Traveling Back to the 1960s: The Entire Internet Teaches Me How to Build Missiles

Zhou Yunxiao quickly finished his cornbread, then went out to wash the aluminum lunchbox and rushed back to the dormitory.

He first poked the stove to make the fire burn brighter before opening the letter from his hometown while sitting around the warm stove.

Zhou Yunxiao glanced at the postmark on the envelope and realized that a month had passed since the letter was sent.

The address on the letter read "P.O. Box 20, Branch Office 27, Jincheng City," and the recipient was the recipient's own name.

Mailbox 20 is the external mailbox code for the Dongfeng Base, i.e., Base 20.

After all, everything here is confidential. Even a letter from home cannot be sent directly. Instead, it must be forwarded to this mailing address first, and then picked up by the comrades at the base post office.

Upon receiving the letter, the confidential department would open and inspect it to ensure there were no problems before it was sent to the recipient.

This has resulted in many comrades receiving letters from their hometowns after more than half a month has passed, making the timeliness very poor.

The only urgent way was to send a telegram, but that was charged by the word, even for a single punctuation mark, costing five cents.

Five cents is all it takes to make a bowl of rice!

So unless it's an extremely urgent matter, such as a relative being seriously ill, critically ill, or passing away, no one would be willing to send a telegram.

Therefore, whenever the post office notifies a comrade to pick up a telegram, people around him often cast sympathetic glances and pat him on the shoulder, saying "Please accept my condolences."

Zhou Yunxiao opened the envelope; inside were densely packed, delicate handwriting, clearly in the handwriting of his younger sister, Zhou Yunping:

[Dear Brother: It's been three years since you left home. Everything is fine back home, so don't worry. I received your letter a few days ago and learned that you're doing well at work, in good health, and have even become a proud member of the People's Liberation Army. Mom was very happy to hear that...]

My mom's back has been bothering her again lately. She said she didn't want to write to tell you, but I thought about it and decided to let you know anyway. I'm taking care of things at home...

The neighborhood committee recently gave us a copy of "The Barefoot Doctor's Handbook," and the medical techniques in it are amazing. I heard it was copied from Sultan, and I really admire the translator. I also want to be a useful person, so I plan to apply to a military medical university this year. Do you agree, brother?

I don't know if you can come back for Chinese New Year this year. If you can't, don't force yourself. I don't know what you're doing over there, brother. I guess you're building submarines? Or maybe airplanes? In any case, you must be contributing to Dongguo, doing something incredibly glorious! I'll take good care of Mom for you and wait for your triumphant return...

[Respectfully submitted by my younger sister.]

After reading the letter, Zhou Yunxiao sighed sadly.

If this letter had arrived a few days earlier, I might have softened my heart and gone to my superior to ask for leave to go home for the New Year.

But since everything's fine at home, let's focus on things at the base first.

Zhou Yunxiao took out a notebook from the drawer and wrote a reply to his sister.

Perhaps inheriting the will of the original owner of this body, he still had deep feelings for his mother and sister, and thus unconsciously wrote a lot of everyday words.

His family was considered a glorious family in the Yimeng old revolutionary base area. His father was a model of supporting the front line by pushing a wheelbarrow to transport the wounded in his early years. He later sacrificed his life on the battlefield, which earned Zhou Yunxiao a place to study at the Moscow Aviation Institute.

My mother is a textile factory worker, and my younger sister, Zhou Yunping, is five years younger than me and will be able to take the college entrance exam this year.

"Taking the college entrance exam is a major event in one's life, so I need to take good care of my health!"

Zhou Yunxiao plans to send more money home.

He now enjoys the rank of technical captain, with a basic monthly salary of 80 yuan, plus an 8 yuan hardship allowance for the Northwest region and a 10 yuan research staff grade allowance, bringing his total salary to 98 yuan.

The salary is pretty good.

However, Ye Ling called for support for the local people, so he also had to subscribe to 20 yuan of Jincheng's economic construction bonds every month, plus 15 yuan for canteen meals.

If you send some of the remaining money home...

Zhou Yunxiao did some calculations and realized that he only needed to keep a dozen yuan for himself, so he decided to send fifty yuan home.

After all, he wasn't sure if his sister was only reporting good news and not bad, but judging from the situation at Dongfeng Base, even the military rations were in such a state, things back home must be even worse!

Zhou Yunxiao then took stock of the tickets and certificates he had collected over this period of time.

Since becoming a citizen, he has been entitled to a monthly ration of 38 catties of grain, which consists of a 3:7 ratio of refined grains to coarse grains. In addition, he receives a standard ration of one catty of meat, one catty of soybeans, one catty of kelp, half a catty of oil, half a catty of eggs, and two liang of sugar, in addition to the rations for a technical captain.

Zhou Yunxiao himself was struggling financially, so he only had a few grain coupons, oil coupons, and sugar coupons to send home.

