{"product_id":"war-trash-isbn-9781400075799","title":"War Trash","description":"Ha Jin’s masterful new novel casts a searchlight into a forgotten corner of modern history, the experience of Chinese soldiers held in U.S. POW camps during the Korean War. In 1951 Yu Yuan, a scholarly and self-effacing clerical officer in Mao’s “volunteer” army, is taken prisoner south of the 38th Parallel. Because he speaks English, he soon becomes an intermediary between his compatriots and their American captors.With Yuan as guide, we are ushered into the secret world behind the barbed wire, a world where kindness alternates with blinding cruelty and one has infinitely more to fear from one’s fellow prisoners than from the guards. Vivid in its historical detail, profound in its imaginative empathy, \u003cb\u003eWar Trash\u003c\/b\u003e is Ha Jin’s most ambitious book to date.\u003cp\u003e“Powerfully moving. . . . Brilliant and original. . . . Timeless and universal. .  . . Nearly perfect.” —Russell Banks, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“A powerful  work of the imagination.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Startingly seductive.... A work  of profound humanism.” —\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Haunting. . . .  Deeply moving.  . . . [Ha Jin] holds our attention like a whisper.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Christian Science Monitor\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eHa Jin\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003eleft his native China in 1985 to attend Brandeis University. He is the author of the internationally bestselling novel \u003cb\u003eWaiting\u003c\/b\u003e, which won the PEN\/Faulkner Award and the National Book Award, and \u003cb\u003eWar Trash\u003c\/b\u003e, which won the PEN\/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize; the story collections \u003cb\u003eThe Bridegroom\u003c\/b\u003e, which won the Asian American Literary Award, \u003cb\u003eUnder the Red Flag\u003c\/b\u003e, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and \u003cb\u003eOcean of Words\u003c\/b\u003e, which won the PEN\/Hemingway Award; the novels \u003cb\u003eThe Crazed\u003c\/b\u003e and \u003cb\u003eIn the Pond\u003c\/b\u003e; and three books of poetry. His latest novel,\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eA Free Life\u003c\/b\u003e is his first novel set in the United States. He lives in the Boston area and is a professor of English at Boston University.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWar Trash\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003cb\u003eThe Crazed\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003cb\u003eThe Bridegroom\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003cb\u003eWaiting\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003cb\u003eIn the Pond\u003c\/b\u003e, and \u003cb\u003eOcean of Words\u003c\/b\u003e are available in paperback from Vintage Books.Before the Communists came to power in 1949, I was a sophomore at the  Huangpu Military Academy, majoring in political education. The  school, at that time based in Chengdu, the capital of Szechuan  Province, had played a vital part in the Nationalist regime. Chiang  Kai-shek had once been its principal, and many of his generals had  graduated from it. In some ways, the role of the Huangpu in the  Nationalist army was like that of West Point in the American military.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe cadets at the Huangpu had been disgusted with the corruption of  the Nationalists, so they readily surrendered to the People's  Liberation Army when the Communists arrived. The new government  disbanded our academy and turned it into a part of the Southwestern  University of Military and Political Sciences. We were encouraged to  continue our studies and prepare ourselves to serve the new China.  The Communists promised to treat us fairly, without any  discrimination. Unlike most of my fellow students who specialized in  military science, however, I dared not raise my hopes very high,  because the political courses I had taken in the old academy were of  no use to the People's Liberation Army. I was more likely to be  viewed as a backward case, if not a reactionary. At the university,  established mainly for reindoctrinating the former Nationalist  officers and cadets, we were taught the basic ideas of Marx, Lenin,  Stalin, and Mao Zedong, and we had to write out our personal  histories, confess our wrongdoings, and engage in self- and mutual  criticism. A few stubborn officers from the old army wouldn't  relinquish their former outlook and were punished in the reeducation  program-they were imprisoned in a small house at the northeastern  corner of our campus. But since I had never resisted the Communists,  I felt relatively safe. I didn't learn much in the new school except  for some principles of the proletarian revolution.