Earning Stripes

I took a very unusual route in NS. I was supposed to get trained as an non commissioned officer, and I was doing a trade course, when a very bad accident happened, and I worried for a while that I would never play the piano again. I was supposed to spend 6 months being a clerk, or being sidelined. But I stalled for time, and it was more like 16 months. 16 months of doing not very much, going home at 5. In a way, that was the least stressful time in my life. In another way, that was a time when I felt I could have done much with my life, but didn’t.

I went back into training, became an NCO, and after that, I somehow managed to convince them to continue being a clerk, because I only had 4 months left on my national service balance. They warned me, “you’re going to find it very tough when you’re on reservist training.” Well, reservist training is reservist training, and it was supposed to be easy, isn’t it?

The first few times, it was difficult for me to come to terms with what was happening. And I don’t know if I looked at it in a very immature way, but I did a lot of head scratching and sulking during the first few times. Some sessions were better, others were worse. I spent a lot of time hiding somewhere and reading a book, and somehow I don’t regret that. However, after 1 exercise where I screwed up, an officer pulled me aside and said, “do you want to do this seriously, or do you want me to have you transferred to another company?” I said, OK, I’ll give it a shot.

Later on, I got into a big argument with another corporal who was on that exercise, and I have since suspected that he was the one who badmouthed me to the officers. But he wasn’t around this time.

This ICT, I thought a bit about what it means to earn your stripes. One of the reasons is this: things look a lot like they did during the year that I became an NCO. We also had El Nino, and with that, a drought and a haze. There was a financial crisis going on (but since the 90s this happened all the time). And there was a feeling that possibly in the near future, something would happen that would substantially change my life. There was the waiting at home for the possibility of a recall. There was the world cup. Back then, I was finally becoming an NCO, at a time when people had almost finished serving their national service. Now, I’m finally coming to terms with being an NCO at a time when most of my 10 years of reservist training were going to be over.

There were a few rules that you just had to understand. First of all, some of your most important relationships are with your peers. I had hung out with a lot of the corporals at first, because a lot of them were nearer my age. The sergeants were younger. But a lot of them were looking at me funny, like “how come this sergeant is asking me for a lot of stuff?” I decided, go hang out with the sergeants instead. I started to hang out more at the mess than at the canteen. And while they didn’t exactly teach me how to do my job properly, I got some news from them, I saw how they interacted with the corporals, and I learnt a few things from them.

Things became easier when I started acting like a boss, when I asked them for small things that it was well within their power to do. When I asked them how to do stuff that somebody had taught me long ago but I later forgot, most of them would give me a tip or two. Of course, there was the freedom that you had of being a free agent, you didn’t belong to a clique, or a gang. And that is the position I have found myself in for much of my life: never completely a member of any one gang, but somebody who drifts around and tries to be on a first-name basis with people from different backgrounds.

One of the more interesting things took place when we were preparing for the exercises. I was one of the very few sergeants who was not a section commander. They were about to make me a section commander when I told them, no, I was not up to the task yet. But there was an exercise preparation that took place outside of the camp, for the section commanders. And I was left behind to prepare a lot of the vehicles. I had to learn quickly how to do a system check. I decided that this was a chance to learn a lot of stuff. I went walking around a lot, plugging in cables here, answering questions there, walking between section and platoon headquarters, trying to troubleshoot. I was the only guy around with 3 stripes instead of 2, and naturally people assumed I knew everything when I didn’t. In the end, the problems were all solved, and I didn’t have anything to do with the solution, except to help make sure that the people who solved the problem were notified, but I think I did my part.

For the week leading up to the exercise, I was apprehensive about the weather, because of the great drought which made the papers. People were always complaining about the sweltering heat. We all prayed that it would not be too hot, and our prayers were answered. Unfortunately we got the only thing that was worse than sweltering heat: rain.

From the moment that we reached the exercise ground, we could see lightning flashes on the horizons. But there were false alarms before, and we didn’t think that it was going to rain. We reached the ground at midnight. Not long after, there was a drizzle. We went on sleeping in our safari beds, until the drizzle turned heavier. The instructors said that we were going to be tested on this and that, but I think none of us counted on the weather. We set up the system, and ended up sleeping the whole time. This was reservist training, and I think we forgot about the sentry, because I don’t think that people want you to spend 1 hour in the rain with your finger on a rusting machine gun (no bullets of course). We went through the night unmolested because, in trying to get a proper night’s sleep in the rain in an armoured personnel carrier, with the water seeping through the hatches and everything, was tough enough. In the end, I designed one of the best weather shelters, by taking 2 safari beds (which are useless because it’s raining) and leaning them against a monster truck tyre, and I slept in the little space, sitting up against a tyre. Those in the tank were less lucky, it was stuffy, there was even less room than economy class flights, and people got stiff backs. We were lucky: other APCs were practically sitting in puddles, and the option of setting up impromptu tents did not exist. So in the end, there was almost no exercise, except for the occupation of the exercise site. And I didn’t do very much in the actual exercise. But all this experience was enough to make me think a bit about being a section commander for my next in camp training – assuming that we were going to have in camp training again.

