I woke up at 5.30 AM in a Chinese military camp, nerve center of the relief effort in Sichuan. The People's Liberation Army is clearly in charge here in Yingxiu, pretty much the quake's epicenter. Cooks working at shiny new mobile military kitchens churned out breakfast: huge vats of steaming rice congee and boiled eggs. Blackhawks and Russian choppers zip in and out almost nonstop during daylight hours (averaging more than 60 flights a day), hovering like gigantic dragonflies

 "You Americans won't sell us spare parts for the Blackhawks," the party secretary of Aba prefecture, where Yingxiu is located in Wenchuan county, told me in an interview last night. He was referring to U.S. sanctions on the sales of certain military hardware to China (the sanctions date back to the aftermath of the June 1989 Tiananmen bloodletting). "We're at the point where we have to take parts off one Blackhawk and put them on another just to keep keep flying." He promised to put me aloft in a Chinese military chopper, adding with impish humor, "If it's a Blackhawk then you'll see for yourself how difficult it is to maintain them." Very funny.

But right now I have an even more important mission to prepare for: Premier Wen Jiabao is slated to visit Yingxiu imminently, and so is United Nations general secretary Ban Ki Moon.  That's why I spent the night in a camouflage tent and dined on instant noodles last night. The road from Chengdu to Yingxiu is treacherous, slippery with landslides and littered with the carcasses of cars crushed by huge falling rocks. One "East Wind" truck sits by the roadside, completed smashed with a boulder the size of my bathroom still on top of it.  Not the kind of journey you want to be rushign through, impatient to catch a morning visit by the premier of China. Besides, the PLA soldiers here turned out to be hosts with the mostest. More on all this in a later blog.