Zhang Yingcai, Republic Champion and Nine-Time First-Class Merit Recipient

[Based on a True Story: An Epic of a Republic's War Hero]

Nine first-class extraordinary merits, three titles of first-class combat hero, the only one among four million members of the People's Liberation Army!

He began as a village boy tending cattle in rural Shanxi. He joined the Eighth Route Army at fifteen and fought his way through a hail of bullets, rising from soldier to company commander, battalion commander, and general. He fought through the entire War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the War of Liberation, and the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea.

During the breakout at Fomiaoling, out of ammunition and food, he pulled the pin on a grenade and fought ten times his number of Japanese troops, surviving against all odds;

In the Shangdang Campaign, he led the Ninth Company in defending North Pass to the death, earning the unit its fearsome reputation as the "Iron Ninth Company";

At Dongyang Village in Lüliang, thirty men penetrated deep into the enemy division's territory. Attacked from three sides, they fought for four hours and held out until reinforcements arrived, earning him his first first-class extraordinary merit;

On the Huaihai battlefield, five hundred men took on more than twenty thousand enemy troops, an entire division. The Xiaozhangzhuang position pinned down Huang Wei's corps. They repelled all nineteen assaults, forging an "Iron Battalion" in a single battle and killing enemy division commander Xiong Shouchun. A blocking action became an annihilation campaign;

During the suppression of bandits in the southwest, he led his troops on a thousand-mile pursuit and captured enemy Lieutenant General Tang Yao alive;

In the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea, he crossed the Yalu River and earned further distinction in the hell of artillery and fire.

He fought in over a hundred battles and never suffered a single serious wound, from the foot of the Taihang Mountains to the Korean Peninsula, from the flames of resistance to the dawn of peace.

He was Zhang Yingcai, a god of war for the Republic who rose through the ranks with his rifle.

"Even if I die, I'll fall facing forward. I will never be taken prisoner!"

One rifle, a body of iron, a lifetime on the battlefield: he forged an undying military spirit for the Republic!