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt graduation the next fall, I was assigned to the 180th Division of  the People's Liberation Army, a unit noted for its battle  achievements in the war against the Japanese invaders and in the  civil war. I was happy because I started as a junior officer at its  headquarters garrisoned in Chengdu City, where my mother was living.  My father had passed away three years before, and my assignment would  enable me to take care of my mother. Besides, I had just become  engaged to a girl, a student of fine arts at Szechuan Teachers  College, majoring in choreography. Her name was Tao Julan, and she  lived in the same city. We planned to get married the next year,  preferably in the fall after she graduated. In every direction I  turned, life seemed to smile upon me. It was as if all the shadows  were lifting. The Communists had brought order to our country and  hope to the common people. I had never been so cheerful.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThree times a week I had to attend political study sessions. We read  and discussed documents issued by the Central Committee and writings  by Stalin and Chairman Mao, such as The History of the Communist  Party of the Soviet Union, On the People's Democratic Dictatorship,  and On the Protracted War. Because about half of our division was  composed of men from the Nationalist army, including hundreds of  officers, the study sessions felt like a formality and didn't bother  me much. The commissar of the Eighteenth Army Group, Hu Yaobang, who  thirty years later became the Secretary of the Chinese Communist  Party, even declared at a meeting that our division would never leave  Szechuan and that from now on we must devote ourselves to rebuilding  our country. I felt grateful to the Communists, who seemed finally to  have brought peace to our war-battered land.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThen the situation changed. Three weeks before the Spring Festival of  1951, we received orders to move to Hebei, a barren province adjacent  to Manchuria, where we would prepare to enter Korea. This came as a  surprise, because we were a poorly equipped division and the Korean  War had been so far away that we hadn't expected to participate. I  wanted to have a photograph taken with my fiance before I departed,  but I couldn't find the time, so we just exchanged snapshots. She  promised to care for my mother while I was gone. My mother wept,  telling me to obey orders and fight bravely, and saying, \"I won't  close my eyes without seeing you back, my son.\" I promised her that I  would return, although in the back of my mind lingered the fear that  I might fall on a battlefield.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJulan wasn't a pretty girl, but she was even-tempered and had a fine  figure, a born dancer with long, supple limbs. She wore a pair of  thick braids, and her clear eyes were innocently vivid. When she  smiled, her straight teeth would flash. It was her radiant smile that  had caught my heart. She was terribly upset by my imminent departure,  but accepted our separation as a necessary sacrifice for our  motherland. To most Chinese, it was obvious that MacArthur's army  intended to cross the Yalu River and seize Manchuria, the Northeast  of China. As a serviceman I was obligated to go to the front and  defend our country. Julan understood this, and in public she even  took pride in me, though in private she often shed tears. I tried to  comfort her, saying, \"Don't worry. I'll be back in a year or two.\" We  promised to wait for each other. She broke her jade barrette and gave  me a half as a pledge of her love.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAfter a four-day train ride, our division arrived at a villagelike  town named Potou, in Cang County, Hebei Province. There we shed our  assorted old weapons and were armed with burp guns and artillery  pieces made in Russia. From now on all our equipment had to be  standardized. Without delay we began to learn how to use the new  weapons. The instructions were only in Russian, but nobody in our  division understood the Cyrillic alphabet. Some units complained that  they couldn't figure out how to operate the antiaircraft machine guns  effectively. Who could help them? They asked around but didn't find  any guidance. As a last resort, the commissar of our division, Pei  Shan, consulted a Russian military attache who could speak Chinese  and who happened to share a table with Pei at a state dinner held in  Tianjin City, but the Russian officer couldn't help us either. So the  soldiers were ordered: \"Learn to master your weapons through using  them.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs a clerical officer, I was given a brand-new Russian pistol to  replace my German Mauser. This change didn't bother me. Unlike the  enlisted men, I didn't have to go to the drill with my new handgun.  