family just sent a letter, everything is fine at home, did not mention anything important. Read the letter twice and put it aside, picked up the remnants of my family’s ancestral book, some years ago those few experiences, so that I have a great interest in the study of feng shui, free time to take out to flip through.

As the book mentioned a lot of five elements gossip and other terms, such as what the East A B wood, the South C D fire, the center of the E has earth, the West Geng Xin Jin, the North Nong Dui water, what dry, Kan, Burgundy, Zhen, Kun, Dui, away from the un and so on, more than one place, over the years, I looked for a lot of related books to look through, although the cultural level of the limited, but still be able to cope with the understanding of the three or four percent.

Sixteen words yin and yang feng shui secret art of these sixteen words, respectively: heaven, earth, people, ghosts, gods, Buddha, demons, animals, deterrence, town, recluse, things, chemistry, yin, yang, empty.

This book I do not know what age, I do not know from whom, just the contents of the very deep, Fu Xi gossip sixty-four changes, in fact, should be sixteen hexagrams, passed to the Yin Shang period, because the sixteen hexagrams leaked, by the gods wiped out half of them, even the rest of the number of hexagrams of this gossip is not complete. But can know one or two points of the people, has been extremely powerful, think that Zhuge Kongming, know a little, can keep Liu Bei tent, tripod world, Liu Bowen will only solve three, will assist Zhu Hongwu built four hundred years of the foundation of the Ming dynasty. But these I don’t believe it, really can have so evil call?

The only regret is that this book, only about feng shui five elements of the tomb layout structure of half of the book, the other half of the number of yin and yang gossip Taiji from the time of transmission to my grandfather’s hands, has not been. The remnants of the book read, some of the content is not coherent, and the text is obscure and difficult to understand, it is difficult to glimpse its deep meaning. I thought it would be easier to understand if it was the full book.

Suddenly a three-long and three-short assembly call sounded, cutting through the quiet air in the barracks, and my first thought was, “Something must have happened, and for no reason would never be an emergency assembly of the whole battalion in broad daylight.” I stuffed all the remaining two buns into my mouth, bounced up from the bed and rushed out the door.

A column of columns lined up neatly, and I saw that not only our battalion was assembling, but the entire regiment was assembled. I’m not qualified to know what kind of action, only to obey the order to listen to the part of the command, we received the order is to go to the train station to standby, followed by the brother troop with the departure.

People over 10,000, like a mountain like a sea, in the military train station, crowded with tens of thousands of soldiers, from a distance as a green tide, it looks like the whole division was mobilized, at that time a division are mobilized that is not ah, like our main division is very large, under the three infantry regiments, in addition to a regiment of artillery, a tank regiment, plus the division’s organs of the logistical forces, almost have more than 20,000 people. There are more than 20,000 people in the division. What exactly is such a large-scale operation going to do? I don’t think it’s for disaster relief. I haven’t heard of any disaster in the neighborhood lately.

We were pulled to the Yunnan border in a confused manner by iron tank cars, and only then did everyone realize that this was going to be a war, and many people cried at that time…….

At the same time, the * is visiting the U.S. in the White House said shocking: “Children do not listen to the words, it is time to spank.” And openly admitted that Chinese troops were massing on the China-Vietnam border.

In the early morning hours of February 17, the entire 220,000-strong PLA of 17 divisions attacked, fighting all the way to Lang Son, and on March 4 China announced its withdrawal.

My company was the main division of the sharp knife company, bore the brunt of the ten days of fighting down casualties more than half, another march, we were ambushed by the Vietnamese agents, they used women holding children as a cover, threw zha medicine packets into our armored personnel carriers, eight soldiers under my command, were blown up in the armored car. At that time, my eyes went red, killing three and capturing alive the remaining two Vietnamese militiamen, one old and one young.

They were an old Vietnamese man in his fifties and a Vietnamese woman in her twenties, and it looked like they were a father and daughter. One of my men told me that the woman disguised the zha packets as babies in her arms and threw the zha packets into the armored car as it passed by. Definitely looked good. She did it.

My greatest fear is to watch my comrades die in front of me, and in a fit of rage, I forget all about the Three Disciplines and Eight Points of Attention as well as our army’s policy of treating prisoners. I had someone take a zha medicine bag and tie it under the Vietnamese woman’s buttocks and put her in a dirt plane. And I tied the old man up tightly and threw him off a cliff into a minefield.

This incident was a serious violation of troop discipline, and even alerted General Xu of the command. If not for my family in the military region has a very deep background, would have been sent to the court martial, my military career was forced to end, with a piece of paper demobilization order, back home.