At eighteen, Shen Jian entered the military with all his rebellious swagger. He thought he was just there to kill a couple of years, never realizing that the moment he crossed the gate, his life would change forever.
In recruit training, squad leader Zhao Dashan smacked him on the back of the head in front of everyone. When he couldn’t fold his bedding properly, he was hauled outside for extra drills in the middle of the night. He threw up during the five-kilometer run, then kept running. He scored the highest in his platoon in live-fire marksmanship, and pushed his time on the 400-meter obstacle course from four minutes and twenty seconds down to two minutes and twenty-eight. Three months later, he had been put through the wringer and finally looked like a soldier.
In the reconnaissance company, he learned what a true top performer looked like. If he couldn’t get over a three-meter wall, he practiced fifty times. If he couldn’t climb out of a pit, he kept at it until his legs gave out. He pushed his five-kilometer time from the passing mark of twenty-two minutes down to eighteen. He and Ma Dajun and Gouzi, the two brothers who had come up with him from recruit training, leaned on one another through the toughest times.
The special forces selection took just twenty candidates from a hundred top reconnaissance soldiers. For seven days and seven nights during Hell Week, they went without sleep, carrying logs and wounded men, enduring hunger and interrogation. Again and again, he thought he couldn’t go on, and again and again, he got back up. The day he put on the special forces insignia, he cried.
During a border counternarcotics operation, he killed a man for the first time. His comrade Liu Chuang died in his arms, and he ran five kilometers carrying his body. While pursuing the man responsible, he considered killing him with a single shot, but ultimately chose to take him alive. A First-Class Merit Medal could never bring his brother back, but he remembered Liu Chuang’s words: “Don’t become like them.”
At an international competition, he represented China and won the individual all-around championship. As the five-star red flag rose, he said to himself: Brothers, we won.
After twenty years in the military, he went from a rebellious recruit to
