Siheyuan (traditional courtyard house): Starting with the Korean War, returning home to take charge

Forced march. The two words sound efficient, but you only know what it feels like when you actually start marching.

My feet went from burning hot to numb, until finally they went numb, and I just mechanically lifted and lowered them. The things on my back—gun, bullets, frozen potatoes, tattered blankets—grew heavier and heavier, as if they were trying to nail me into this frozen earth. My throat was parched, and the white breath I exhaled was immediately swept away by the knife-like north wind.

The road was no longer a road. Shell craters piled upon shell craters, the churned frozen soil as hard as iron, its edges covered with ice. A charred skeleton of a truck lay askew in the ditch, tires gone, its sheet metal blackened and curled. Scattered objects occasionally caught the eye: a rubber shoe of indistinguishable color, half a deflated water bottle, a tattered piece of military uniform frozen in the mud and ice, with a blurred unit number printed on it.

This is just the beginning.

The further they went, the more they saw. The ruins of houses appeared on both sides of the road—actually, only a few sections of blackened mud walls remained, standing precariously, the roofs long gone. Broken tiles, charred beams, and shattered furniture were scattered everywhere. He Yuzhu saw them as they passed a small village that had been almost completely flattened.

Behind several collapsed mud walls lay several corpses. They weren't soldiers, but civilians, dressed in tattered white clothes, frozen stiff, their bodies curled up or outstretched, covered with a thin layer of snow. A very small child lay nearby, a tiny, charred hand reaching towards the sky.

He Yuzhu looked away.

Suppressed retching sounds and the clattering of teeth came from behind. The recruits' faces were deathly pale in the dust and cold. Wang Dazhuang walked slightly behind them, his breathing heavy and rapid, his eyes fixed on the backpack of the person in front of him, not daring to look to either side.

On the reconnaissance map, the dot representing Sun Ba fluctuated wildly—unlike the others which only flickered slowly and wearily, his dot was bright and dim, jumping around in a way that was irritating.

The column moved silently through the ruins. Only the sound of footsteps, heavy breathing, and the officer's hushed urging could be heard. Besides the smoke and acrid smells, there was another odor in the air, thicker and more somber. No one said what it was, but everyone smelled it.

Reaching a sheltered ravine, the order to rest finally came. People collapsed onto the cold ground, as if their bones had been removed, too exhausted even to unload their backpacks. No one spoke, only the labored breathing of bellows filled the air.

He Yuzhu sat down against a rock, took out a frozen potato from his pocket, and struggled to bite into it. It was as hard as a rock; he could only hold it in his mouth and slowly warm it up, grinding off some icy powder, which he swallowed, making his throat ache. He glanced at the tear in his cotton coat on his back; cold wind was pouring in, and that patch of skin was already numb with cold.

We need to find a way. Otherwise, we'll collapse before we even see the enemy.

In the dead silence of the rest, a sob suddenly burst forth, which then turned into an uncontrollable, desperate wail.

It's Sun Ba.

He collapsed to the ground, clutching his head, his shoulders convulsing violently, tears and snot streaming down his face, his voice hoarse and distorted: "What the hell is this place... hell! I want to go home... I quit! Let me go back!"

The cries were like stones thrown into an icy lake. The eyes of several new recruits around them began to glaze over, and some began to sob quietly. Despair spread like a plague.

The platoon leader's expression changed, and he was about to reprimand him—

He Yuzhu moved even faster.

He threw the frozen potato on the ground, took two steps to Sun Ba, grabbed his cotton coat collar with his left hand and lifted him up sharply, and slammed his right fist into his stomach!

"Ugh!" The wailing stopped abruptly. Sun Ba curled up like a shrimp, groaning in pain.

He Yuzhu didn't let go, his face almost touching his face, his voice squeezed out through clenched teeth, each word hammered in:

"Home? Which home do you want to go back to?"

His free right hand suddenly pointed towards the village ruins—though unseen, the image was etched into everyone's mind.

"Look at both sides of the road! Look behind the wall! Look at those outstretched hands!"

"That was the home of ordinary North Koreans! What is it now?"

The hand gripping his collar tightened even more. Sun Ba rolled his eyes.

"American planes and artillery have turned their homes into graveyards and shredded the living into pieces! What you've seen today—if we back down now, where will the next bombs fall?"

He stared at Sun Ba's contorted face, his voice carrying an almost cruel clarity:

"It will fall in the Northeast! It will fall in Andong! It will fall on our doorstep! It will fall on your father, mother, brothers, and sisters!"

"You think you're living in North Korea's hell?"

He suddenly slammed Sun Ba to the ground. Sun Ba lay there, clutching his stomach and coughing violently.

"Let me tell you," He Yuzhu straightened up, his gaze sweeping over every pale, evasive face around him, including Wang Dazhuang who was biting his lip, "we traveled thousands of miles here, wearing only thin clothes, eating frozen potatoes, rubbing our feet raw, risking our lives, why?"

He paused, and the cold wind whipped up the tattered cotton-padded coat.

"Just so that this road, this river, will become an insurmountable wall for them!"

"So that what you just saw will never happen in our own area!"

"Now, you're saying you want to go home?"

He Yuzhu glanced one last time at the curled-up Sun Ba, his eyes filled with cold contempt, not anger.

"Okay. Only when we're done fighting and come back alive can we truly say we're going home."

"Right now, you're just a soldier. Either pick up a gun and drive out the bastards who're creating hell, or die here and become a disgusting thing on the street."

"Choose for yourself."

After saying that, he stopped looking at Sun Ba, walked back to his original spot, picked up the frozen potato covered in dirt, patted it off, and continued to eat it expressionlessly.

The entire valley was deathly silent. Only the sound of the wind and Sun Ba's suppressed sobs could be heard.

But that pervasive despair was brutally torn open by He Yuzhu's harsh words. The new recruits looked at his straight back under his tattered cotton coat, at the way he calmly ate a potato, and the unfocused look in their eyes slowly returned—the fear was suppressed, replaced by numbness, resignation, and perhaps a little bit of forced ruthlessness.

Footsteps approached.

Li, with a dark face, walked over. He glanced at Sun Ba on the ground and then looked at He Yuzhu.

"He Weiguo".

"Here." He Yuzhu stood up.

Dark-faced Li didn't comment on his previous words, only coldly saying, "What you said makes sense." He turned to the crowd, his voice not loud, but like a hammer striking frozen ground:

"Did you all hear that? This is the battlefield. It's not a threshing ground at the village entrance, nor is it a training camp platform."

"Here, mercy is a luxury, being soft-hearted is suicide, and being cowardly—" He paused, his sharp gaze sweeping across every face, "is like handing a knife to the enemy, stabbing yourself and the brothers next to you in the back."

He waved to the side: "Sun Ba, you've undermined morale. Put him in solitary confinement. We'll talk about it when we get to the garrison."

Two veterans stepped forward and helped the limp Sun Ba up.

Li, with a dark face, glanced at He Yuzhu one last time, his eyes filled with complex emotions. He didn't say anything more and turned to leave.

The team regrouped and continued forward.

The atmosphere was different. The silence remained, but the previous despair and dissipation had been replaced by something heavier and more tense. It was as if something had been forcibly forged in a furnace of fear, rough and cracked, but finally taking shape.

As He Yuzhu walked in the queue, the wind blowing in from the gap behind him didn't seem so biting anymore.

Some things must be said. Some boils must be popped.

The war has only just begun.

First, you have to harden your heart.