By now I had realized that my appointment at the headquarters of the  180th Division might be a part of a large plan-I knew some English  and could be useful in fighting the Americans. Probably our division  had been under consideration for being sent into battle for quite a  while. Before we left Szechuan, Commissar Pei had told me to bring  along an English-Chinese dictionary. He said amiably, \"Keep it handy,  Comrade Yu Yuan. It will serve as a unique weapon.\" He was a tall man  of thirty-two, with a bronzed face and a receding hairline. Whenever  I was with him, I could feel the inner strength of this man, who had  been a dedicated revolutionary since his early teens.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBefore we moved northeast, all the officers who had originally served  in the Nationalist army and now held positions at the regimental  level and above were ordered to stay behind. More than a dozen of  them surrendered their posts and were immediately replaced by  Communist officers transferred from other units. This personnel  shuffle indicated that men recruited from the old army were not  trusted. Though the Communists may have had their reasons for  dismissing those officers, replacing them right before battle later  caused disasters in the chain of command when we were in Korea,  because there wasn't enough time for the new officers and their men  to get to know one another.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA week after the Spring Festival we entrained for Dandong, the  frontier city on the Yalu River. The freight train carrying us  departed early in the afternoon so that we could reach the border  around midnight. Our division would rest and drill there for half a  month before entering Korea.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe stayed at a cotton mill in a northern suburb of Dandong. Inside  the city, military offices and supply stations were everywhere, the  streets crowded with trucks and animal-drawn vehicles. Some  residential houses near the riverbank had collapsed, apparently  knocked down by American bombs. The Yalu had thawed, though there  were still gray patches of ice and snow along the shore. I had once  seen the river in a documentary film, but now, viewed up close, it  looked different from what I had expected. It was much narrower but  more turbulent, frothy in places and full of small eddies. The water  was slightly green-\"Yalu\" means \"duck green\" in Chinese. A beardless  old man selling spiced pumpkin seeds on the street told me that in  summertime the river often overflowed and washed away crops, apple  trees, houses. Sometimes the flood drowned livestock and people.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne morning I went downtown to an army hotel to fetch some slides  that showed the current situation in Korea. On my way there, I saw a  squadron of Mustangs coming to strafe the people working on the twin  bridges over the Yalu. As the sirens shrilled, dozens of antiaircraft  guns fired at the planes, around which flak explosions clustered like  black blossoms. One of the Mustangs was hit the moment it dropped its  bombs, drawing a long tail of smoke and darting toward the Yellow  Sea. As they watched the falling plane and the hovering parachute,  some civilians applauded and shouted, \"Good shot!\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe drilled with our new weapons and learned about the other units'  experiences in fighting the American and the South Korean armies. We  all knew the enemy was better equipped and highly mechanized with air  support, which we didn't have. But our superiors told us not to be  afraid of the American troops, who had been spoiled and softened by  comforts. GIs couldn't walk and were road-bound, depending completely  on automobiles; if no vehicles were available, they'd hire Korean  porters to carry their bedrolls and food. Even their enlisted men  didn't do KP and had their shoes shined by civilians. Worst of all,  having no moral justification for the war, they lacked the  determination to fight. They were all anxious to have a vacation,  which they would be given monthly. Even if we were inferior in  equipment, we could make full use of our tactics of night fighting  and close combat. At the mere sight of us, the Americans would go to  their knees and surrender-they were just pussycats. To arouse the  soldiers' hatred for the enemy, a group of men, led by a political  instructor, pulled around a hand truck loaded with a huge bomb casing  which was said to be evidence that the U.S. was carrying on  bacteriological warfare. They displayed the thing at every battalion,  together with photographs of infected creatures, such as giant flies,  rats, mosquitoes, clams, cockroaches, earthworms. The germ bomb,  which was said to have landed near the train station, was almost five  feet long and two feet across, with four sections inside. This kind  of bomb, we were told, would not explode; it would just open up when  it hit the ground to release the germ carriers. To be honest, some of  us had rubbed shoulders with Americans when we were in the  Nationalist army, and we were unnerved, because we knew the enemy was  not only superior in equipment but also better trained.