By Wang Da and Wang Yuka
At the Escuela de Operaciones Especiales General de División Andrés Rojas, a school of special operations in Venezuela which is popularly nicknamed as the hunter school in China, the ruthless subject titled "breaking through enemy interdiction barrage", along with many others, constitute the "hell-like trip" for Zhao Guohua, a staff officer from a special operations brigade of the PLA’s 76th Group Army.
The PLA first assigned special troops to the hunter school in 1999 and Zhao Guohua was among the latest Chinese special troops graduating from the Curso Intrenacionl de Fueraza Especiales (course for international special operations forces) there. He survived serial hell-like training on diving, sniping, helicopter landing, etc., and went through all the tests with the third-highest score among all the participants, for which he was granted the commando badge, a sign of the highest honor.
Knockout begins before the course kicks off.
The opportunity of training at the hunter school is greatly valued by members of the special operations forces (SOF) all over the world. The newly promoted company commander Zhao Guohua is no exception. After rounds of selection and Spanish training, he, along with seven other members, finally came to their dreamland.
Located in the middle-east Venezuela, the training range is built on a mountain top at the elevation of 1,000m, surrounded by mountains and facing the Caribbean Sea in the north. Zhao Guohua and his peers had their hair cut and lived in the tin shacks of extremely poor conditions. During the daytime, it was more than 30℃ outdoors and up to 50℃ indoors, but at night it was only about 10℃. The school was infested with mosquitoes, insects, and snakes.
But the poor living conditions were nothing compared to the unique training mode at the school, of which there was no training program, no plan, nor any notice for preparation.
Before the training officially began, one day during the morning jogging, the trainees were ordered to jump into the cold water inside the deep mountain after running for more than ten kilometers. "This is really nightmare. I want to quit..." Zhao heard two foreign soldiers with knee injuries talking in the water. As soon as they got back, several soldiers went to the square and tolled the bell. Toll the bell, lower their national flag, and write a statement of voluntary withdrawal - that’s the quitting process at the school.
The rest 70 soldiers were asked to sign a waiver declaration with the school, which was written in Spanish and included numerous and complex articles, with some words difficult for Zhao to comprehend. Zhao understood the document was likely to have something about possible casualties during the training, to which the school is not liable. But he signed it with great calm. At that time, he might have not realized that the cruel training in the few months to come would leave an indelible impression on his mind.
The training is devastating in a nutshell.
Cadets at the hunter school do not have name, title, or position but a randomly handed numerical codename. Zhao Guohua’s number was 71.
Most of the days were spent in marching and the routes were never the same; on nights the cadets received various punishments and had only three to four hours’ sleep. At the rare intervals, they could quickly fall asleep whether in howling wind, rain or scorching heat, said Zhao.
The cadets only had one burrito and some boiled beans for each meal, so Zhao always felt hungry. "Even the trainer's dog eats better than us," he recalled. All the soldiers would rush to wash the food containers, so as to grab what was left at the bottom.
"The trainers ordered the cadets to carry logs, run on mountains, march with load, climb obstacles and push vehicles to exhaust them, and then tried to destroy their willpower with fatigue, cold, hunger, tear gas, scolding, physical punishment and captive abuse," Zhao wrote in his report after returning to China, "the training was devastating in every way."
Several days later, the bell was tolled successively. "Phasing participants out was the trainers' goal." Most participants were kicked out during the "aguafrio" (pouring cold water), an exercise that was a horrible memory for all.
Whenever a cadet broke a rule, the trainer would pour freezing spring water on them with a barrel or pipe, both during the day and at night, until someone quitted. Zhao was once punished with only the sports shorts and a vest on. And for another time, his training outfit and backpack were wet through, but he was not allowed to change and had to leave the clothes on him dried naturally. "They didn't stop until my lips turned blue with coldness."
What was most excruciating was to be exposed to wind after being poured water. "Participants can feel the heat flowing away from themselves little by little", so much that they felt warm when water was poured on them again. Zhao Guohua and his fellow Chinese soldiers wrapped themselves up in plastic wraps to keep off the cold and retain as much heat as possible. How could he ever imagine that what impressed him most by tropical Venezuela was the bitter cold?
There were unlimited ways to punish the cadets at hunter school, of which the most terrifying one for Zhao was "head plank" and "fist plank". "Head plank" means the soldier has to prop his body above the ground with his head and feet, which creates an immediate feeling of "encephalemia", while the more ruthless "fist plank" means the soldier should prop his body up with knuckles of the two interlocked hands and the feet, arms straight, which would make his knuckles bleeding after merely a few minutes.
A relatively easy affliction was jogging, sometimes at the square and sometimes at the airport. Zhao Guohua measured with his steps that the airport runway was 1.4km long. But the good days didn't last long. Starting from the third week, trainers began to hurl tear bombs from the square uptake, forcing the cadets downwind to spread apart. The trainers would come back after the smoke was gone and pour water on them.
Later the cadets knew better. They sneaked away along with the trainers, only to find that trainers began to hurl tear bombs after a forced march when everyone was too exhausted to run away. Zhao Guohua could still remember how helpless he felt then, and the only thing he could manage to do was lifting his clothes and covering his mouth and nose after a fashion.
