After a Long Respite...

Met a jc friend at the bus stop back home today and was chastised about not updating the blog for so long. Well, honestly, I really can't remember what happened on the first weekend of June that made me unable to write (which gives you an idea of just how bad my memory has become), but what happened last weekend makes for a good story.

So the second week of June proved to be one of those weeks which really left me flabbagasted at the incompetence and excesses of the SAF. We spent a total of three days and two nights in Tekong, and suffered the following amazing screw ups:

1. We rode over twenty bikes from our camp in Chua Chu Kang to Tekong and back (crossing the straits by this sea-faring platform called the RPL), just for one hour's worth of day and night cross country riding, which could have been easily achieved in mainland Singapore.

2. Having unloaded everything and set up camp, we were told were we at the wrong area and had to move to a different place. Apparently my OC mistook one camp site for the other and as a result, indented the wrong camp site. Great. So we pack up everything and go to the new camp site, only to find that it's way too small to fit us all, and so negotiations are made to use the original camp site. So yes, strong feeling of deja vu as we re-unload all the stuff and re-set up camp at the first camp site.

3. By some stroke of amazing planning, someone indented 4000 rounds of blanks for our simple one-day exercise, which followed the cross country riding. Yes, 4000 rounds divided among about twenty men, who were playing the role of enemy, which I was part of, to be totally expended in a single night. Needless to say, we spent most of the night just loading and firing our weapons just to expend our ammo, without a care of whether the opposing side was infiltrating our position. Just to give you an idea of how ridiculous 4000 rounds is, an M16 magazine takes a grand total of 30 rounds.

4. When we returned to camp, a single blank round was found in one of the magazines in the armskote. As the magazines are unmarked, it is impossible to tell who was responsible for the act of negligence. SAF is amazingly anal about ammunition, and rightly so too. Before a weapon is brought back from outfield to the armskote, it is checked first by the bearer of the weapon for any excess ammunition in the weapon, followed by an officer who declares one free of holding "any forms of pyrotechnics", and finally by the armskote personnel when the weapon is delivered into the armskote. How the round could have gone undetected through all the levels of checks may seem baffling, but considering how most of the times the checks are simply a matter of going through the motion, it isn't that surprising that what happened happened. Needless to say, what followed was a couple of hours of tekaning to the tune of "everything out, everything in" full pack inspections and countless of push ups. I love the way the commanders always assume it's us troopers who are responsible, because it's really the higher ups that are more complacent about these checks. Also, it's quite amusing how people think that punishment is a memory stimulant, otherwise, why would punishment lead to someone suddenly remembering that they forgot to check their arms?

This brings me to one of my favorite head slapping moments in the army, where an inappropriate question is used to elicit a required response:

Officer, to a group of soldiers: Anyone not feeling well?
(Awkward silence)
Officer, getting irritated that no one is replying: I said anyone not feeling well?
A bit of tentativeness, followed by a resounding "NO SIR!!"

The mechanics of all this is really quite subtle. The officer, asking a question that is directed at individuals, expects the group to respond as a coherent whole, as if he were asking "Is everyone feeling well?", which really cannot be answered by a group, since the group of soldiers can be thought of as autonomous agents who are expected to synchronize their actions to come up with a unanimious answer representing the global state of their group. Local synchronization to obtain global behavior - classic difficult problem yes?

5. To top everything off, my CSM went nuts when some biscuits fell out from one guy's field pack right in front of him and subsequently fell us all in, declaring that he had mentioned that he did not want to see combat rations stuffed in the cargo netting we have outside the field pack. Following that he declared that all those who had flouted his rule would receive 3 x extra duties, i.e. three extra weekend guard duties for each person. Totally blown out of proportion - three extras are given for far more serious offences, but obviously he was having PMS that day. Naturally, I will remember never to place my combat rations outside my field pack for quite a while, since I was one of the lucky eighteen who were awarded the extra duties.

Which brings me to what I did last weekend - Sunday guard duty, which wasn't too bad as my guard commander was nicely slack and I just ended up in a semi-comatose stupor for the entire day, watching Sunday morning cartoons (haven't seen these in quite a while), followed by inane Sunday afternoon chinese variety programs, followed by two movies, Bend It Like Beckham (lovely movie) and Braveheart (c'mon, it's a Mel Gibson film), and England vs France (yes, we all nearly went to bed, only to be roused by the two amazing last minute goals by Zidane).

This week, I was outfield again, playing enemy for some massive exercise known as Giant Buaya. A relative non-event, as we spent most of the time either baking in the sun or swatting commando-trained mosquitoes at night. However, on Wednesday, news broke out via SMS from friends that we were getting a two month reduction in NS. Waves of euphoria broke out in the group I was with, and screams of "ORD lor!" were heard from passing land rovers. I was more circumspect though, since my NS situation is rather unusual, having disrupted from service and all. So all of us huddled around my NS mate's Nokia 6610 with speaker radio when the six o'clock news was broadcast to listen to the news first hand. When I heard the words "disruptee will get the same cuts as others in the same batch" I was ectastic. But the flurry of phone calls to friends who are in the same boat as I am that followed sank my spirits as I learnt that "same batch" referred to same batch of enlistment, which meant that I wouldn't get to ORD earlier.

And so, bitter disappointment.