A Single Swallow

by Zhang Ling

When I first became your instructor, no one was interested in remote or timed explosives. You all preferred close-range weapons, like grenades. You wanted to see the immediate effects of bodies blown to pieces. A victory that you hadn’t seen with your own eyes couldn’t be a real victory, just as a life that didn’t dare to risk everything couldn’t be called a life. I was like a chisel, patiently chipping away, an inch at a time, at your stubborn way of thinking. I told you that if a specially trained soldier was sacrificed, it was a huge waste of manpower and material resources. Only by staying alive could you destroy the enemy, so any action plan that didn’t include safe evacuation wasn’t worth trying. You dismissed my advice and made me out to be a coward, afraid to die. My view was eventually accepted, but that was later, after you’d tasted the sweetness of large-scale lethality that such special technology held.