I guess this may have been funny had it been an April Fool’s joke. Even though it is his own fault for asking his maid to carry his full pack, I felt a little sorry for the attention this full-time National Servicemen [NSF] got. I remembered that when I was doing my National Service [NS], some of us were ‘given a hard time’ by our seniors (i.e. NSFs who are enlisted earlier) simply because the SAF made it a point to improve the conditions an NSF has to go through. (Sadly, the SAF’s attempt to build up the morale and the pride NSF has in NS was not well received. That is in spite of the fact that every Singaporean son only gets NS as his ‘reward’ while foreigners gets our jobs and a good life at our expense.)
Let me talk about the kind of ‘hard time’ some of us got. When I was enlisted in 1992, some of my older poly classmates who had already completed their NS were appalled that I was actually given nights-off and long weekends as a recruit! By the time I passed out of Basic Military Training [BMT] and posted to the unit, our seniors told us we had it easy because they had to go for 5km runs every morning while my batch only had to do so every other day. Doesn’t matter they also enjoyed the same benefits we had! To make up for our allegedly ‘good life’, we were made scapegoats for mistakes by our seniors and ended up pulling extra duty or suffered confinements on weekends.
By the time I am about to complete my full-time stint, the SAF was serving catered dinner in some camps. And while some people still complained about how bad catered food from the Singapore Food Industries [SFI] is, its food was markedly better compared to cook house food made by NSF cooks! Anything the SFI served was better than the hard boiled eggs which we can use as rocks to kill enemy troops, noodles that has the tensile strength of rubber bands, lumps of cooked rice that individual grains are not identifiable, and Milo that taste like muddy water in the longkang (aka drain). That’s not mentioning unappetizing looking vegetables with worms. My platoon mate consoled me saying that this simply means the vegetable is safe to eat because no the worms would have survived if there is an overuse of pesticides. He even reasoned we should treat the worms themselves as extra protein as long as we didn’t notice them.
It was ironical that we were told SFI supplies food for SIA on their planes too, but I was grateful that SFI at least conduct surveys to find out how we felt about it. I was happy no one will single me out for special treatment – such as ‘extra ingredient’ in my food or drinks (e.g. Eno to help cleanse my bowels, saliva to show their brotherly love, or water boiled with their unwashed socks soaked in them) – if I complained a little too much. That is why these days the armed forces have aunties serving food in the cook house on a plate with a smile, and she would gladly to give the NSF more food compared to the dour-faced NSF cook who would verbally abuse soldiers with Hokkien comments which never failed to mention the privates of our mothers. Such verbal abuse are also common place from our Non-Commission Officers [NCOs] and officers when they mete out punishments! While that would be considered as abuse these days, back then it was treated as a form of character training.
Being posted to the Armor formation in ulu (i.e. remote) Lim Chu Kang, we were driving 30 year-old American equipment like M113s (rumored to be leftovers from the Vietnam War) or AMX-13s, which are essentially Israeli rejects from the Six Day War. It doesn’t matter what improvements Singapore Automative Engineering [SAE] has put into those antiques. Not to mention, we can still remember those World War II looking Mercedes 3-tonners which we suspect were given as war compensation by the German government to Israel, and subsequently given to us by the Israeli government out of good will. These equipment made us felt closer to soldiers from the wars before and not that of a glamorous high-tech defense force we see on TV advertisements. After all, we were picking off targets at 300 meters which looked no bigger than our thumbnails using M-16s with iron sights and wore tin pots (WW2 looking steel helmets). We can only dream about state of the art equipment like the Bionix, Leopard 2s, the Primus, SAR-21s complete with a scope and laser… and Kevlar helmets!
So what is the point I am making here with regards to this NSF who asked his maid to carry his full pack? The point I am making is, we are all considered ‘soft’ compared to the batches that comes before us. In fact, when compared to the Israeli trained hell-troopers with their hellish NS stories, we are all ‘wimps’. At times, it makes me wonder whether those guys opened can food with rocks, has teeth that cuts like high-speed steel and kill enemies in one blow with fist that are harder than diamonds. It probably won’t be far-fetched if we compared them to Space Marines in the Warhammer 40,000 stories.
As far as I am concerned, as long as the training programs are up to date and there is no downgrading of the physical fitness and weapons proficiency level required of our new soldiers, there is really nothing for me to complain about. That is also part of the reasons why I object to any further reduction of national service duration or calls for its abolition.
Picture: courtesy of Terence Foong
Some may talk about how this guy looked like a wuss (or a p*ssy) and this may present an image to our potential aggressors that Singapore’s NSmen are soft city boys who will prove a walkover in combat. But the fact remains that our soldiers are nothing more than ‘holiday soldiers’ (not even weekend ones) who are called up to train up to 40 days every year. We can only hope that our advanced military equipment will give us the edge, and our Operationally Ready NSmen (or reservists) remember enough from their 2-year full-time and sporadic 10 in-camp training that will kick in during combat, so that they can be an effective deterrent to our potential enemies and hold up long enough for UN intervention.
Face it, we are no Israel even when some considered certain political realities between our nations. It is perhaps the hope of everyone of us that in our lifetime we will never experience war, and the SAF will continue serve nothing more than a deterrent to potential enemies who might consider military adventurism as ‘an extension of state policy… by other means’.
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