A Technical Section of a Certain Brigade Under the 82nd Group Army Establishes a Clear Orientation of Striving and Shouldering Responsibility Through Concrete Results
Late at night, the lights in the technical section of the repair battalion of a certain brigade under the 82nd Group Army remained bright. Engineer Min Qingdong was sitting with several technical backbone personnel around a computer screen, eyes fixed on the parameters displayed on the interface, pressing hard to tackle the entirely new subject of a "unit-level smart charging shelter (部队级智慧充电方舱)." Not long before, he and his team had seen their innovative results earn three national utility model patent certificates in succession. At that moment, those certificates were displayed neatly on the technical section's honor wall, alongside various equipment innovation reports and research breakthrough results.
"At first, this was just a blank wall," Min Qingdong said with feeling. One by one, the tangible results focused on combat readiness had transformed the wall from "blank" to "full," and had also borne witness to everyone's practice of striving hard, closely aligned with actual combat and diligent in study.
Li Bing, director of the technical section, said that when he had first been transferred to the post, the other units in the garrison had their pennants from competition victories and commendation certificates for meritorious service hanging in abundance, but the technical section's wall alone was bare—and his heart felt equally hollow.
When chatting with the section's officers and soldiers, several veteran backbone personnel revealed their true thoughts: "We just repair equipment—as long as we clear faults and complete support missions, that's enough"; "Pursuing patents and innovation is the business of research institutes; there's no point in us flailing around—if it works out, nobody pays attention, and if it fails, we get criticized"; "Honor belongs to the soldiers who compete on stage and charge on the front line; we work behind the scenes, and as long as we get by, there's no need to stick our necks out competing for this or that." Under the influence of these attitudes, the technical section had at one point developed unwritten "understandings" such as "report upward when something comes up," "sit and wait for supplies to be issued," and "never overstep boundaries."
Clearly all of them had professional training backgrounds, dealt with all manner of thorny problems year-round, and had the ability to solve more difficulties in training and combat readiness—so why were they passive in the face of their work, with no one willing to do a little more or take one more step? The battalion party committee recognized that a distorted view of political performance (政绩观) had become the ideological shackle obstructing officers and soldiers from shouldering responsibility and taking action.
"If we cannot win on the battlefield, support equals zero! We are on the front line of training troops, closest to the equipment, closest to actual combat. If we are unwilling to tackle hard support problems, then when we encounter equipment power failures and fire interruptions in actual combat in the future, are we supposed to wait for our superiors to deliver improved solutions to our hands?" At the organizational life meeting (组织生活会), this soul-piercing question caused more than a few comrades to bow their heads.
Looking again at that blank wall, everyone realized: a blank wall had never meant a lack of opportunity to render meritorious service—it meant that in their thinking they had chosen to lie flat and avoid, and had given up striving for honor.
Li Bing understood clearly that to break the deadlock, preaching alone was far from enough; the impasse had to be broken with concrete action and results. During a certification assessment for medium repair capability on a certain type of equipment, although the overall results were excellent, Li Bing's gaze fell on the deduction point for "non-standard construction of the battery charging room"—the charging room's level of intelligentization was low, causing batteries to suffer from problems such as "slow charging" and "incomplete charging." In high-intensity continuous field operations, this could very easily cause equipment to break down, constraining the unit's mobile combat capability.
Staff Sergeant First Class Zhao Dan, standing nearby, stared at the batteries being charged by a simple charger and said offhandedly: "If we could get an electronic display screen in the charging room that accurately shows the charging status of each battery, wouldn't that solve the problem?"
A glimmer of light flashed in Li Bing's eyes. That evening, he brought several backbone personnel to the battalion, laid out in full his ideas for optimizing the battery support mode, and received the full support of the battalion party committee.
With no mature plan and no ready-made experience, Li Bing led everyone to start from scratch. During the day, he planted himself in the charging room, taking massive amounts of measured data and debugging hardware; at night, he led the team in discussing program optimization and refining system logic.
