Soon the helicopter was outside of the city and over rolling hills.
The chief said, “If war breaks out in the children’s world, it’s unlikely to be a high-tech war as we currently understand it. The shape of war may be more like the Second World War. But that is just a guess. Your minds are very different from adults’. Children’s war may take a form completely unlike anything we’re capable of imagining. But adults’ war is all that we can teach you right now.”
The helicopter flew for around forty minutes. Beneath them the vast expanse of ground was dotted with hillocks, and a desertified stretch and the remains of ground cover, from which a few columns of sand and dust rose.
“Class starts now, kid,” the chief announced. “The area beneath us was, back in the early eighties, the site of the largest land war games in military history.[4] Now we’ve turned it into a battlefield simulation. We’ve assembled five field armies to conduct exercises here.”
Lü Gang looked down. “Five armies? Where?”
The helicopter dropped swiftly, and Lü Gang saw that the dust columns were rising from roadways bearing tanks and other military vehicles that crawled off like beetles toward somewhere indistinct on the horizon. Some of them, he noticed, weren’t following the roads, nor were they trailing dust. They were moving far faster: he realized they were low-flying helicopters.
The chief said, “The Blue Army is assembling below us. Very soon it will launch an attack on the Red Army.” He pointed southward and drew an invisible line across the rolling hills. “See, that’s the Red Army’s defensive line.”
The helicopter headed toward that line and landed at the foot of a hill. Here, the ground was crisscrossed with tire ruts slicing through the red soil. They disembarked and got into green coms vehicles that took them into a cave in the hillside. Lü Gang noticed that the soldiers busy at work outside the vehicles, as well as the guards that saluted them at the cave entrance, included both children and adults.
A heavy iron door opened and they entered a spacious chamber with situation maps of the battlefield displayed on three large screens on the opposite wall, red and blue arrows tangled up like some grotesque creeping animal. In the center of the chamber was a large sand table surrounded by bright computer screens attended by camouflaged officers. Half of them, Lü Gang noticed, were children. They all stood at attention and saluted when the chief entered.
“This is the Red Army battle display system?” the chief asked, pointing at the large screens.
“Yes, sir,” replied a colonel.
“Do the children know how to use them?”
The colonel shook his head. “They’re learning. But they still need adults’ assistance.”
“Hang up the combat map. It’s the most reliable, at any rate.”
As several officers unrolled a large combat map, the chief said to Lü Gang, “This is Red Army Command. In this simulation, several hundred thousand children are learning warfare. Their course of study ranges from how to be a private to how to be a field army general. You, my boy, have the hardest course of any of them. We don’t expect you to learn much in such a short time, but we’ve got to instill in you a correct, precise appreciation and instinct for warfare at a high level. And that’s not an easy thing, either. In the past, progressing from a military academy cadet to your present position would take at least thirty years, and without those thirty years of bottom-to-top experience, you’ll find it hard to understand some of the things I’m going to tell you. We’ll just do our best. Fortunately, your future opponents aren’t much better off than you are. Starting now, forget everything you’ve learned about war from the movies, as completely as you can. You’ll find out very soon that movie warfare is totally different from the real thing. It’s vastly different even from the battle you commanded in the valley. The battles you’ll command might be ten thousand times that size.”
The chief turned to a senior coloneclass="underline" “Go ahead.”
The senior colonel saluted and went out. He returned not long afterward. “Sir, the Blue Army has launched an all-out offensive on the Red Army’s defensive line.”
Lü Gang looked around him but didn’t see any obvious changes. The tangle of arrows on the situation map were not moving. The sole difference was that the adults around the sand table and at the combat map had stopped their urgent explanations; the children had put in earpieces and microphones and were standing in wait.
The chief said to him, “We’ll get started, too. Kid, you’ve received a report on the enemy’s movements. What’s the first thing you need to do?”
“Order the defensive line to block the enemy!”
“That’s not an order.”
Lü Gang looked blankly at the chief. Another three generals came over from the exercise directorate. Then they felt muted tremors from outside.
The chief prompted him: “What does your order consist of? What are you basing your order on?”
He thought a moment. “Oh, right. Determine the main direction of the enemy’s attack.”
The chief nodded. “Correct. But how do you make that determination?”
“The place where the enemy has put the most troops and is attacking the fiercest is its main direction.”
“Basically correct. But how do you know where it’s putting most of its troops, and where it’s attacking the fiercest?”
“I’ll go observe from the highest hill on the front lines!”
The chief’s expression did not change, but the other three generals sighed softly. One seemed about to say something to Lü Gang but was stopped by the chief, who said, “Very well. Let’s go have a look.”
A captain handed helmets to Lü Gang and the chief, and handed binoculars to Lü Gang, and then opened the iron door for them. Explosions rolled in along with gusts of wind that smelled faintly of smoke, and the sound grew more deafening as they crossed the long passage to the outside. The ground vibrated under their feet, and the smoke grew thicker in the air. Squinting against the bright sunlight, Lü Gang looked about him, but the scene before him was little different from when he had arrived: the green coms vehicles, the rut-crossed ground, and a few placid-looking nearby hills. He couldn’t locate the shells’ impact points; the explosions sounded like they were coming from a different world, but somehow seemed right beside him. A few armored helicopters flew low over the opposite hilltop.
The waiting Jeep sped them along a winding mountain road, and in just a few minutes they reached the top of the hill, which held the command post and a radar station, an enormous, silently spinning antenna. A kid stuck his head out the half-open door of a radar control vehicle, his too-large helmet wobbling, and quickly drew back and shut the door.
They exited the car, and the chief swept a hand about him. “This high ground is an excellent vantage point. Make your observations.”
Lü Gang looked around. Visibility of the uneven, rolling terrain spread out before him was indeed excellent. He located the blast points, all of them far off, the newer ones still smoking. Some hills were shrouded in a thicker smoke and dust and seemed to have been under assault for quite some time, and all he could see were sporadic flashes of explosions.
The targets were visible in all directions, sparsely but evenly distributed throughout his field of vision rather than in a line like he had imagined. Picking up the binoculars, he scanned the scene with no particular target in mind. His viewfinder raced across the meager ground cover, exposed rock, and sand, but he saw nothing else.
When he trained the binoculars on a far-off hill currently under attack, all he could see was a haze of smoke blurring out the scene itself, which nevertheless remained ground cover, rock, and sand. He held his breath and looked more carefully, and at last in a dry streambed at the foot of the hill he found two armored vehicles, but in the blink of an eye they vanished into a valley. On another roadway between two hills he found a tank, but before long it turned and headed back the way it came. He set down the binoculars and watched the battlefield in a stupor.