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThroughout this period we attended regular meetings at which both  civilians and soldiers would condemn American imperialism. An old  peasant said his only farm cattle, a team of two, had been shot dead  by a U.S. plane while he was harvesting sweet potatoes in his field  near the border. A woman soldier walked around among the audience,  holding up large photographs of Korean women and children killed by  the South Korean army. A reporter spoke about many atrocities  committed by the American invaders. Sometimes the speakers seized the  occasion to vent their own grievances. They often identified the  United States as the source of their personal troubles. A college  graduate of dark complexion even claimed to an audience of eight  hundred that his health had been ruined by the American film  industry, because he had watched too many pornographic movies from  which he had learned how to masturbate. Now he couldn't control  himself anymore, he confessed publicly. These kinds of condemnations,  high and low, boosted the morale of the soldiers, who grew restless,  eager to wipe out the enemy of the common people.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn the night of March 17 we crossed the Yalu. Every infantryman  carried a submachine gun, two hundred rounds of ammunition, four  grenades, a canteen of water, a pair of rubber sneakers and a short  shovel on the back of his bedroll, and a tubed sack of parched wheat  flour weighing thirteen pounds. We walked gingerly on the eastern  bridge, because the western one was partly damaged. Each man kept ten  feet from the one in front of him. The water below was dark, hissing  and plunging. Now and then someone would cry out, his foot having  fallen through a hole. A tall mule, drawing a cart, got its hind leg  stuck in a rift and couldn't dislodge it no matter how madly the  driver thrashed its hindquarters. The moment I passed the tilted  cart, it shook, then keeled over and fell into the river together  with the helpless animal. There was a great splash, followed by an  elongated whirlpool in the shimmering current, and then the entire  load of medical supplies vanished.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHaving left behind our insignias and IDs, from now on we called  ourselves the Chinese People's Volunteers. This was to differentiate  us from the army back home, so that China, nominally having not sent  its regular troops to Korea, might avoid a full-blown war with the  United States. We were ordered to reach, within fourteen days, a town  called Yichun, very close to the Thirty-eighth Parallel. The distance  was about four hundred miles, and we would have to walk all the way.  It was early spring, the air still chilly; the roads were muddy,  soaked by thawing ice and snow, hard for us to trudge through. The  divisional headquarters had two jeeps that transported the leaders  and their staff. Sometimes the jeeps would drop off the officers and  turn back to collect some limping men and those who could no longer  march thanks to blisters on their feet. I walked the whole time  except for once, when Commissar Pei wanted me to get on his jeep so  that I could figure out the meaning of the English words on a folded  handbill someone had picked up on the way. It turned out to be the  menu of a restaurant in Seoul, which must have served Americans  mainly, because the menu was only in English. I couldn't understand  all the words, but could roughly describe the dishes and soups to Pei  Shan. The entrees included broiled flounder filet, beef steak, fried  chicken, meat loaf.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBesides the commissar's orderly, a clerical officer named Chang Ming,  who edited our division's bulletin, often boarded the jeep. I envied  him for that. Whenever we stopped somewhere for the night, Chang Ming  would be busy interviewing people and writing articles.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCommissar Pei seemed a born optimist. He often laughed heartily,  jutting his chin and showing his buckteeth. He looked more like a  warrior than a political officer. By contrast, our division  commander, Niu Jinping, was a wisp of a man, who had once been the  vice director of the Political Department of the Sixty-second Army. I  often saw a cunning light in Niu's round eyes; in his presence I was  always cautious about what I said. When he smiled he seldom opened  his lips, chuckling through his nose as if his mouth were stuffed  with food. He was a chain-smoker, and his orderly carried a whole bag  of brand-name cigarettes for him. Both the commander and the  commissar were in their early thirties, and neither was experienced  in directing battle operations.