The only thing they had saved up was 16 feet of cloth ration coupons.

He then counted out thirty large black ten-yuan bills, put the three hundred yuan, along with these tickets and the Tongrentang plaster given to him by Comrade Xiao Su, into a net bag and tied it up.

Then, in the letter, she wrote down what she had sent, asked her sister to take her mother to the hospital to see a doctor about her back when she had time, and reminded her to bring the household registration booklet and not to forget anything.

Use the cloth coupons to make a new outfit for the New Year, and if there's any left over, make a new jacket for your mother too.

The grain coupons were all national grain coupons, which could be put in a drawer and saved up. We should prioritize spending the grain coupons that were about to expire at home, and take Mom out to eat something nice...

I've written a lot of rambling and rambling stuff.

Before he knew it, Zhou Yunxiao had written five pages. Only then did he reluctantly put down his pen and stretch.

Then I saw Jiang Weimin next to me holding a photo and grinning foolishly.

"What are you laughing at, kid?"

Zhou Yunxiao leaned closer and discovered a one-inch black and white photo tucked inside Lao Jiang's letter.

He chuckled in surprise, then cupped his hands in congratulations:

"Wow, Lao Jiang, your family actually found you a wife? She has thick eyebrows and big eyes; she looks like a lucky girl!"

The girl in the photo has short hair and is smiling shyly at the camera. She may not be a beautiful woman, but she looks like a down-to-earth and virtuous woman.

Jiang Weimin carefully tucked the photo into his small wallet, kissed it gently, and said proudly:

"My mother said in her letter that this girl is from the neighboring village, she's strong and hardworking, and we can get married when I go back, hehe!"

Zhou Yunxiao said with a pained expression, "It's so pitiful for the sisters in the Eight Great Hutongs. They can't marry a good man like Captain Jiang. Tsk tsk tsk."

"To hell with those prostitutes! I'm not cut out for them. Let's leave them to the comrades supporting the Northwest and the Great Northern Wilderness..."

Jiang Weimin, with a lovesick grin, said, "You're the one being so sour. If you're envious, just say so. You can't find a wife yourself, so you're always making fun of others. There are so many beautiful women in the art troupe who ask you to dance every day, but you don't even glance at them. Is there something wrong with you?"

"You son of a bitch, I'll pull this out and scare you to death!"

The two joked around in the dormitory for a while before packing up their things. Taking advantage of their day off, they quickly went to the post office to mail a letter and also sent money back to their hometown.

……

As winter deepens, the end of the lunar year is fast approaching.

As the Spring Festival of 1961 approached, Ye ordered Qin, the director of the logistics department, to go out and purchase New Year's goods.

After much begging, they finally managed to bring back a special trainload of Chinese cabbages, as well as scallions and dates from Jiaodong, soybeans from Northeast China, rice from Sichuan, yellow croaker from Shanghai, and ribbonfish from Zhoushan.

The hunting team also drove long distances every day to hunt gazelles. When the gazelles in the Gobi Desert were exhausted, they went on a detour to the Qilian Mountains and finally managed to bring back seventy or eighty gazelles.

In this way, on New Year's Eve, all the comrades in the base were finally able to enjoy a hot meal of cabbage and pork dumplings!

Although there were far more monks than meat, and the little flour available couldn't make many dumplings, it was just a drop in the ocean for tens of thousands of soldiers. But in those days, being able to eat meat was already a great blessing.

After the Spring Festival, the base began spring plowing in full swing.

The night school also opened three new classes, mainly teaching everyone how to grow crops. The teaching materials were all from materials that Zhou Yunxiao had translated before.

Everyone was eager and full of fighting spirit, as if they couldn't wait to plant crops in the fields and eat white flour buns tomorrow.

Just as spring was in full bloom, Ye Ling secretly notified some of his comrades to put down their hoes and shovels and immediately go to the office building for a meeting.

Zhou Yunxiao was one of them.

He arrived at Garrison No. 10 in a daze, and to his surprise, there seemed to be more than twice as many armed guards as usual at the headquarters building.

Before entering the building for the meeting, the guards searched everyone.

Their notebooks, pens, draft paper, and other personal belongings were confiscated and placed in a cardboard box at the entrance for safekeeping.

Zhou Yunxiao also saw an old acquaintance, Mu Chunsheng from the First Battalion of the First Launch Regiment, who, like him, knew nothing about the matter.

The two entered the building and saw a burly soldier standing every few steps down the corridor.

Captain Mu greeted one of the acquaintances, but the other man simply stood there expressionless with his gun, ignoring him.

"This is quite a big setup. What kind of meeting is this, making it so serious? There weren't this many sentries on duty when we mobilized for the Dongfeng-1 launch test mission, were there?"

Zhou Yunxiao asked curiously.

Mu Chunsheng shook his head. "Something big is definitely going to happen!"