“So I worked with the Chinese twice. The first time I worked with them, it was this massive co-op training event. It’s the one that you see on the news in America and causes everyone to freak out, even though it’s just Russia and China training and it’s scheduled like clockwork.

It takes place in North China, close to the Gobi desert. The Chinese aren’t very good hosts, and usually they just sit there for an hour boasting about their might while you sweat your balls off in full kit in the desert sun. Regardless, that training exercise was probably more dangerous than any of my three deployments.

The Chinese military has zero regard for safety, which is saying something coming from a guy who signed up to get shot at and jump out of planes. I watched Chinese Pvt’s dump a box of 60 year old grenades on the ground and just start throwing them in the open, with zero cover.

I’m talking about a field as flat as table, and these guys are throwing grenades with frag sleeves into the open, with no regard for anyone standing near them. During the night it would get freezing cold because of the wind blowing thru the plains. So we would find purpose built hills that they would dig with excavators.
Well little did me and my squad know that the Chinese army was using those as fu*king ramps for their Jeeps! They were literally driving them up and off these massive dirt mounds mere centimeters from our heads.

I could actually see the tires treads at night, that’s how close they were. The worst thing I think that happened was the Chinese Marines tried demonstrating one of their amphibious armored vehicles in this massive lake. Well it got about halfway through the lake but these massive bubbles started surrounding it as everybody looked on. Then it sank to the bottom like a rock, but the Chinese observers didn’t even flinch! We went out there with a bunch of zodiac type boats and tried to rescue them.

That was my first experience working with the Chinese. Underpaid, underperforming, and unprofessional to say the least.”
-Anon Former Russian Soldier. Beta Company, 218th Battalion, 45th Independent Guard Brigade. VDV.

Documented by Nicholas Laidlaw. Every soldier has a story, and every story deserves to be told.