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBack in Dandong City, I hadn't been able to imagine the magnitude of  the war's destruction. Now, to my horror, I saw that most villages  east of the Yalu lay in ruins. The land looked empty, with at least  four-fifths of the houses leveled to the ground. The standing ones  were mostly deserted. Most of the Korean houses were shabby, with  thatched hip roofs and walls made of mud plastered to bundles of  cornstalks. Many of them were mere huts that had gaping holes as  windows. It must have been hard to farm this rugged land, where  boulders and rocks stuck out of the ground everywhere; yet it seemed  every scrap of tillable soil was used, and even low hills were  terraced with small patches of cropland. We came across Korean  civilians from time to time. Most of them were in rags, women in  white dresses that had faded into yellow, and old men wearing black  top hats with chin straps, reminding me of Chinese men of ancient  times. Here and there roads had been cratered, and teams of Chinese  laborers were busy filling the holes, carrying earth and stones with  wicker baskets affixed to A-frames. The farther south we went, the  fewer houses remained intact, and as a result most of us had to sleep  in the open air.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGenerally, during the day it wasn't safe for us to march, because  American planes would come in droves to attack us. So only after  nightfall could we move forward. After Shandeng, a rural town, the  air raids were constant and sometimes even took place at night. Every  infantryman carried at least sixty pounds while each horse was loaded  with five times more. Without enough sleep and rest, the troops were  soon footsore and exhausted. On the fifth day heavy rain set in and  made it impossible for us to lie on the ground to sleep. Some  officers in our Political Department clustered together with a piece  of tarpaulin over their heads. Many men, too tired to care about the  downpour, simply put their bedrolls on the ground, sat on them, and  tried to doze that way. Some, staying in a chestnut grove, tied  themselves to the trees with ropes so that they could catnap while  remaining on their feet. The rain continued in the afternoon, and  because we couldn't sleep and the enemy bombers were unlikely to come  in such weather, we ate our lunch-which was parched flour mixed with  water, as sticky as batter-and went on our way.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe following night, as the divisional staff was about to enter a  canyon, suddenly three green signal flares whooshed up ahead of us.  At first I thought they must have been fired by our vanguard, but  then some officers began to whisper that someone on the mountain was  signaling our whereabouts to the enemy. I had heard that a good  number of Korean agents worked for the Americans on the sly, but I  hadn't expected to encounter something like this in the wilderness.  As we were talking about the possible meanings of those signals, four  planes appeared in the southeast, roaring toward us.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Take cover!\" a voice ordered.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSome of us rushed into the nearby bushes and some lay down in the  roadside ditches. The planes dropped a few flash bombs, a shower of  light illuminating the entire area; our troops and vehicles at once  became visible. Then bombs rained down and machine guns began raking  us. Some horses and mules were startled and vaulted over the  prostrate men, dashing away into the darkness. A bomb exploded in  front of me and tossed half a pine sapling into the sky. I lay  facedown on the slope of a gully, not daring to lift my head to the  scorching air, and keeping my mouth open so that the explosions  wouldn't pop my eardrums. Around me, men hollered and moaned, and  some were twisting on the ground screaming for help. Some, though  dead or unconscious, were still clutching their submachine guns.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe bombardment lasted only five minutes but killed about a hundred  men and wounded many more. Along the road, flames and smoke were  rising from shattered carts and disabled mountain guns. As I looked  for Chang Ming, I saw two orderlies coming my way, supporting an  officer. I recognized the officer, Tang Jing, the quartermaster of  our divisional staff. He looked all right, though one of the  orderlies kept shouting, \"Doctor, doctor! We need a doctor here!\" But  all the medical personnel were busy helping the seriously wounded,  assembling them for shipment back to our rear base. Division  commander Niu ordered an engineering company to dig a large grave at  the edge of a birch wood to bury the dead.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFinally Dr. Wang turned up with a flashlight and asked Tang Jing,  \"Where were you hit?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe quartermaster didn't register the question, his fleshy face  vacant while his eyes glittered without a blink.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Are you injured?