"I Taught Soldiers How to Choose a Path, and Found the One I Wanted to Walk Myself"

Company Commander Guo Kai of a Certain Unit of the Information Support Force——

"Teaching Soldiers to Choose a Path"

■ Zeng Hengjie, Information Support News Reporter Ma Jing

The first time he gave a class to officers and soldiers, Guo Kai, company commander of a certain unit of the Information Support Force, was mid-lecture when he casually let slip: "Look here—traveling from Point A to Point B, this hilly terrain is an unavoidable passage..."

A few soldiers in the audience exchanged glances. "What hilly terrain?" "Isn't that just the slope between the equipment room and the launch position?"

After class, one soldier couldn't help asking: "Company Commander, were you a teacher before?"

Guo Kai smiled. He really had been.

In 2014, Guo Kai—then a university student—enlisted for the first time, serving successively as a wireman, a cook, and an assault vehicle gunner. After leaving the service, he returned to campus, bringing with him the solid work ethic he had forged in the military. Through persistent effort, the student who had ranked at the bottom of his class before enlisting ended up winning a national scholarship. After graduation, he became a geography teacher. Though he felt a surge of pride every time he drew China's topographic map on the blackboard, he always sensed something was missing. He eventually figured out what it was: the purity and intensity of military life that kept pulling at him.

In 2019, Guo Kai enlisted a second time. Returning to the barracks, he was assigned to a communications unit. He began viewing everything around him through the professional lens of a geography teacher.

Where others looked at cables and saw cables, he looked at cables and saw contour lines, terrain cross-sections, and optimal routing paths. His apprentice Zhang Ming had spent a month running cable routes with him before finally blurting out: "Sergeant, your approach to laying cable is a bit strange—how do you think about it?"

Guo Kai crouched on the ground, a coil of fiber-optic cable in his hands, not looking up: "Look at this hill. If you need to run a line from the base to the summit, what's the best way to do it?"

Zhang Ming pointed in the direction of the straight line.

Guo Kai shook his head: "The straight line is the shortest, but it's not the best. Look at this gradient—gentle on this side, steep on that side. Taking the gentle slope adds 50 meters, but it's easier to maintain, and it's less likely to break in wind and rain."

Zhang Ming had a sudden realization: "Sergeant, you've really got something!"

"It's nothing much—I taught geography for a few years."

Before long, the fact that "Sergeant Guo used to be a geography teacher" had spread through the company. Everyone teased him: "Guo Kai is really cut out for this—he looks at everything like he's reading a topographic map..."

In 2021, Guo Kai passed the officer promotion examination and became a commissioned officer. In 2024, he was ordered to stand up a drone company in a certain coastal area. The location was a stretch of tidal flats with highly complex terrain.

How to proceed? Where to begin? On the first day, Guo Kai led six soldiers, standing in the mud, buffeted by a cold wind, holding a few scattered aerial photographs.

Guo Kai spread the photos on the ground, crouched down, and moved his finger along the coastline: "This is the wind gap—wind speeds run five to six on the Beaufort scale year-round, so the launch window is only in the early morning and evening. This is the tidal flat—the silt is deep, so landing zones must avoid it. This is the hilly terrain—it's a natural barrier, and also a signal dead zone..."

The soldiers gathered in a circle, watching him mark point after point on the terrain map.

One month later, they had covered the entire area on foot, mapping out every takeoff point, every flight route, and every signal dead zone with complete clarity. When the company later expanded to more than sixty personnel, newly arrived soldiers who received this terrain analysis material assumed it was a professional survey report issued by higher headquarters.

"Company Commander, you read the terrain really carefully."

Guo Kai said: "When I was teaching geography, the very first lesson I gave students was—you read terrain in order to fight..."

When he was a teacher, the textbook had a chapter called "Interpretation and Application of Topographic Maps." Every time he taught that chapter, he would say: "Don't think topographic maps are just exam questions—on the battlefield, terrain is life." When he said it then, the students below showed no reaction. Now when he says it, the soldiers below are all nodding.

Guo Kai has a distinctive approach to leading soldiers: he likes to help them think through "how to walk the road ahead." For those wanting to apply to a military academy, he helps them work out a time budget—how many hours a day can be squeezed out for study, which subject to start reinforcing, what score on a practice exam counts as solid footing. For those wanting to learn a technical skill, he draws up a reading list, clearly marking which book lays the foundation, which advances the skill, and which to tackle last. When someone wants to change their specialty track, he pulls out his own experience of switching roles and walks them through it, telling them which hurdle is the hardest to clear after the transition and how to get through it.

Someone joked with him: "Company Commander, this doesn't feel like leading soldiers—it feels like teaching students."

Guo Kai said in earnest: "Leading soldiers is sometimes really just like teaching students. You have to let people know where the road is and how to walk it most steadily."

The soldiers hold him in high regard—not only because he can read terrain. Someone told the reporter: "From Sergeant Guo to Teacher Guo to Company Commander Guo—he has walked every step of that road with real seriousness."

Someone once asked him what all that back-and-forth was worth. Guo Kai thought for a moment, then looked out toward the distant sea: "That's not back-and-forth. The road of a person's life is far more complex than any topographic map. I taught soldiers how to choose a path, and I found the one I wanted to walk myself."