A Course in Miracles Explained

Pictures courtesy of cyberpioneer, MINDEF Singapore

National Service. A compulsory two-year long rite of passage for every 18 year old Singaporean male: it is dreaded before, endured during and celebrated after. Two years when one’s life is kept in suspended animation – while girls go on to University, guys have to put their plans on hold until they emerge from military life, hopefully unscathed.

If anything, the Army taught me not to take the simple things in life for granted – one’s freedom, a roof over your head, clean clothes. I remember these moments: trying to sleep in a shell scrape (think of a shallow grave) full of mud and ants, doing foot-drill for hours in the parade square in the mid-day sun while your mind and body goes numb, walking for days in the thick Brunei jungle. These moments made me realise how lucky I was in civilian life – to be living in a modern day environment, not needing to worry about where the next meal was going to come from, having a clean, comfortable bed to sleep on, having friends and family who supported me. I thought about the people who had suffered so much more – through war, famine, disaster – and how truly privileged I was, just by virtue of not having to live through all of that. How much do we really need to be happy?

I don’t think spending a huge chunk of a country’s GDP is necessarily the best way to achieve peace, if that even is the objective of the military. I think peace on a societal level is found through cultivating inner peace in the individual, and not through amassing weapons. If you really want peace – stop having a Us vs Them mentality. Seek unity and not separation. Seek to understand your neighbour. Drop all your labels – Chinese, Malay, Indian, Singaporean, Malaysian, etc, and recognise yourself and others, first and foremost, as a human being. I think a large, active military force is deeply insidious for the psyche of a country – it glamorises killing and conquest. It makes heroes out of mass murderers. It makes a left-brained society like Singapore even more left-brained – where everything has a hierarchy, is compartmentalised, is graded; where thinking becomes institutionalised, rigid and constrained.

Don’t get me wrong – I learned a lot from the Army. I think the military is an excellent training ground for individuals – one learns an innumerable number of ‘soft-skills’ – adaptability, teamwork, leadership, to name a few. It certainly wasn’t fun, but it made me who I am today. I can’t even begin to describe how fundamental those two years were to me – I gained much mental resilience and self-confidence. It is the big picture, how the military is used in the real world, that bothers me.

But anyway, my intention for writing is not to change the maya, but to undo the maya. Not to change the world, but to change the way I see the world. It is what it is. I ask you to forgive my ego-babble. =)

Basic Military Training

Military life in Singapore starts with 3 dreaded words – Basic Military Training. There is a form of it in every military all over the world, however it is called – boot camp, recruit training or basic combat training. Through constant shouting, harassment and physical stress, the recruit is supposedly prepared for the stress of live combat, is systematically indoctrinated, is ironed out of his idiosyncrasies and his sense of self, until he is formed into a blank canvas – a standard issue soldier, physically fit, with a base level of combat training, ready for the next stage of training.

Personally, the 9 weeks of BMT was the toughest part of my military training – even more so than my time in Officer Cadet School (OCS). It was the intensity of the training and the shock of the transition from being a civilian to a soldier. My company also happened to be a ‘scholar’s’ company – where there were a number of individuals who were slated for military and government scholarships – and as such, the sergeants and officers perhaps were a bit over-zealous about showing how ‘professional’ they were. One of the strangest things was that our sergeants and officers, being conscripts themselves, were only one or two years older than us!

The first week of BMT went by quickly. I was still having my self-imposed feud with my family at that time – leaving home and family wasn’t a big deal for me. I remember reading newspapers at the bus stop on enlistment day, being nonchalant about it all, as parents and sons said their teary goodbyes around. It was a blur of events – we took a ferry over to Pulau Tekong (a small island off the main Singapore island), I took my oath of allegiance, exchanged my civilian identity card for a military ID card, was issued with all my basic gear – boots, uniforms, backpack, etc, and had all my hair shaved off. I was allocated a company, a platoon, a section, and a number that was synonymous with my new title: Recruit Bok. I met my buddy, CK, a likeable guy who was a bit ‘blur’ but really funny. Our section got a lot of laughs out of his antics.

