I was born in the Xinjiang Corps, and my family was in a grassroots company when I was a child.
(At the end of 1986, in the winter of thousands of miles of ice, my father and mother, with the approval of the leaders of the regiment headquarters and the division headquarters, ended their careers as soldiers in the Northwest Frontier Corps for more than 20 years, returned to their hometown in Henan, and went to work in Pingdingshan City.) My brother and I went with him. ）
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In response to the call of the country, many enthusiastic and energetic young people from their inland hometowns in China came to the Xinjiang Corps in the distant Northwest Frontier with high spirits and impassioned spirits from their inland hometowns in China in the 1960s or earlier in response to the call of the country. At that time, the soldiers of the Xinjiang Corps dragged their families and families, and the men, women, and children who shouldered the duties of soldiers were vigorous and vigorous, and the Corps companies stationed in the vast and uninhabited Gobi Desert, desert, and large tracts of cultivated land were encamped, standing guard day and night, taking root in the border fortress, and old friends went into battle together, full of pride and high morale, and jointly shouldered the heavy task of garrisoning the frontier and stabilizing national defense and the duties of the Corps soldiers. Most of the uncles and aunts (in the regiment or other companies) are from different inland provinces, and there are almost no local ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.
The soldiers of the Corps have never changed their inland dialects, gathered in the frontier Xinjiang and Northern Xinjiang Corps, and have continued the duties of the ancients of the countless soldiers of the Chinese nation in the past dynasties, and shouldered the important task of defending the motherland, sticking to the frontier and consolidating the national defense of the motherland. I can't hide it in my heart, thinking about the hometown where my ancestors have lived for generations and the familiar faces of my relatives and friends thousands of miles away.
In 1976, when I was 6 years old, the "WG" era of the motherland was red. When I was a child, I vaguely remember that after the end of the "WG" era, aspiring young people who returned to the city in the "vast world, dedicated to youth", including those who returned to their original jobs due to other factors. At this moment, there was a sudden wave of parting. During this period, I left my company's company one after another at different times. Rare entrants. The company camp was full of people, and the exciting scene of prosperity was gone.
In 1978, during the peaceful years of reform, opening up, and economic development, the number of soldiers in the grassroots company where my family belonged was still getting smaller and smaller. When the school year began in the fall of 1979, when I was not paying attention, many unfamiliar faces appeared in the company's elementary school. I suspect that during the summer vacation, several families were transferred from other units (companies), and they did not know each other, which means that none of them came from the same company (unit). After getting along for a while, I learned that their ancestral hometowns are: Hubei, Jiangsu, Sichuan and so on. When I chatted with a few of these classmates, I learned that they were not from the same company, but from different companies in the same regimental field, that is, they did not go out of the regimental field, but only changed units (companies), and their work and life did not change.
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For as long as I can remember, my father worked in the company's maintenance platoon. In 1978, when I was 8 years old, one day during the summer vacation, I rode a tractor driven by my father to carry out the tasks arranged by the company leader and came to the southernmost farmland of my company's residential area.
My father and I went out of the company's residential area in the direction of the south, and we could see at a glance that there was a canal at the edge of the distant and empty cultivated land, which my father called the "South Trunk Canal", and I also heard the uncles and aunts in the company talking that the "South Trunk Canal" was the boundary between the 148th regimental field and the 149th regimental field where my family was located. I followed my father to the northeast corner of the cotton field north of the "South Trunk Canal", and I carefully surveyed the surroundings: in the green wilderness, there were many loess clay houses in the depths of the tall woods, large cloded houses, almost no roofs of all houses, timbers still lying across the roofs of the ruined and broken walls, straight wooden beams and wooden whirls were exposed, and they were in shambles. When I came to a sad and heavy and very strange place, I asked my father with curiosity, and he said that this was the pigsty in the company, and all the buildings in the company were built in the 1950s after the founding of the People's Republic of China, when many provinces in China were detained in Xinjiang to serve their sentences for labor reform, including the pigsty in the company.
(When I became an adult, I learned from various media that in ancient times, prisoners were exiled and deported to farther frontiers to serve their sentences and reforms, and I guess that since then, between the former endless desert and Gobi, the military organization that has entrenched its borders, the company, has risen up in the Xinjiang Corps.) I still remember looking up at the scorching sun with blue skies and white clouds, and I looked curiously into the depths of the verdant vegetation and ruined walls, and I didn't see a single person, let alone a pig, except for my father and me. I was still standing in what looked like a cistern in the company's pigsty, because I saw the cement prefabricated slab under my feet, and I didn't know what it was doing at the time, and this question was deeply etched in my memory. I never heard a detailed picture of the company's pigsty, as if the people around me never knew that there was ever a pigsty in the company.
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For as long as I can remember when I was a child, the company camp was built on the open Gobi Desert, with rows of neat rows of early barracks-style houses, and the company camp was full of chickens and dogs smelling of soldiers and civilians from all over the world. The buildings in the company's barracks are military installations facing south and north according to the ancient Chinese house building style. In the 1950s after the founding of the People's Republic of China, many provinces in China built the barracks-style housing for prisoners who had been sent to Xinjiang to serve their sentences for re-education through labor. The military facilities in the company camp are well organized and orderly: offices, auditoriums, canteens, bachelor dormitories, health centers, distribution stores, primary schools...... The walls of loess cement and the houses built of large clods of soil are easy to connect with local materials and local conditions.