On one occasion, the system suddenly crashed during a trial run and all data was reset to zero, instantly deflating some members of the team. "Start over from the beginning!" Li Bing stared at the black screen, and after a moment of silence said with resolve: "On the battlefield there is no chance to start over. The more sweat we shed now, the less blood we will shed in wartime."
After multiple rounds of refinement and optimization, a smart charging room system capable of scientifically setting charging modes and precisely recording charging times and counts was finally deployed and put into use. In a subsequent major exercise and training support mission, the system autonomously initiated emergency dispatch, and more than ten groups of batteries that had been undergoing centralized maintenance and servicing were all precisely issued from storage in a short period of time, successfully delivered to assault positions, and provided uninterrupted power support to front-line fire strike units.
Upon returning from the mission, the party branch carefully mounted the equipment innovation report on the honor wall. A backbone member said: "For the first time I felt that by rooting myself in my combat post and solving actual combat support problems, I too could earn weighty, visible honor."
The results on the wall became a silent mobilization order, inspiring all officers and soldiers to proactively target various support shortfalls for research and hard work. "Grassroots innovation need not be grand or sophisticated—only practical on the battlefield." Innovation results continued to go up on the wall, and this honor wall of concrete results became everyone's spiritual reference point.
Facing the problem that traditional classroom spoon-feeding instruction was tedious and rigid, and that annual equipment theory examination pass rates were poor, Engineer Min Qingdong drew inspiration from watching comrades around him play video games, and led several backbone personnel to invest in developing an equipment theory study system. They devoted all their spare time to studying computer fundamentals, code writing, and database construction from scratch—dissecting tutorials line by line, refining code sentence by sentence, optimizing the system item by item.
In the end, they produced an intelligent theory study system equipped with functions such as level-clearing mode, point reward systems, and rank advancement. Soldiers gathered around the screens, and their joy was plain to see as they watched the virtual equipment they controlled complete one level after another.
Relying on this independently developed digital personnel-cultivation system, the team successfully obtained a computer software copyright, and the brand-new certificate was solemnly mounted on the honor wall.
Today, the wall that was once entirely blank has gradually been filled with certificates and results. Over the past several years, the officers and soldiers of this technical section have cumulatively obtained more than ten national patents and more than twenty software copyrights; multiple equipment technical innovation and tactical method optimization results have been promoted and applied across the group army, effectively resolving multiple major and difficult equipment support problems and enhancing the unit's field and emergency equipment support capabilities.
Since last year, the brigade has pushed technical innovation experts to the forefront of exercises and training, integrating and optimizing personnel groupings—not only directly attaching them to mission detachments to provide accompanying support, but also moving forward at any time to provide mobile reinforcement support. The brigade party committee has also specifically studied and established a craftsman workshop (工匠工作室), an unmanned aerial vehicle specialized repair room, and other facilities, and the innovative atmosphere of researching for the sake of war has continued to grow.
A special honor wall can serve not only as a "roll of honor" commending the advanced, but can also become a "weathervane" for examining one's view of political performance and the effectiveness of combat readiness. The honor wall built up with patent certificates and innovation reports by the technical section of the repair battalion of a certain brigade under the 82nd Group Army has broken the traditional thinking of "only competition victories count" and "only meritorious service citations count," giving the unsung heroes who root themselves in their combat posts and solve actual combat problems their own moment in the spotlight. This is not only an innovative form of honor display, but more importantly a breaking of the ideological ice (思想破冰) at all levels toward fighting and preparing for war.
The transformation from "report upward when something comes up" and "sit and wait for supplies to be issued" to "proactively tackle hard problems" and "grind away at difficulties"—the change in officers' and soldiers' understanding of the mission and responsibilities they bear both reflects the results of carrying out study and education on establishing and practicing a correct view of political performance (正确政绩观), and also reminds us: true honor has never been waited for or endured into existence—it is fought for and earned through hard struggle with eyes fixed on battlefield requirements, rooted in one's combat post, and working with both feet on the ground.
Fighting toward war and preparing for war—what matters is concrete action. When every patent certificate carries the smell of gunpowder and every innovation report is connected to combat effectiveness, the honor wall can truly become the "spiritual reference point" of revolutionary servicemembers in the new era.