"At that moment, I knew what despair felt like," said Zhao with a bitter smile.
Hell Week is the darkest moment before dawn.
But that was just the beginning. When he came to the last week of the third month, the most desperate "Hell Week", Zhao was forced to the verge of collapse by the high-intensity training.
"We were like robots following orders mechanically," he said. There was a new trainer every two weeks or so, and they "only got tougher". In the later stage, Zhao often felt pain all over his body as if he was about to fall apart, and had to use the anti-inflammatory drug, salve mull or nerve blocks injection to keep on.
During the loaded march on the second day of Hell Week, Zhao suddenly lost consciousness and fell straight to the ground, breaking a front tooth. Because of endless pain, he could barely eat anything and the idea of giving up was gnawing at him and eroding his willpower.
The most dangerous moment appeared when they were on the way of a seemingly endless log-carrying march, during which a sudden leg cramp made Zhao unable to continue. "You go first", he told the other three Chinese soldiers, feeling completely out of hope.
Luckily, his peers didn't listen to him, but changed the position to take more pressure off him. In the end, the four Chinese special forces members finished that mountain march, using up the last bit of strength.
Two extremely risky subjects of the Hell Week left a deep impression on the trainees. One was "jumping off from a 10m cliff", in which the cadets, carrying gun and backpack, had to jump from a cliff more than 10 meters high into a river, and a protruding rock was lying right beneath the cliff. There was a soldier who hit his leg on the rock when jumping and had comminuted fracture. Without any hesitation, Zhao jumped off after a run-up and got over with it.
Another one was "breaking through interdiction barrage", the last subject of the selection training, in which more than ten hurdles were placed within a section of 200m, and two heavy machine guns by the side would barrage at the soldiers all the time. It must be noted that before passing the hurdles, the soldiers just finished a 40km load-carrying march and everyone was more than exhausted.
Before the training began, a petty officer demonstrated for the cadets. He dashed forward at full throttle, leaving bullets behind, but fell when jumping across the wooden piles. An ambulance came and took him away immediately.
"Was he hit?" The cadets were guessing. "Do we continue?" Zhao Guohua was caught by a fear never felt before. Time stands still and he could even hear his heartbeat.
But a shout from the trainer pulled him back into reality, and he, throwing every thought out of his mind, dashed out with a gun in hand. The two heavy machine guns began to fire away, leaving bullets, smoke, and dirt only five meters after him. Zhao darted ahead shouting the motto of the school - this is the place to harden your will, forge your mind and temper your body; this is the place to cultivate the most experienced and atrocious commando.
All of a sudden, like in a film, Zhao Guohua couldn't hear the swishing bullets behind him anymore and all he could see were the hurdles in front of him. When jumping over the last hurdle, he looked back and realized that he just had a narrow escape from death.
Going back to the range, Zhao, to his great surprise, saw the non-commissioned officer who “was hit and taken away” before. He turned out to be an “actor”. Later the trainer explained that the load-carrying march in the early stage and the wounded “actor” later were to make the cadets feel the pressure from a real war environment.
We bring the useful experience back to China.
By the end of the devil training, only 21 soldiers left out of the 71 three months ago. As a tradition at the school, the president put a commando badge with a 2cm metallic pin on Zhao Guohua's left chest. The badge brought him honor and set him thinking.
"Two things about the hunter school have left the deepest impression on me - one is the tempering of willpower, and the other is the realistic training atmosphere," said Zhao.
He also discovered an interesting pattern during the training. The trainers didn't seem to care whether a soldier ran to the front line during a specific session. Instead, they would punish the one who performed too superbly and the better the performance, the harsher the punishment. For the trainers, only those who made it to graduation could be considered winners.
"Any form of war is strenuous and painful. When you are in a limit state, it's your willpower that keeps you on, not physical strength or some specific skill," - that's Zhao's understanding of what the hunter school is aiming at.
Another impression he had of the trainers was that they were "highly conscious of realistic combat". There was a time when the trainer held their shooting training in a knee-deep ditch in the mountain rather than on the shooting range or an open clearing. Targets were on the branches on the cliff, on waterside weeds, or on piles of rocks, so the soldiers had to search and shoot at the same time.
"We can learn from that," said Zhao, adding that "our training should focus on specific skills, such as distance, speed, and precision, while paying close attention to overall capabilities in a realistic war environment."
The training at the hunter school made him realize that the consciousness of training and war-preparedness should not be slacked for a second. After coming back in September 2019, Zhao collected many case studies to temper his ability of judgment and reaction, and while on duty, he often suggested the leaders organize emergency training of specific contingents.
At one time, Zhao was assigned to inspect the preparation of war-readiness materials, including whether the batteries in tactical flashes have power and whether the workboxes are properly loaded. He also organized special training to help soldiers take guns more quickly, as "these details reflect how well a force is prepared for war".
Despite a tight schedule, Zhao Guohua still recalls those days at the hunter school every once in a while, where a wooden badge with his name on it is hanging on the wall of honor. He doesn't want to recall the painful training, but he knows that the rare and thought-provoking experience has brought him too much change.
