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.
