At dawn Deng Zhangde still touches the scar on his left chest as if checking that his life belongs to him. The mark, he says, is a daily reminder that he survived a battle that claimed so many of the men he called brothers, and that his survival carries a responsibility: to keep watch over the peaceful, prosperous society they fought for.
Deng enlisted in 1951 at the age of 17 after lying about his age and answering a village call for volunteers. He remembers his father pressing two gleaming silver coins into his palm and saying simply, "Come back alive." That command—"come back alive"—became a small seed of hope he would carry through campaigns, artillery barrages and months underground.
In training Deng learned an early lesson in political purpose: the instructor framed their duty not as abstract patriotism but as protection of newly redistributed land, food and the fragile gains of recent reforms. That linkage between personal survival and collective wellbeing underpinned what many soldiers felt was at stake as they crossed the Yalu into Korea—home and harvest as much as ideology.
The reality of war, Deng says, was physical and banal rather than cinematic: hunger, exhaustion and the peculiar terrors of night marches. Men developed habits born of necessity—relying on another's sight if you lost your own to night-blindness, passing the last drops of water to a comrade thought more likely to survive. Trust between soldiers was not rhetorical; it was the condition of staying alive.
Deng’s account of the Shangganling (Triangle Hill) campaign in late 1952 is pitched in the close-up details of tunnel warfare. He describes crawling under the white canvas of a captured parachute as concealment, timing the pauses in an enemy machine gun to dash into a main dugout, and handing a folded triangular letter to a commander in oil-lamp light before leading a counterattack that helped retake a bunker. These episodes explain why the battle, in Chinese memory, is at once a tale of endurance and improvisation.
When the fighting reduced entire ridgelines to stumps and blew the trees clear out of the earth, the surviving men retreated deep into tunnels where air tasted of sulphur and wet earth. Deng recalls a ritual of shared denial: a wounded man refusing the scarce water cup that was passed around because he wanted it to go to whoever could keep fighting. Moments like that made the loss of comrades feel like the loss of entire possible futures rather than only personal grief.
Deng and four others volunteered for a twenty-four-hour sentry duty on a crucial slope near where the celebrated hero Huang Jiguang fell. Outnumbered and often down to rocks and hand grenades, they repelled repeated enemy assaults and held the line. For that action Deng received a special commendation, his squad a collective first-class merit—symbols of state recognition that followed a life of postwar work and later retirement.
Despite official honours and a squad named in his honour, Deng says he has long been unsettled by what his fallen comrades lost: the quiet futures of marriage, farming and old age that could never be lived. A question his grandson posed—why did the men refuse to drink water when they were so thirsty?—crystallised his understanding: those who gave up the cup gave up a future so that others might keep one.
In the last two decades Deng has turned that unease into education. He travels to schools and military units not to sermonise but to recount the sensory specifics of combat—the grit, the hunger, the fear—so young people understand that heroism was chosen by ordinary men under extraordinary strain. He says he now watches the calm streets and laughing children on behalf of those who cannot see them, a living custodian of a sacrifice the nation still commemorates.
Shangganling is one of the touchstones of Chinese war memory from the 1950–53 Korean War, a battle that the People’s Republic has used to symbolise collective endurance and the costs of resisting foreign intervention. As veterans age and the living links to 1950s combat fade, first-person narratives like Deng’s help transmit a moral message about duty and sacrifice to generations with no direct memory of the conflict.
That transmission matters beyond national commemoration. It feeds into contemporary narratives about the military, citizenship and the state’s obligation to veterans; it is material for patriotic education; and it shapes how China’s modern security choices are framed for domestic audiences. The tale of a single soldier keeping watch over prosperity is both intimate and emblematic of how the PRC stitches wartime sacrifice into its present legitimacy.