Radar Soldiers on the Island: Guarding the "Anchorage" Deep in the Heart's Sea
On a small island in the vast South China Sea, there is an old tree — knocked over by a typhoon, yet still putting out new branches and leaves. The youth of radar soldiers is like this tree: pressing close to the earth in a prostrate posture, piercing the sea and sky with an upright conviction. There are no earth-shaking heroic feats here, only the ordinary perseverance of gazing at the sea and sky day after day. Today, let us turn the lens toward the "anchorage" deep in the heart's sea of island radar soldiers. From the epiphany beneath the old tree, to the craftsmanship beside the switchboard, to the tender moments in a photo album — as we enter the spiritual world of the radar soldiers of a certain unit of the Southern Theater Command Air Force, what do we come to understand? To guard the island is to guard not only that expanse of azure territory, but also the most resilient steadiness within a soldier's heart. When signals pierce through the clouds, that force of taking root downward is their most profound declaration to the ten-thousand-li maritime frontier.
— The Editors
Watching over the prosperity of a distant world.
Radar Soldiers on the Island: Guarding the "Anchorage" Deep in the Heart's Sea
■ He Jiantao, Li Sixuan
[Photo caption] A distant view from the island's summit. Photo by Cui Qinghao.
[Photo caption] Combat transition: officers and soldiers rush toward the summit position. Photo by Cui Qinghao.
[Photo caption] Holding the watch at the summit post. Photo by Cui Qinghao.
Slowly taking root against the sea wind — time has its own answers for growth
In the island garrison there is a tree unlike any other. It grows in a prostrate posture: the year a powerful typhoon struck, it was toppled by the gale, its main trunk pressed flat against the ground. When the spring breeze swept across the island the following year, its branches put out fresh green shoots, stretching upward toward the sky with all their strength.
[Photo caption] Instructor Guo (left) recounts the story of the old tree. Photo by Cui Qinghao.
This old tree is very much like the radar soldiers who guard the island — possessed of a stubborn refusal to bow before wind and rain. Second-Class Staff Sergeant Huang Minhua still remembers the shock he felt the first time he saw it.
It was the autumn of 2015. Huang Minhua, carrying the dream of a military career, shouldered his pack, said goodbye to his hometown in Hunan, and boarded the boat bound for the island radar station. Newly arrived on an unfamiliar island, the moment the salty, damp sea wind hit him, he felt like a solitary boat adrift, his heart full of confusion and loss.
"That year the typhoon knocked the old tree over, and we all thought it was finished… Who knew it would tenaciously take root right there against the earth, like a soldier crawling forward." Listening to the then-political instructor of the radar station tell the story, Huang Minhua bent down and touched the trunk. In that instant, he clearly felt a force strike heavily against the heart where his surging youthful dreams lived.
This old tree — "prostrate, and then upright" — took root in Huang Minhua's heart from that day on.
When he first studied communications operations, the complex circuit diagrams gave Huang Minhua great difficulty. But every time he passed that old tree, its upward posture silently encouraged him: he tied sandbags to his wrists while tapping Morse code, and trained his ears to distinguish signals amid noisy interference. At that time, he wrote to his parents and made a vow to take root on the island: "To be like the prostrate old tree, stubbornly stretching its branches toward the sky."
As the tides came and went, the old tree grew ever more lush, and Huang Minhua gradually shed his greenness. He successfully passed the relevant self-study higher education examinations and gradually grew into a backbone of his specialty. Later, he represented the radar station in a higher-level evaluation and claimed first place in his specialty in a single stroke.
The day he returned to the garrison, Huang Minhua carried his trophy to the old tree. The sea wind rustled the leaves, as if applauding him. Today, Huang Minhua is the communications section leader with the longest service on the station. Every year when new soldiers arrive on the island, he brings those fresh-faced young men to stand beside the old tree.
"Even if you're knocked down by wind and rain, you must grow upward and take root downward. The old tree holds the spirit of the company." Looking into pairs of bright eyes, Huang Minhua also gained a new understanding — the stretch of sea where the heart has taken root is precisely the place the radar soldiers watch over with their youth, bearing their mission and their glory.
Tempered by a thousand blows, resilience only grows stronger. This stubbornness of growing close to the earth lifts new soldiers to stand straight out of their confusion, and awakens young backbone members who are learning to lead troops, helping them understand the meaning of the words "bending down." First-Class Staff Sergeant Wang Fei once untangled a long-standing knot in his heart about leading troops, right there in the shade of this tree.
During one quarterly evaluation, the squad Wang Fei led fell several places in the company rankings. That evening, from judgment accuracy rates to combat readiness response speeds, he led everyone through a point-by-point review, merciless and sharp-tongued throughout. New soldiers didn't dare raise their heads; veterans bit their lips; the "air pressure" in the meeting room was so low it was suffocating.
