Defying Orders 1

In the arduous years of the War of Resistance Against Japan, when the great famine of 1942 struck and Okamura Yasuji launched his massive mopping-up campaigns in North China, the able-bodied men of Dawu Village in southern Hebei were seized by the Japanese devils. The first thing the Eighth Route Army's armed work team—sent to establish base areas behind enemy lines—did was to rescue them from the tiger's jaws. Mo Tianliu, a wild, fearless mountain boy who hated evil as he hated poison; Sha Bangcui, a simple, honest human tank of boundless strength; the aged, pedantic yet deeply principled clan chief Uncle Jiang; and the peasants of southern Hebei driven to desperate resistance by the Japanese and the puppet troops—all were bound together by an unprecedented national catastrophe with the Eighth Route Army's armed work team, who risked death to destroy the Japanese invaders: a marksman who never missed, a hereditary swordsman from a bandit background with extraordinary skills, a "monkey" who scaled cliffs and mountains as if walking on flat ground, and a captain utterly selfless and wholly devoted to the common people… From suspicion to utter loyalty, from wariness to a bond of life and death, they fought as one in bloody battle to slaughter the invaders. Fearing no hardship and shrinking from no sacrifice, what did it matter if every man fell and every drop of blood was shed, if military orders were defied—so long as they could strike the Japanese and save their countrymen? A head cut off leaves only a bowl-sized scar; eighteen years later, one is a hero again!