Yang Yougang is teaching.Photo by Wu Fujiang

In a mountain col on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, officers and soldiers lined up neatly, staring at a target 150 meters away…

"Bang!" In an instant, the target was accurately hit. This sniper is Yang Yougang, deputy captain of a squadron of the Armed Police Tibet Corps. In the 19 years since he joined the army, he has successively won honors such as "Individual Model of Military Readiness" and "Top Ten Loyal Guards of the Chinese Armed Police". He has received first-class personal merit once, second-class merit once, and third-class merit four times.

Hearing his grandfather's stories about participating in the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea since childhood, Yang Yougang joined the army with the ambition of "becoming a sharpshooter".

After entering the sniper class, challenges also came: the first time he hit the target, he missed a shot; the second time, he still missed a shot; the third time… After more than 10 target shootings in succession, his performance still did not improve. .

Yang Yougang, who refused to admit defeat, insisted on practicing firing a gun with his eyes closed more than 500 times a day. He hung a kettle on his arm to practice raising his arm for two hours, hung a kettle on the barrel of the gun to practice, and used a needle tip to drill holes in rice…

Over the past two years, Yang Yougang conducted ultra-intensive training on subjects such as latency, endurance, and memory one by one. For many years in a row, Yang Yougang participated in the sniper competition of the team and won the first place.

"His biggest characteristic is his stubbornness towards sniping." said Liu Dingwei, who has been fighting on the plateau with Yang Yougang for more than 10 years.

Once, when hitting the target through the window, Yang Yougang fired as usual and did not hit the target.

After listening to his comrades' explanations using mathematical theories, he realized that relying solely on experience was not enough, and that theoretical study was equally important. So Yang Yougang bought mathematics and physics textbooks to study in depth, but it was very difficult for him to learn with a weak theoretical foundation.

"You can't do it without learning. What if you encounter a situation that requires calculation in actual combat?" Yang Yougang gritted his teeth and started to learn the mechanics and kinematics knowledge that is urgently needed for shooting. Under his leadership, the squadron set off an upsurge in theoretical knowledge learning and research. You can always see everyone discussing physics, mathematics and other difficult problems in the study room.

Through continuous learning and practice again and again, he discovered that the air density, air pressure, acceleration of gravity, etc. on the plateau were all slightly different from those in the plains. In order to break through the training limits, he began to continuously study plateau shooting topics.

One year, special forces from multiple countries were invited to conduct military exchanges, and Yang Yougang was responsible for demonstrating the very difficult subject of "sniping moving targets on the move".

The viewing site was crowded, and everyone was looking forward to the performance of this Chinese soldier. Yang Yougang carefully measured wind speed and other data on the orbital target that moved back and forth, and constantly corrected the ballistic trajectory.

1 minute, 2 minutes… As time passed by, when everyone was waiting a little anxiously, Yang Youcong decisively seized the opportunity and pulled the trigger. The target report showed that the bullet hit the target, and the observation group immediately burst into laughter and burst into lasting applause.

Over the years, Yang Yougang regarded every training as actual combat, carefully studied the methods of precise sniping in different environments, wrote nearly 300,000 words of study notes, and summed up the "Long Rifle Pursuit Shooting Method" and "'8'-Character Quick Reaction Shooting". More than 20 kinds of tactics, training methods and data, including the "Method", have been promoted and applied by the armed police force and even the entire army. He also taught his sniper skills, tactics, tactics, etc., and trained more than 200 teaching staff. "People's Daily" (Page 08, August 10, 2022)