Wang Fei was the brigade's well-known specialist top performer, determined to build an elite squad. On the training ground he recognized only results, not individuals — whoever made a mistake was criticized in front of everyone. Yet somehow, the harder he criticized, the further the squad's scores fell rather than rose.
After the review ended, Wang Fei unconsciously wandered over to the old tree. Looking closely, he noticed that the old tree's curved main trunk had long since merged with the soil, its roots pressing into the earth from the side of the trunk, deeper and denser than those of ordinary trees; the new branch shooting straight up into the night sky had grown precisely from the most bent part of the trunk, twisting its way upward with determined force.
He had been walking this road so long that he had forgotten where he came from — forgotten the original aspiration to grow upward. He stared at the trunk for a long time, and the restless fire in his heart, as if washed over by the tide, slowly settled.
From that day on, Wang Fei put away his impatient, results-driven temperament. No longer relying solely on extra drills and pressure, he shifted his focus to understanding each person's baseline and leading the squad in step with the training rhythm. On the training ground, harsh rebukes gave way to patient breakdowns; in the squad, tense suppression gave way to unified drive. At the year-end brigade-wide specialty competition, two soldiers from Wang Fei's squad placed in the rankings, and he was awarded an individual Third-Class Merit Citation for outstanding performance.
The day they returned from the competition, Wang Fei brought the squad to the old tree and said: "It's all right to be a little slow. Like the trees on this island — only when the roots go deep and go firm can you withstand the baptism of wind and rain."
The wind blew through the canopy, the branches and leaves swayed gently, and another generation of island radar soldiers came to understand the meaning of taking root and grasped the significance of holding the watch.
Holding reverence in the heart — dreams grow purer through repeated tempering
Walk into the honors room, and an old decommissioned telephone switchboard sits quietly on a table, silently recounting the glory of former days. The patch panel on its body once listened day and night to the burning heartbeats of island radar soldiers.
[Photo caption] A radar soldier tells his son the story of the old telephone switchboard. Photo by Cui Qinghao.
In the 1990s, the switchboard was the hub of command communications for the radar station. Duty operators listened for instructions, raised and lowered their hands, precisely inserting patch cords into the correct jacks, completing information relay through manual switching time and again — tempering the meticulous and rigorous work style of the older generation of radar soldiers.
Old objects bear witness to history and also carry forward the radar soldiers' craftsmanship of striving for excellence (精益求精).
One year, during a routine inspection of pipeline renovation work, Second-Class Staff Sergeant Xie Yihui spotted the problem at a glance: the wiring laid by his newly assigned apprentice, Huang Yucan, was disorganized, the standard of running cables at right angles thrown to the wind.
The sloppy wiring before him brought Xie Yihui back to his own restless and confused early days in the military.
When he first entered the barracks, Xie Yihui's head was full of fantasies about the imposing image of holding a steel rifle and guarding the sea and sky — but after being assigned to the communications section, his daily companions were nothing but screwdrivers and endless cables.
Stripping wire, organizing wire, laying wire — the same routine over and over gradually wore down the enthusiasm in his heart. What truly broke him was fiber optic splicing, the communications soldier's "signature skill." The glass fiber core is as thin as a hair; the slightest tremor during operation cannot be tolerated, and he was by nature impetuous. No matter how many times he practiced, the end faces he cut came out crooked and uneven, and a string of evaluation failures left him thoroughly dispirited.
The old squad leader took in Xie Yihui's low spirits at a glance. Rather than launching into empty platitudes, he simply led the dejected young man to stand before that old telephone switchboard and spoke of the past. In the early years, when a powerful typhoon swept the entire island and the air situation at sea changed by the second, the whole machine room shaking in the gale, their predecessors still steadied their minds, precisely connecting every jack, firmly holding the entire command lifeline.
Facing the "stumbling block" of fiber optic splicing, the old squad leader taught Xie Yihui a small method: before each splicing operation, wash your hands clean, and use that brief pause to force yourself to calm down, completing each tiny operation with a sense of reverence (敬畏之心).
Xie Yihui stared at the polished jacks on the switchboard, and the "knot" twisted inside him instantly came undone. Whenever he couldn't hold himself steady, recalling the old squad leader's words, all the restlessness in his heart would quietly recede like a tide. He settled his mind and plunged into the tangled cables, honing and refining his professional skills through wiring and installation work.
Pulling his thoughts back from the old memories to the present, looking at the disorganized wiring before him, apprentice Huang Yucan flushed red, clutching his wire stripper and waiting awkwardly for a reprimand.
