I guard this word “comrade” like an Asian girl guards her chastity, not giving it easily to others.
We were strangers before the war, and after the war, I barely contacted you. I once sent a letter to the US address Pastor Billy left me, but it was returned after a few months. I didn’t understand why until today. Five years later, at an annual meeting of the American instructors, we remembered old times in Yuehu, talking of Buffalo, Snot, and Liu Zhaohu. When I got back to the hotel that night, I was a little emotional. I couldn’t help writing a letter to Liu Zhaohu. I thought it would probably just sink into the sea, because the country was going through a major transformation. After that, I didn’t try to contact either of you, and I didn’t get news about either of you for the rest of my life.
Although our time together was short, I still call you my comrades.
I was an instructor back then. Liu Zhaohu, you were a student in my class. According to your culture’s tradition of giving teachers great respect, there was a clear hierarchy that separated us. Even so, out on assignment, all hierarchies were meaningless, because our lives hung on the same fragile rope. You held one end of it, and I held the other. Your loss was my loss, and mine, yours. We could live together, or we could die together at any moment. So we always had to look out for each other.
I remember that night march. We walked on a mountain road so dark, we couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces. Fearing an ambush, we couldn’t smoke, and we had to be silent. When you tapped me lightly on the shoulder, I knew I was standing on the edge of danger. This was your native land, your mountain road, and you knew secrets about the terrain that I didn’t. One coded signal from you saved my life. Had I taken another step, I would’ve fallen into the abyss and shattered every bone in my body. I put my life in your hands, an unparalleled trust. That’s why you are my comrades, and they aren’t.
Another time, we got reliable intel on a convoy of Japanese transporting military supplies. According to the source, it would cross the train tracks two nights later, just a little over fifty-five miles from our position. We marched hard to reach it in time and set up an ambush. The Japanese transport had seen plenty of ambushes and knew how to deal with them. They put an empty car at the front, in case of attack, while the cars at the rear contained the actual cargo. They’d stretched their front lines too far, and the supply lines couldn’t keep up.
In fact, our luck wasn’t much better than theirs. After several attempts, we still hadn’t managed to hit the target. We even lost a few Chinese trainees. Instead of sending men to ambush them, we decided to use a new explosive. The first time we tested this new weapon, it was you who controlled it, Liu Zhaohu. You held the detonator, waiting for me to calculate the timing and distance of the detonation. My eye was crucial, not just in figuring whether the target could be hit but also whether the person detonating the device could withdraw safely. It was a special skill of mine, as a first-class American armorer.
When I first became your instructor, no one was interested in remote or timed explosives. You all preferred close-range weapons, like grenades. You wanted to see the immediate effects of bodies blown to pieces. A victory that you hadn’t seen with your own eyes couldn’t be a real victory, just as a life that didn’t dare to risk everything couldn’t be called a life. I was like a chisel, patiently chipping away, an inch at a time, at your stubborn way of thinking. I told you that if a specially trained soldier was sacrificed, it was a huge waste of manpower and material resources. Only by staying alive could you destroy the enemy, so any action plan that didn’t include safe evacuation wasn’t worth trying. You dismissed my advice and made me out to be a coward, afraid to die. My view was eventually accepted, but that was later, after you’d tasted the sweetness of large-scale lethality that such special technology held.
That day we tested it, Liu Zhaohu, you squatted beside me, waiting on my eye. You put your life in my hands without reservation, because I was your comrade.
And Pastor Billy, even though you didn’t wear our tan uniform, and though you didn’t see action with us, I still call you comrade. We called you Basketball Billy and Pastor Billy, but you didn’t know we had another nickname for you: Crazy Billy. Because you weren’t the sort of pastor we were used to, the kind who was all fire and brimstone and the wrath of God at the drop of a hat. You wore a tunic like the locals and rode a dilapidated old bicycle, sweeping back and forth between your church and camp. Afraid the hem would catch in the bike’s wheel, you pulled up the end and tucked it into your waistband while you rode. Your hair, which had already begun to thin, looked like a dandelion in full bloom, blown by the wind. Your bike didn’t have hand brakes, so you had to pedal backward to stop. That was how you traveled the mountain road, switching between pedaling forward and backward. You were a pastor and also practiced medicine, so all day all sorts of people came in and out of your church, including teachers, butchers, tea farmers, weavers, and even tramps. In your circle of acquaintances, there could’ve been someone whose wife’s brother was a cook at a big restaurant in the county town frequented by members of various secret societies and who knows how many other gangsters and tobacco dealers. Maybe there was also somebody’s aunt, a cook for a certain Japanese defense officer, who might inadvertently overhear a few words of a conversation while carrying in a bowl of soup or a cup of tea. And maybe there was someone whose son studied at a school in the city, and his roommate was the son of an officer in the puppet government who bragged incessantly. Your nose was as sharp as a dog’s and your tongue as sleek as a snake’s. You put both to use in picking up all sorts of information from these people, then pedaling forward and backward to bring it to our intelligence officers. This often got our timed explosives in the right place at the right time.
Old Miles (though he was only in his forties then) said over and over that our safety depended on our relationship with the locals. “If he has the trust and protection of the Chinese people, a person can move through the place as he pleases.” This was the experience he summed up for us. As an American who’d lived here more than ten years, you warned us that Americans must not only avoid offending locals but also learn to blend in with them. You taught us to wear Chinese tunics, strap our trouser legs, and put sandals on over our socks (we weren’t used to going around barefoot). You said that, on average, we were much taller than the Chinese people, so if we wanted to be unobtrusive, we had to learn to walk with an appropriate posture. What most gave us away was our gait and the way we sat. You repeatedly told us that we should keep the center of gravity low and our legs always bent. You told us to carry baskets on poles, like the locals did, and not use rice, sweet potatoes, or mung beans to hide what we carried, since these were too heavy and the weight of a full basket would be too much while a half-empty basket would raise suspicion. The best thing for us to carry were cowpeas. Once they were dried, cowpeas were light and could fill a whole basket, leaving plenty of room. This made them ideal for hiding small weapons, and it was easy to get the weapons out of them. You even gave us Atabrine to take, which cured malaria and would turn our skin a bit yellow, closer to that of the local people. Your suggestion annoyed our resident medical officer, but a few cups of rice wine calmed him down, and you finally got him to support your idea.