Comrade Zhang Xizhi's military uniform photo
The Qingming Festival has arrived, and I have a lot of thoughts. My heart has flown to a foreign land thousands of miles away.
For many years, their voices and smiles have always lingered in my mind, lingering, they were really young at that time, they were just a bunch of children!
Every time I was ordered to dispose of the remains of the martyrs, I couldn't bear to look at the childish faces.
I couldn't bear to let my brothers, who had fought day and night, leave.
However, I still have to work with the doctors and nurses of the field hospital to carefully wipe away the blood on their faces and bodies. "Tap, tap again!" I kept reminding them, for fear of adding new pain to them.
Dear comrades-in-arms! You have dedicated your lives for the great trust and honor of the motherland and for world peace, and the motherland and people will never forget you.
An Pei Sheng Xing Martyrs Cemetery
I remember saying goodbye to the martyrs' cemetery for the last time, nearly sixty years ago.
That was the last year of the 1960s, when I was working in the political department of the three detachments of the Chinese Anti-American Aid Force, which had been abroad for five years. On the eve of the completion of the mission of the troops and the order to return home, the head of the unit gave me a task to contact the relevant local departments, lead the soldiers, repair the tombs of the martyrs, and organize a farewell ceremony to the martyrs before returning home.
The martyrs' cemetery of our troops was built on a small hillside seven or eight kilometers on the outskirts of An Pei City, Vietnam, backed by mountains, facing the motherland, surrounded by dense layers of subtropical forests, and more than a dozen tall "hero trees" (kapok trees) with bright red flowers lined up behind the cemetery. The colorful flowers and plants unique to the Yuebei Mountains, clustered and bushy, grow on the hillside, laying a beautiful carpet for the cemetery.
In this exotic land, more than 30 comrades-in-arms of our troops were buried in the construction of the battle. Their names are engraved on the tombstones inlaid with black marble. The youngest of them is only 18 years old and the oldest is only 35 years old.
In March 2016, a veteran soldier from Jiayu County, Hubei Province, wrote a silent letter of mourning to the martyrs
With a sense of solemnity and reverence, we cultivated soil for the graves of our comrades-in-arms, scrubbed the tombstones, repaired the tomb passages, and repainted the gates and parapets of the cemetery. We also took a panoramic view of the cemetery and the tombstones of each comrade-in-arms so that they could be given to the relatives of the martyrs after returning home and placed in the team history exhibition room as a permanent memorial.
The farewell ceremony began, mourning music was played, the Internationale was played, and the honor guard fired its guns to pay tribute to the martyrs.
The head of the detachment and the representatives of the detachments circled the cemetery for a final farewell to their comrades-in-arms. At that time, many of us had such a feeling: I hope that people will really have souls after death, and I hope that the heroic spirits of martyrs will return to the motherland, return to their hometowns, and return to their relatives with the troops.
Veteran soldiers and their relatives went to the Shengxing Martyrs' Cemetery to visit the graves of their comrades-in-arms who died together
Although many years have passed since then, I still remember the scene vividly and vividly.
Dear comrades-in-arms! For many years, have you been lying peacefully in a foreign land? I miss you guys, I miss you...
Comrade Zhang Xizhi, male, Han ethnicity, born in August 1930, from Lai'an County, Anhui Province. In June 1949, he joined the army while studying at the high school of Chuzhou Middle School in Anhui Province. He joined the Party in 1959. He was awarded the rank of second lieutenant in 1955, lieutenant in 1960 and captain in 1964. In 1965, the Central Military Commission announced the abolition of military ranks.
In 1954, he was a teacher at the Fifth Aviation Preparatory School, in 1959 he was an officer in the Propaganda Section of the Second Construction Division of the Air Force (the predecessor of the Second General Force), in 1965 he was an officer and deputy chief of the Propaganda Section of the Three Branches of the Vietnamese War to Resist the United States, and from 1969 to 1983 he was the deputy chief and section chief of the Propaganda Section of the Second Corps of The Air Force Engineer Corps, and the deputy director of the Political Department. He left his post after 1983 to recuperate.