\" the doctor asked again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTang Jing opened his mouth but no sound came out. He was trembling  all over, unable to speak a word. Dr. Wang felt his forehead and then  his pulse. Everything seemed normal, so he didn't know what to do. We  had to reassemble and continue to march, but we were unsure whether  we should take the quartermaster along. Another doctor, Li Wen,  arrived, and together the two doctors checked him again, but they  found nothing unusual except that his temperature was slightly above  normal.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Shell shock. He lost his mind,\" said Dr. Li.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Can he hear?\" an orderly asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I'm not sure.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"What should we do about him?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"We'd better send him back. It'll take a long time for him to recover.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I can't believe this,\" said Chang Ming, who had joined us for a  while. \"He's such a strapping man, yet he lost his mind so easily.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe two orderlies helped the quartermaster to his feet and walked him  toward a team of stretcher bearers who were going to carry the  wounded back to our base. I had been struck by the vast number of  Chinese laborers in Korea. Most of them came from Manchuria, and some  were over forty years old. They were able to mix with the Koreans  because they could speak Japanese, which had been taught in both  Manchurian and Korean schools during the Japanese occupation; yet  their lives here were as precarious as the soldiers'. Although  constantly under air and artillery attacks, they had to repair roads,  build bridges, unload supplies, and ship the casualties back from the  front. A lot of them had been killed or wounded. Right in front of me  walked a reedy boy, about fifteen years old, carrying one end of a  stretcher, on which lay a man with his face bandaged. The wounded man  kept wailing, \"They lied to us! They lied to us!\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOur divisional leaders were unsettled by the loss of lives,  equipment, animals, and supplies, but I was more shaken by Tang  Jing's case. For a whole week his expressionless face went on  haunting me. Never had I thought a man's mind was so easy to destroy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe next morning, on a roadway leading to Seoul, we ran into a group  of U.N. prisoners, about seventy men, marching past us from the  opposite direction. The majority of them were Turks, some tall, some  quite short, with haggard faces. At the end of the procession were  about a dozen Americans, mostly large men wearing parkas. One of them  wore steel-rimmed glasses and a tufty red beard. The POWs couldn't  walk fast on account of injury and fatigue, and some hobbled along,  one using a shovel handle as a crutch. The Chinese guards, toting  rifles with fixed bayonets, were rough with them. One officer yelled  in a strident voice, \"Faster, don't drop behind! You need a ride, eh?  I tell you, we have no vehicles to relieve your pampered feet.\"  Although the prisoners couldn't understand him, they looked  frightened and hung their heads low.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe encounter cheered us up a little. Our political officers began  working to convince the rank and file of the enemy's weakness despite  their airpower. Likewise, the U.N. side had never slackened its  psychological work either. The roads we trod were strewn with  leaflets, dropped by American planes and printed in both Chinese and  Korean, urging us to capitulate. One had an ancient couplet on it:  \"How piteously the skeletons lie on the riverside \/ Still dreaming of  a pretty bride!\" Another showed a woodcut in which a young woman  stood on the shoulder of a mountain, gazing into the distance,  longing for her man's return. We had been ordered to ignore the  leaflets. Many men pocketed them to roll cigarettes with or to use as  toilet paper, but once you glanced through these sheets, a heavy  sadness would stir in your chest, sinking your heart.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOur food supplies, carried by the horse carts, had been used up by  the end of the first week, so now the only thing we had to eat was  the parched flour in the tubed sacks draped across our chests. Some  men found and picked wild herbs-dandelions, purslanes, wild chives,  and onions. There was a kind of wild garlic in Korea, whose heads  were still tiny but good-tasting, pungent and crispy, not as spicy as  the regular garlic. You could eat both their heads and their green  tops, but they were scarce in the early spring when most herbs were  just beginning to sprout. Some trees were sending out yellowish  leaves, which many men plucked and ate. I didn't eat many wild herbs  or tree leaves, because I couldn't tell poisonous ones from good  ones. Quite a few men were not as cautious and suffered food  poisoning.