Chapter 7 My Name is Fang Huai

"No cigarettes, no lighter, my name is Fang Huai."

Having said that, Fang Huai walked inside and started to pull out the straps from his backpack, organizing his bedding.

"Hey, Fang Huai, I'm Yue Tao. We arrived before you, so you should call us squad leader!" The skinny, dark-skinned guy with the pointed head snapped back to reality, standing up from his bed.

Fang Huai turned around and sized him up, guessing he was quite young, and smiled, "Hello, Squad Leader Yue."

"Hmm! His name is Chen Zhongqiang!" Yue Tao, a bit of a show-off, pointed towards the chubby guy on the upper right bunk as he introduced him.

Fang Huai: "Squad Leader Chen... "

Chen Zhongqiang hurriedly shook his head: "Just call me Chen Zhongqiang, don't call me squad leader."

"All squad leaders, all squad leaders."

Fang Huai mechanically agreed while quickly folding the sheets neatly, then turned to rummage through his things. He found a pen in his trunk, took out the refill, and used the sharp end to tuck all the edges of the sheet into the bed's seam.

Soon, the white sheet was stretched tight.

"Damn, bro, you're slick! Using a pen to fix the sheet, how did you think of that?"

Yue Tao was amazed, evidently having had a pretty relaxed couple of days.

Indeed, Hao Chengbin had been receiving recruits from Chongqing and even dozed off in the car today, probably having arrived in Chongqing overnight. With the squad leader absent, these two had likely been out of line for the whole day.

Fang Huai walked over to his bed to take a look. The sheet was so messy that if an ant got in, it would be split into several districts. He chuckled and handed over the pen cap.

"Do you two want to tidy up?"

Yue Tao immediately shook his head, fell back onto the bed like a corpse, covering his head with the blanket, entering a state of rest.

From under the blanket, a muffled voice came.

"No, no, I'll sort it out tomorrow when I get up."

Chen Zhongqiang on the opposite side, however, said, "I'll take it, let me use it."

Fang Huai handed over the pen and reminded, "Squad Leader Yue, if you sleep like that, tomorrow your sheet will definitely be too creased to fix...there's going to be an Internal Affairs inspection."

Yue Tao popped his head out, irritably saying, "No way, the company hasn't really been on our case these past couple of days! Firefighting must be different from other units!"

"That's because they haven't arrived yet. The soldier-receiving cadres told me everyone will be here tomorrow, then you'll see."

As Fang Huai finished speaking, Chen Zhongqiang across from him once again showed a gleam in his eyes.

"They're arriving tomorrow?"

Fang Huai glanced at him: "Don't get your hopes up, better quit, once everyone's here, management will tighten up too. Even if someone gives you cigarettes, there'll be no place to smoke. If you keep thinking about it, you'll suffer for months, and even after moving to the squad, smoking isn't allowed."

"The toilet, then!" Chen Zhongqiang stubbornly said.

The toilet... you'll find out in time.

Fang Huai waved his hand, too lazy to warn these two fools any longer, and, actually, better not to mention it at all—he himself was starting to crave a smoke.

Being forced to quit smoking is a challenge made all the harder with someone like this by your side, obsessing over it daily.

"Hey, you seem to know so much about the army, were you a militia in the Armed Forces Department before?" Yue Tao flipped over on the bed, curious.

"I had a cousin who served in the army," Fang Huai casually said.

Not explaining wouldn't be good; after all, he was quite familiar with certain things, and it was not top secret information—he wasn't planning on being secretive about it.

However, due to various contextual necessities on the way here, he had ended up 'enlisting' his entire family into the army.

Any group of people sitting down to chat about him would quickly realize he belonged to a genuine "military family."

The task was accomplished, no further ado needed, worst case scenario—he'd just make up another story.

"Oh... So do you know when we're moving to the squad..."

Before Yue Tao could finish, the door opened.

Hao Chengbin walked in, glanced at Yue Tao's messy bed, and handed the plastic bag he was carrying to Fang Huai.

"Put the things in the basin; I'll take you to the washing area."

Fang Huai took the bag and saw that it contained a bar of soap, shampoo, toothpaste, and a toothbrush.

"Thank you, squad leader."

Hao Chengbin took another look at Fang Huai's tidy bed and couldn't help but nod appreciatively.

"Hmm... Can you fold the blanket?"

"Reporting to the squad leader, I can a bit."

This was the truth. Fang Huai had left military service ten years prior, and since the day he got discharged and returned home, he had never made his bed again. His blanket folding skills could at best be described as so-so.

"Now they are all quad-fold blankets, not like the tri-fold blankets from before," Hao Chengbin guessed it might have been Fang Huai's father who taught him and worried that Fang Huai would apply the Internal Affairs standards from his father's era to everything.

Standards had changed over the years, and filling a piece of paper with errors was worse than leaving it blank.

"Reporting to the squad leader, I know," Fang Huai said with a nod.

"Oh? Did your father also teach you that?" Hao Chengbin asked, surprised.

Fang Huai shook his head: "I like to go online—most things, I learned by watching on the internet."

No sooner had the fib left his mouth than Yue Tao interjected from the side.

"Weren't you just saying your cousin taught you?"

Trickster.

Fang Huai immediately retorted, "Squad Leader Yue, I never said that!"

Hao Chengbin furrowed his brow, turned to look at Yue Tao, then turned back to ask.

"What did you just call him?"

Faced with a bit of embarrassment, Fang Huai said, "Squad Leader Yue... He said he came two days before me, and that I should call him squad leader. I thought the military rules had changed."

"I... squad leader, I was just joking with him!" Yue Tao immediately cried out.

Hao Chengbin's barely concealed displeasure was evident.

...

Two minutes later, the door to Squad Nine's room opened, and Yue Tao, standing beside his bed with a face as bitter as if he had eaten bad garlic, watched his sheet being pulled down and tossed aside.

"You have ten minutes. Also, clean up the bathroom before going to bed," Hao Chengbin left these words and led Fang Huai out.

Fang Huai felt relatively at ease the whole way.