Xie Yihui did not reproach him harshly. He simply gave him a light pat on the shoulder, led him to stand before that old telephone switchboard, and told the story of his own embarrassing evaluation failures back in the day — and also the story of generation after generation of radar soldiers guarding the island and maintaining communications, embodied in this old piece of equipment.
"Eagerness to improve is a good thing, but you must hold reverence in your heart." Xie Yihui told Huang Yucan that dreams grow purer through repeated tempering. They turned and crouched down into the corridor, master and apprentice beginning to re-lay the wiring together. Xie Yihui locked in every right-angle turn; Huang Yucan also put away his hurried impatience, smoothing the cables flat and straight along the wall edges.
The sea wind carried the sound of the tide over the windowsill. The old telephone switchboard waited quietly in the play of light and shadow. The perseverance and craftsmanship sunk deep in the years quietly continued along each straight-run cable, settling into a weighty and resolute force.
On a small "dot" on the map of China, recording the most moving face of youth
On the display shelf of the honors room, several veterans' photo albums wait quietly to be leafed through. Each photograph silently tells a story and conveys a feeling — the excitement of winning a competition, the joy of validating a new tactic, the warmth of the mess hall wreathed in cooking smoke, and the reluctance of parting at discharge.
[Photo caption] A soldier leafs through a veteran's photo album. Photo by Cui Qinghao.
No matter how time flows, whenever someone turns the pages to the moments frozen in the album, the warmth and glory inscribed in the radar soldiers' years of keeping the watch surge back to the surface.
Whenever new soldiers join the company or veterans are discharged, Instructor Guo brings everyone to linger here and recall together the stories behind the photographs. When this year's new soldiers joined the company, he pointed to one photograph and said: "On our island, there has never been a soldier who charges forward alone. Behind every person stands the whole squad, shoulder to shoulder."
There is one photograph in which the lens has frozen a moment of celebration after an evaluation — Private Su Kaidi stands at the dormitory door, his face full of emotion and surprise. His entire squad surrounds him; the squad leader holds a birthday cake in both hands, the flickering candlelight reflected in everyone's smiling faces.
When Su Kaidi first arrived on the island, he was slow to grasp the essentials of radar operation, and the occasional mistakes made him grow silent and self-doubting — he always felt he was an invisible "nobody" in the collective, someone who could be there or not. That day, when his duty shift ended deep in the night and Su Kaidi pushed open the dormitory door, his entire squad burst into a birthday song. In the warm candlelight, his eyes turned red.
After the cake was eaten, the squad leader gave Su Kaidi a light pat on the arm: "Settle your mind and train. Don't lose heart — the whole squad is with you." In that moment, all the grievances and exhaustion quietly dissolved in the warmth of the military family.
Today, the radar soldiers have inscribed precious memories in that photo album: from the greenness of first arriving on the island, to the composure of the first independent duty shift, to the shining moment of being commended as a "Four-Haves" (四有) outstanding soldier… Each once-green face has undergone its own distinct growth and transformation.
Instructor Guo says that the veterans' photo albums are the island's "gift of time" to the soldiers who guard it — new soldiers who have just arrived on the island leaf through them and come to understand the warmth of comrades helping one another; veterans who have taken off their uniforms open them and pack their military youth into the luggage of memory.
On the eve of the July 1st anniversary, the radar station received a letter from discharged veteran Yang Hexiang. After taking off his uniform and returning to university, he often leafs through his military photo album. The gritting of teeth on the training ground, the deep nights on watch at the post, the New Year's Eve dinner in the barracks… Whether struggle or emotion, whether gain or regret, it is all as he wrote in his letter: "The barracks taught me that there is no obstacle that cannot be crossed. Those years of striving shoulder to shoulder with my comrades are an irreplaceable spiritual treasure."
Growth is like a wave in the long river of time, refracting the light of the sun.
After his discharge, veteran Luo Gaojing became an auxiliary police officer at a local police station. In his wallet he keeps a group photo of his entire squad. This past spring festival, when he looked again at the familiar faces in the photograph, he couldn't help sending a text message to his squad leader: "Scanning the map of China, between the pale blue expanses and the crisscrossing lines of latitude and longitude, our island is a tiny 'dot' that is very hard to find. Yet it is on this 'dot' that the most moving face of our youth was recorded — it is the place that haunts my dreams…"
Page after page of light and shadow turns; the stories of perseverance and growth are inexhaustible. Some have shed their greenness; some have gained the strength of standing shoulder to shoulder; some have found a place to rest a long and lingering attachment.
Youth and dreams, hot blood and responsibility, the ordinary and the great — frozen by the lens into eternity. Every page holds the warmth of "home" and the colors of growing up.