A Foot Soldier's Diary

It's been ten years since I left the army, and I haven't gone back to Daqing once.

It's not that I couldn't. Life just kept rushing forward, so fast I never thought to look back. Then, on New Year's Eve that year, a voice call came through our old army buddies' group chat. Cao Shuhao cursed at me from the other end: "Didn't you say you'd write a book about our own time in the army after you got out? What the hell happened to that?"

That's when I remembered I still had a debt to pay.

This book isn't about a war hero, special forces, or a comeback. It's about the new recruits in Fourth Squad of an ordinary combat engineer company: six ordinary people, and how over two years they ate, folded their blankets, sneaked cigarettes, took punishment, competed with each other, and entrusted their lives to one another on forced marches.

There was a chubby guy named Cao Shuhao who had to ask permission to fart and hid cigarettes beneath his mattress, until the squad leader punched him into the bed frame. There was a soldier from Anhui named Ming Bingyu: neat, aloof, and always hungry. He was the first to be discharged, but came back later. There was a squad leader surnamed Jiang, barely five foot three. Nobody chose him as squad leader, but he became someone I remembered for the rest of my life.

I'm no great writer. Everything I've written is true. I kept five notebooks of diaries, untouched for ten years after leaving the army. Now I'm finally writing, and I'll see where it takes me.

You ask what the army is like. I can't explain it. Open the book and see for yourself.