#冬日生活打卡季#
Written on the front
During the construction of the open-pit coal mine in the Huolinhe mining area of Inner Mongolia, there is a history worth remembering, that is, the historical stage in which the 44th detachment of the infrastructure engineering corps participated in the construction from 1978 to 1981. In order to look back on the past, remember the history, tell the story of Huolinhe's entrepreneurship, and inherit the entrepreneurial spirit of Huolinhe, Zheng Yanfei, Zhao Lijuan, Tang Zhongfu and other comrades-in-arms of the 44th detachment of the former infrastructure engineering corps launched the activity of "listening to veterans tell the story of Huolinhe's entrepreneurship" to restore the passionate years for us, and let us feel those moving stories and historical events together.
From 1978 to 1981, I served as a deputy company commander in the 44th Squadron (Company) of the 432nd Regiment of the 11th Detachment of the Infrastructure Engineering Corps. At that time, the company I led was composed of three parts: conscripts, workers and employees. More than half of the company's conscripts enlisted in 1978 came from Changshu in Jiangsu Province and Zigong in Sichuan Province, as well as some from Yunnan and Jilin. The company commander was Liang Zhenhua, a native of Guizhou, and the deputy instructor was Tang Xuejian, a native of Inner Mongolia. The company was initially stationed on the hillside east of the towing plant in the Huolin River mining area, and there was a ditch at the bottom of the hillside leading to the quarry. Our company is mainly responsible for the blasting and mining of stones and the processing of crushed stone required for the infrastructure project of the Huolin River mining area.
▲ A photo of the author when he was a soldier
In the early days of the construction of the Huolinhe open-pit coal mine and the newly formed 44th detachment, the conditions were very difficult, the grain and vegetables could not be self-sufficient, all relied on foreign transportation, and most of the grain was coarse grains, that is, big dumplings, cornmeal, sorghum rice, and only a small part of rice and white flour. Some of the warriors from the south had never seen sorghum rice, and whenever they ate big dumplings or sorghum rice in the canteen, some of them had difficulty swallowing, and after eating the leftovers, they also attracted foxes and weasels from the mountains to come to the door to feed. There were no wells in our station, and we had to rely on horse-drawn carriages to pull water to a spring by the Holin River, two or three kilometers away. The water should not be drunk immediately after it is pulled back, because the water is relatively turbid and must be put into a large vat or bucket for precipitation before drinking. Therefore, the drinking water of the company was very scarce, not to mention the water for bathing.
Soldiers from the south had the habit of bathing every day in their hometowns, but in the north, especially in the difficult years of the construction of the Huolin River mine, there were no public baths, and bathing was just a luxury, so they could only boil water with buckets on the stove in the barracks dormitory, and then scoop it out with their own basins to wipe their bodies and wash their feet. In addition to the difficulty of using water, it is also a difficult problem to dry the washed clothes, and the clothes will freeze after washing and drying them outside for a while in the winter, and they will not dry for several days, and the few clothes issued by the army will not dare to be washed. In this case, some people don't wash their underwear in the winter, they can't wash their outer clothes even if they don't wash them, they can still deal with them when they are dirty, and they really can't stand it if they don't wash their underwear for a long time, and as a result, they don't wash it for a long time, and "living things" (i.e., lice) are born on their clothes. Some of the southern soldiers had never seen lice on people, and when they saw that there were a lot of lice in their underwear and underwear, they didn't know how to deal with it, so they simply threw the lice and lice's underwear and underwear into the furnace and burned it.
In winter, the Huolin River is frozen, and the river water is frozen for more than one meter and nearly two meters of ice. The location where we pull water is downstream of the dragging plant in the mining area along the Huolin River, and the dragging plant and its residents do not have indoor toilets or public toilets, so they dig a pit with asbestos tiles or linoleum by the river. In winter, the river freezes, and the higher the river becomes, the ice freezes thicker and thicker, gradually flooding the latrines along the river. Spring is coming, and the river is starting to flow downstream. It is conceivable that the water of the river cannot be polluted.
▲ Group photo of comrades-in-arms
In April 1979, the company began to have diarrhea, and finally spread to most of the people also diarrhea, which seriously affected the normal production, life and health of the soldiers. An elderly worker surnamed Wang at the battalion headquarters said that he never took medicine for diarrhea in his rural hometown, but picked some wild poppies in the field, uprooted them, and brought them to his home to wash and wash them into soup in an aluminum pot. We go back and forth to the construction site every day, and there are wild poppies everywhere on both sides of the road, so you might as well try it.
So, I asked the soldiers to pick a handful and hand it to the cooking class when they came back from work, wash the wild poppies with their roots and leaves, and then cut them into sections and put them in an aluminum pot to boil into a purple soup. At the same time, the regiment also sent our drinking water samples to the higher health department for testing, and the result was that the E. coli bacteria seriously exceeded the standard, and after testing and field investigations, the reason was that the dirty water of the riverside toilets on both sides of the upper reaches of the Huolin River polluted the drinking water source. Since then, we have given up horse-drawn carts to pull water, and the regiment has specially arranged for a car to use a water tank to pull water from a nearby deep well.
▲ Old photo of the Huolin River, the infrastructure engineering corps under construction
Time has passed, and many years after the withdrawal of the army, I was fortunate to be invited to Changshu, Jiangsu Province to meet with my comrades-in-arms of that year, and talk about that memory together, what makes them haunt them is still "grain" and "water", they said that the most unpalatable are big dumplings and sorghum rice, not only can I not swallow it, but the most unpalatable dishes are stewed frozen potatoes and frozen cabbage, which cannot be eaten or tasted in the south. Yes, at that time, the difference between the north and the south was too great, one was a region with a hard life, and the other was a rich land of fish and rice. Since they had not taken a proper bath in the Huolin River for more than two years, after the troops withdrew from the Huolin River, the first thing they thought of was to take a hot bath every time they went to a new place.
In just two or three years, we have not only suffered the baptism of wind, frost, snow and rain, severe cold and heat, but also undergone the tempering of hard life, and the short military career has condensed a lifetime of comradeship. It was the army that cultivated me, tempered me, and made me who I am, and this is my inexhaustible spiritual wealth and motivation throughout my life.
Perhaps my life is related to water, and after the abolition of the 44th detachment in 1981, I changed jobs on the spot and engaged in water-related occupations in the city of Huolin Gol, that is, tap water supply and sewage treatment. Coincidentally, the first deep well we built for the city's water supply was at the site of the spring where we used to pull water in horse-drawn carts...... Today, the river's management has greatly improved the coastal environment, and the city's water supply is no longer what it used to be, and a new city is moving towards a more modern level.