Chapter 9

  "Here!" Just as I was still reeling from having handed over the sniper rifle, Knife Scar handed me an iron box.

  "What's this?" I stared blankly at the cylindrical iron box.

  "Can food!" Scar exclaimed: "You little fool! Haven't you ever had canned food?"

  "Hmm! I'm a country bumpkin, I don't eat much!" I casually responded and took the can, but no matter how hard I looked, I couldn't find the tab to open it... At first, I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, but it wasn't until Knife Scar handed me a dagger that I realized pull tabs hadn't been introduced to China yet.

  After a busy morning, I was quite hungry. Without saying much, I quickly opened the iron box and took a look... only to be shocked. What's inside is actually broad beans.

  I'm not someone who's never seen canned goods before, but nowadays it's all just various meat cans or fruit cans. Who uses vegetables to make cans?

  "Eat up! What are you still dawdling for?" Scar urged: "Hurry up, we've got another mission later!"

  "Oh!" I reluctantly responded with a bitter face and stretched out my hand to the inside, where the silkworms were huddled together like a bunch of bugs.

  Having something to eat is better than starving, I don't want to be too weak to even walk on the battlefield later. But the taste wasn't as bad as I imagined (it was only later that I found out it was because I had never eaten this type of food before), it's just that those broad beans were hard like steel and couldn't be chewed no matter how hard I tried.

  "Still thinking about your gun, huh!" Scarface looked at me with a distracted expression and advised from the side: "Don't think too much, even if you use 56 semi you can still kill the Vietnamese ghost sniper? If there's a first one, there will be a second one, do it well!"

  He patted me on the shoulder and walked away, leaving me sitting alone in the same place with a bitter smile: Who knows if I'll be the next to die!

  "Comrades"

  "Look who's here! It's Lian Zhang again. He looks excited, and before the soldiers even had a chance to line up, he raised his hand and shouted: "We've just received news from our superiors that our regiment has successfully broken through the Vietnamese army's defense lines in the Xiao Cao area. Now is the time for us to march towards Lao Jie!"

  "Good!" The warriors were all excited, each one rubbing their fists and palms as if eager to go into battle, but only I sat limply on the ground, self-absorbed in dealing with the can of broad beans in front of me.

  Lào Cai is the capital of Lào Cai Province in Vietnam, located at the confluence of the Red River and Nam Thi River. It has a railway to Hanoi, as well as highway and water transportation on the Red River, making it an important military stronghold and transportation hub in northwestern Vietnam, and also an important gateway to Hanoi. Simply put, if we capture Lào Cai, we can continuously transport strategic materials from the river mouth to Lào Cai, and externally, we can drive directly to Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, so its strategic significance is very important for the entire self-defense counterattack war.

  For most Chinese, this place is both familiar and strange. It's familiar because most people have heard of its name, even now it's no exception. But it's strange because not many people are lucky enough to come to the city and see what it looks like in person.

  However, I don't think it's a lucky thing to see it with my own eyes. The reason is simple: we didn't come here for sightseeing, but for fighting. Seeing it means that another war will start soon.

  In fact, we thought the war should have started an hour ago. Wasn't our goal to break through the defense of Laojie? Can a regiment of Japanese devils rely on solid fortifications to block the frontal attack of our army's division? The regiment I was in was because it was difficult to attack from the front, so we attacked from the side and broke through the Xiaocao area, planning to pincer the enemy in Laojie. But unexpectedly, when we entered Laojie as if we were facing a great enemy, we found that this place had become an empty city with not a single person.

  "Is this the old street?" After walking for a while, Xiao Shi couldn't bear his doubts anymore and asked in a low voice: "The provincial capital of a province... how can it be worse than our county town?"

  This is also the doubt of all of us, originally we thought this was a prosperous Vietnamese provincial capital... even if it's not as prosperous as Shanghai or Beijing, at least it should have some semblance of a city, right? But when we saw house after house of broken bricks and wooden houses, only then did we realize that reality is often different from what we imagine.

  "Unbelievable!" Dao Ba turned his head back and responded with a bad tone: "These devils have been fighting for decades, their money is all spent on buying guns and ammunition. Haven't you seen that their soldiers can't even wear shoes? What's so strange about it?"

  After being told by the scar-faced man, my fellow soldiers and I felt relieved. In the past few days, we had seen that the Japanese devils we encountered were indeed not wearing shoes. At first, we thought it was their habit, but when we saw that there were still shoes attached to the belts of their corpses, we realized that they couldn't bear to wear them.

  。

  What kind of concept is it for someone who is about to go into battle to not wear shoes? I only know that if I were to face death on the battlefield, even if it's a ginseng fruit, I would swallow it without hesitation.

  But this is Vietnam, which has been plagued by war for decades. Just a few years ago, the Viet Cong were still fighting against the Americans! Those American planes and artillery weren't just for show, so it's a wonder that this old street can still look like anything at all.

  "Halt! Rest in place!"

  "Halt! Rest in place!"

  ……

  The order was passed down from the front, and as soon as the soldiers heard it, they dispersed with a whoosh, followed by wailing and lamentation, some beating their backs and others rubbing their feet, like a group of refugees.

  Maybe someone will say that this is not like a troop, nor is it like a soldier? But the fact is indeed so. We have fought battles on the battlefield and made achievements, but it does not mean that we are strictly disciplined. The reason is very simple. Many of us have only been in the army for a few days, just like me!