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere were so many troops moving toward and back from the front that  as soon as it was dark, the roads turned chaotic, noisy, and jammed  with traffic-trucks, artillery pieces, carts drawn by animals, teams  of Chinese porters carrying supplies and ammunition, and lines of  stretchers loaded with the wounded. Once I saw a camel laden with  mortar shells. Every night each regiment of our division had about a  hundred stragglers, incapacitated by exhaustion and sore feet. A  movement was started among the ranks, called \"Leave No Comrade  Behind.\" Officers and Party members were supposed to help carry  bedrolls, guns, and bandoliers for those who had difficulty keeping  up. I was moved when I saw squad and platoon leaders fetch hot water  for their men to bathe their feet. This marked a difference between  the Communist army and the Nationalist army, in which even some  junior officers had eaten better food than their men and had often  abused their inferiors.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe arrived at the Thirty-eighth Parallel on time, but a third of our  division could no longer stand on their feet. My legs were swollen  and one of my shoes had lost its sole. Our divisional leaders pleaded  with the Headquarters of the Chinese People's Volunteer Army for a  week's rest, but the superiors allowed us only one day off. We ate a  hearty meal-rice and pork stewed with turnip and broad potato  noodles. After the meal, like sick animals, we slept in the mountain  woods for the rest of the day.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e2. OUR COLLAPSE SOUTH\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOF THE THIRTY-EIGHTH PARALLEL\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe fourth-phase offensive had just ended two months ago in February;  I wondered why we were starting the fifth one so soon. Common sense  dictates that the success of a large battle depends on the buildup of  supplies and munitions and on the thorough preparation of troops.  Although several field armies had just arrived from interior China,  most of the men were bone-weary from the arduous trek and unfamiliar  with the foreign climate and terrain, let alone the nature of the  enemy we faced. We were told that this offensive would wipe out ten  American and Korean divisions and drive all the hostile forces to the  south of the Thirty-seventh Parallel. In our superiors' words, \"We're  going to eliminate some of their unit designations.\" I had misgivings  about that because our equipment was far too inferior, but I didn't  reveal my thoughts to anyone. For the time being my job was to help  Chang Ming edit the bulletin. Ming had graduated from Beijing  University and majored in classics, for which he was well respected,  even by higher-ranking officers. He also knew English but couldn't  speak it fluently. I spoke the language better than most college  graduates because in my teens I had attended classes taught by an  American missionary in my hometown.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn the evening of April 22, 1951, suddenly thousands of our cannons,  howitzers, mortars, and Katyusha rocket launchers began bombarding  the enemy's positions; thus started the fifth-phase offensive. As  usual when the Chinese forces unleashed a major attack, a full moon  hung in the sky, ready to facilitate our men's night fighting. Our  Sixtieth Field Army, composed of the 179th, 180th, and 181st  Divisions, was assigned to attack the Turkish Brigade and the U.S.  Third Division, both positioned in front of us. The battle proceeded  so smoothly that our divisional leaders were bewildered-in just one  day we advanced more than ten miles without encountering any serious  resistance. Why didn't the enemy engage us? Had they been overwhelmed  by our bombardment? Or were they just eluding us? Or was this a ruse  to lure us farther south? Our superiors had their doubts, but neither  Commander Niu nor Commissar Pei, who lacked the requisite training  and experience of senior officers, could guess what was happening.  They just executed the orders issued by headquarters. As a rule,  without approval from higher up, they were not allowed to order troop  movements. This restriction, leaving no room for the officers' own  initiative, directly contributed to our later defeat.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe stayed put for several days and didn't go farther into  enemy-occupied territory. A week later when the second stage of the  offensive started, most of the Chinese and the North Korean","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301755506917,"sku":"NP9781400075799","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400075799.jpg?v=1767743599","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/war-trash-isbn-9781400075799","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}