'Iron Army' soldiers recall rescue operations

Hairdresser Song Yanmei had been buried under the ground floor of what used to be a five-story building in Yingxiu for two-and-a-half days when Liu's company heard her crying for help on the morning of May 15, 2008.

The soldiers quickly located her whereabouts and managed to dig a hole, through which only a teenager could fit. The 165-cm An immediately volunteered.

Like most Chinese army men, An, from Henan's Dengxian county, grew up in an impoverished village. For them, enlisting is a natural choice. Their families see the army as offering a stable environment and compensation, while the adolescent boys themselves envy "smart-looking, masculine army guys".

An joined the army following the footsteps of his elder brother, who enlisted a year earlier than him. His May heroics, though, have motivated many more, including his younger brother.

To save Song, An went back and forth between the hole three times amidst more than 100 strong aftershocks. He fed Song, who had not eaten anything since the tremor, with the company's limited food supply. He encouraged her to stay strong. He told her to believe in the army. Then, he showed her why.

Half-lying under the debris, Song's feet were deeply caught between the rubble, her legs atop two bricks. Plan A, in an ideal situation, required the rescuer to remove the bricks by hand, and, quite literally, dig her out.

The intensity of aftershocks, though, made the company commander opt for the much-safer Plan B: Amputation.

But An refused, stressing that he could save all of her. And he did.

When Song was pulled out of the debris at 2:05 pm that day, nearly 72 hours after the quake, the first thing she said was: "I'm going to introduce a girl to him (An)."

An, still single, says his happiest moment in Sichuan was when a half-recovered Song came to thank the troops in Yingxiu last summer.

Song's hairdressing business has long reopened. And knowing that, An says, is comforting enough.

More than 300 soldiers from An's battalion took part in rescue and reconstruction in Yingxiu, according to battalion commander Zhang Dianshu.

Zhang, in his 18th year at the military, said he had never seen anything like the aftermath of last year's earthquake. "Yingxiu was just like hell when we first got there on May 14," he recalled.

Even for him, the picture was horrifying. "The dying, the crying, the injured, the dead, all out there, laying, half-sitting, or trying to stand beside the broken roads and crumbled houses that filled our eyes."

By the time they left, though, reconstruction was well underway. Most locals had moved into lines of prefabricated houses erected by the army. A "quake lake" lying about 6 km to the north of Yingxiu and on the upper-reach of the Minjiang River had also been drained, thanks to the battalion.

The locals have come to call a new concrete road, built by the soldiers to link Yingxiu with the outside, the "Iron Army Road".