  I found a rock to lean my rifle against, and sat down eagerly to rub my sore and aching feet. I was inwardly cursing: the terrible food, less than an hour of sleep, swarms of mosquitoes and flies, and one death mission after another... I was almost driven mad by this world! To think that in modern times, I would get into a car as soon as I went out and turn on the air conditioning as soon as I got home - when had I ever suffered like this before?!

  Now I have to admire the old man, it's really unknown how this old guy survived!

  Just as I was lamenting my fate, I found a soldier playing with the rifle I had surrendered not far away, surrounded by a large group of soldiers who were watching and cheering.

  "Hey! What kind of gun is this?"

  "Where did you get it from?"

  "Still carrying a magnifying glass!"

  ……

  Looking at it, I feel very uncomfortable. The sniper rifle that was finally collected just fell into someone else's hands... If only I had told Scarface to let me take care of it before handing it over to the superior and "researching" it, at least I could have shown off in front of my comrades for a while.

  Just as I was regretting my tardiness, a loud gunshot suddenly rang out, and the soldier holding the sniper rifle burst into a bloody flower and fell to the ground.

  。

  I didn't think much, and with a backward flip, I fell into the stinky ditch behind me... Although I couldn't stand the suffocating smell in the ditch either, it was nothing compared to my life. As I flipped into the ditch, I also brought my rifle with me.

  "Something's going on!"

  "Get ready for battle!"

  ……

  In an instant, the entire unit was thrown into chaos. Some soldiers lay on the ground and fired their guns in the direction of the gunfire, unleashing a barrage of shots. Others panicked like headless flies, searching for cover everywhere. Still, others didn't even protect themselves, standing upright with their chests out, charging towards the civilian houses...

  "Get down! Come back!" I heard the bayonet shouting at them, it was clear that they were misled by the shots taken in the movie or the propaganda of "revolutionary soldiers are not afraid of sacrifice and death", using their own bodies and lives to face the enemy's bullets.

  It's right to be fearless of sacrifice and death, but that doesn't mean they can just rush forward and die like this!

  Unlike Stabber, I didn't try as hard to call back those few warriors in the hope of saving their lives because I knew it was impossible.

  I rolled around in the stinky ditch at top speed, and that black and smelly water instantly soaked my entire body. Although the foul smell made my stomach churn repeatedly, I finally managed to suppress this nausea by force. I didn't have time to vomit, nor did I have the right to vomit. After crawling a few meters in the stinky ditch, I slowly poked my head out and looked in the direction of the sound.

  That was a civilian house, only over 200 meters away from us. So I determined that the person hiding inside wasn't a sniper, for a very simple reason: no sniper would be stupid enough to set up an ambush with a sniper rifle at a distance of over 200 meters from the enemy. At the same time, it was also impossible for the enemy to have laid an ambush in advance, again for a very simple reason: if it were an ambush, I would have chosen a rocket launcher or a light machine gun, or at least an AK-47 commonly used by the military. However, the gunfire coming from that house told me that the enemy was using two rifles and one AK

  。

  So I was puzzled, the opponent is neither a sniper who shoots cold guns nor an ambush, then what did he come for?

  I took a look at the sniper rifle several meters away and I seemed to understand something.

  This sniper rifle represents two layers of meaning. One is that the Viet Minh thought that a soldier holding a sniper rifle was a sniper.

  On this battlefield, a sniper is even more important than taking out an enemy platoon. Moreover, because they always hide in the dark to shoot and kill their targets, both sides of the conflict hate each other's snipers, whether on the battlefield or after being captured. This is why snipers will go to great lengths to conceal their identities when captured, and some will even hide their sniper rifles when anticipating capture.

  Another implication is that at the time, our army didn't have sniper rifles. The fact that the martyred soldier had a sniper rifle means he must have taken out one of the Vietnamese snipers and obtained his weapon.

  Either of these meanings would have been enough to make the Viet Minh hate him with a passion and they couldn't resist opening fire on him.

  Thinking of this, I couldn't help but wipe a cold sweat, fortunately the sniper rifle was not in my hands just now, otherwise...

  "Rat-a-tat-a..." The gunfire in front of the civilian residence grew more intense, and in the blink of an eye, more than a dozen charging soldiers fell to the ground, four of them hitting the dirt. The remaining seven or eight seemed to know better than to continue their charge forward, or perhaps it was instinct and intuition that told them they couldn't advance any further.

  Regardless of the enemy's hail of bullets, charging forward may have had some effect in the past, but it is not effective today when individual weapons are highly developed.

  "Rocket launcher!" I heard Scarface yelling loudly.

  To be honest, this is indeed a good idea. What kind of people are in that civilian house and how many weapons do they have? Can't we just blast them with rocket launchers?

  But before the rocket launcher was ready, Li Lianzhang loudly commanded: "Don't use the rocket launcher! The superiors have ordered us to protect the property of Vietnamese villagers! Besides, what if there are Vietnamese civilians inside?"

  "Damn it!" I couldn't help but curse loudly in my heart, what kind of ridiculous order is this?

  Alright! Since we can't use rocket launchers, it's time for a sniper. So I turned my gaze to that sniper rifle not far away...