I had said before that we had the ultimate SUV. I said before that the prime mover was the king of the road. In many respects, that is true, especially in the Transformers. But the prime mover has nothing on the armoured personnel carrier. We didn’t take to the roads very often, but it was pretty cool when we did. People would gawk at us. Of course, this does not happen in most places, only areas near military bases. There was this incident, we were on an expressway, and we were on the left most lane. Then this taxi chose to drive on the road shoulder just to be next to us. I was wondering at this baffling behaviour for a while before I saw the passenger whip out a handphone and start to take pictures of us. Now, many other people have served in the military before, and they know that in Singapore in peacetime (which is basically all the time) weapons are not loaded when vehicles are on the move. But we were carrying machine guns and M16s and scary things and I wondered why people wanted to go and fuck with us.

Sometimes the route will go through a HDB estate. A few schoolgirls were gawking at the tank. I gave them a Nazi salute. Life's great.

A lot of things in the army happen very slowly because a lot of precautions are taken, in order to minimise risks, and make sure that citizens did not chaff at doing national service. But because doing stuff in the SAF involves a lot of idling and waiting (unless you’re an officer, in which case you’re really busy because everything revolves around you). One of the guys in my section came up with a moniker for the SAF: slow and fucked up.

When you're in the camp, you somehow become more aware of time passing. Considering how late in the game I became familiar with everything, it doesn't feel like I have done more than half of my ICTs, and that I will finish my training cycle in only a few more years. And after that I will most probably never step into an army camp again. I'll think about how I spent 2.5 years (probably all my ICT cycles will add up to another 3 months) preparing myself for a role that I will never fill. When I work in the hangar, drenched with sweat, I will remember how some of my sergeants (some of them are now warrant officers) were briefing me about how which thing went into which part of the APC. I will think about the options available to me at that point in time when I was only 20, and what else I could have done with my life. (Actually frankly, I lack the imagination to think about how my life could be better. And that's why I don't spend my life regretting things.) I will think about other exercises in the past and the other training grounds. About other peers whose batteries I should have joined instead of my current one where I don't know anybody.

(Actually I don't have very much nostalgia for the past, especially for my active NS days because, if anything I was a much more gloomy person than I am now, if that is actually possible.)

And when you're in various camps in Singapore, you go to a lot of obscure housing estates that you otherwise would not go to. Like Choa Chu Kang, Yishun, Jurong and Pasir Ris. Singapore is a small country but it is also a large city. When you confine yourself to the CBD and the Orchard area, Singapore seems to be very small. But when you go to the outskirts, and when you find that you can drive around for 1 entire hour, and see nothing but HDB flats interspersed with the occasional industrial zones, it does seem to be very big. There just seems to be the same thing over and over again.

It shouldn’t surprise you that people in the SAF are involved in counter-terrorism operations. But I was a little surprised when they called counter-terrorism measures “unconventional operations” and making war with another country is “conventional operations”. The old 20th century kind of war is getting obsolete. Most wars of the 21st century are guerrilla wars. The former Yugoslavia was a war against militias. One of the biggest blunders of the 2nd Iraq war was that it was a war against Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein was really easy to deal with. It’s the guerrillas and the terrorists that the US was finding so difficult to deal with. So I was thinking: the SAF was designed to deal with another country’s military. What did this mean, in a day and age when people changed their nationalities they way they changed underwear? What did this mean when nations rarely fought wars against each other?

The answer that I arrived at after a bit of thinking was this: no matter what, you just had to have a national army. You didn’t want to leave a country undefended, no matter what. You just had to keep the knowledge and the expertise current and updated. Wars between nations are very rare these days because they were extremely costly in terms of lives. (This was also true in the days of WWI and WWII but back then a lot of people didn’t fully grasp this). And it was our job to make sure that this is true.

But all this does nothing to change my impression that our country is spending way too much money on national defence.