Bloodstained Secret War: The Lao Shan Heroes

In 1984, eighty-seven young men entered Laoshan.

Liu Yun Feng, Ge Qing Tian, Zhang Chang Ming, Li Zheng Heng, Chen Er Wa... They had names, parents, fiancées they hadn't married, and newborn babies. They crawled through the forests of Bali River for 187 days. When food ran out, they chewed tree bark. When wounded, they cut away flesh with red-hot bayonets. When surrounded, they squeezed into a cave and waited for daylight. Of the eighty-seven, only three emerged from the cave, leaning on one another, barely recognizable as human.

In 2025, the last survivor returned to Malipo. The kapok trees along the Panlong River were in bloom, a sea of brilliant red. He touched the names on the tombstones, reciting them one by one. Someone was singing in the wind, still that same song, “The Elegance of Blood.”

This book is about eighty-seven young men who left their lives in that forest. They traded their lives for intelligence, for the assault on Laoshan's main peak, and to defend their homes and country.

Forty years have passed. The one who lives on lives for them; the ones who died remain forever seventeen. Every year, when the kapok trees bloom, they blaze red, like the blood that never stopped flowing on the battlefield that year, and like the faces lit up with laughter there.