Typhoons and surging tides fail to dampen sailors' spirits

Zhang remembers the night Typhoon Ketsana hit in 2009. The tides and winds destroyed the camp's walls and smashed the windows of the room in which he and his comrades were sleeping.

They awoke to find themselves floating in the water, and a sailor named Zhao Jianyun sustained a 10-centimeter gash to his stomach when he was hit by a shard of glass.

The electricity was cut off, and the sailors were unable to open the door because the wind was too strong. Working in the dark, they eventually managed to open the door by pulling on a thick rope around the handle, and then tied large rocks to themselves and crawled to the medical center.

"The distance was only about 20 meters but it took us half an hour," Zhang said, recalling that without electricity, the doctor operated on Zhao under a flashlight.

Qiu remembers that the seawater was 60 to 80 cm deep in the dining hall into which the sailors were evacuated. The water kept pouring in, and as the sailors were bailing it out, they saw pigs and sheep they had raised float by, carried into the sea.

Zhang said, "The first things we do after every typhoon are check our equipment to ensure that our duty posts are safe and then tend to our trees."

Li Wanglong, the former head of the machine gun squad, who arrived on the island in 2008, said: "Every time a typhoon kills the trees, we start replanting. I have planted thousands of trees on the island, and we consider a survival rate of 10 percent to be good."