The seriousness of the affair quickly gets to you – it is not fun and games. My platoon sergeant’s prep talk: “In here, I am your mother, your father, your sister, your brother, your best friend and your worst nightmare”. There is one image I will always have burned on my memory – my first lunch at the cookhouse. A hundred of us lined up, heads shaved, wearing grey T-shirts loudly proclaiming ARMY in big black letters on our backs. We wore the same black shorts, the same socks, the same shoes, carrying the same brown tray in front of us. We were indistinguishable. It was a scene out of a Nazi concentration camp, and I was in it! It was surreal. It was that moment when the full weight of the entire affair really hit me – ‘these Army guys, they’re really not screwing around…’

We learnt quickly what the system doesn’t like, and not to step out of line, literally – as a recruit, we never walked from one place to another outside of the company line, we had to march from one place to another. Any sloppy marching was subject to punishment from any NCO (non-commissioned officer) or officer who happened to see us, for we were at the very bottom of a very long food chain, little plankton in a military ocean..

Enlistees

Specialists / Warrant Officers

From left to right: Third Sergeant (3SG), Second Sergeant (2SG), First Sergeant (1SG), Staff Sergeant (SSG), Master Sergeant (MSG), Third Warrant Officer (3WO), Second Warrant Officer (2WO), First Warrant Officer (1WO), Master Warrant Officer (MWO), Senior Warrant Officer (SWO)

Officers

From left to right: Second Lieutenant (2LT), Lieutenant (LTA), Captain (CPT), Major (MAJ), Lieutenant Colonel (LTC), Senior Lieutenant Colonel, Colonel (COL), Brigadier General (BG), Major General (MG), Lieutenant General (LG)

For many like me – English-speaking, mainly Singaporean-Chinese kids who went to good schools and generally came from a more fortunate economic background, it was our first time living in close proximity with others who didn’t fit that mould. BMT was a big melting pot of class and race. It didn’t matter if you were Malay, Indian, Chinese or Eurasian, if you lived in a big house with maids and a chauffeur, or if you lived in a tiny HDB flat – we were all the same recruit scum, and we were treated all the same.

We talk about working life being tough – 13 hour days in the office, bosses from hell, ridiculous deadlines. In comparison, the life of a recruit is far tougher. In the army, your boss really owns your ass – there are no niceties, no facades. Physical punishment is a real threat, all the time. It is a rule by fear – you are always afraid to do something wrong – getting an instruction wrong, marching out of step, failing a test, a stand-by bed/rifle/backpack/etc deemed not being up to scratch by your sergeant.

Our days were packed – 17 hours awake, 7 hours asleep – back to back physical training, weapon training, outfield exercises, foot-drill, obstacle courses, bunk cleaning, weapon cleaning, inspections.

Some of the events that stand out in my memory:

• Push-ups (‘Knock it down!’ – the de-facto punishment for any kind of minor infraction)

• Pull-ups (There was a big emphasis on this, you had to do 5 (i think) just to pass your fitness test, and you were deemed a ‘Zero-fighter’ if you couldn’t manage a single pull-up. Miraculously, I go from zero-fighter to pass by the end of 9 weeks)

• Standard Obstacle Course (Running an obstacle course in half battle gear, rifle, helmet etc. Fun. My timing improved by leaps and bounds, until it was pretty decent)
• Grenade throwing with your PC (Particularly harrowing. “Don’t fuck it up!” This is what you don’t want to happen)

• 24km Route March (Boring. Tiring.)

• Trench digging (Digging a man sized hole in the ground with a “ET” – Excavation tool. As tiring and pointless as it sounds. I get a tiny taste of what the gulags must have been like.)

• Foot drill (Pointless. Mundane. Boring. Numbing.)
• Water parades (Done several times a day. Mandatory drinking of 1 litre of water, regardless of how thirsty you were. You learned not to drink too much before: forced drinking of water = mild Japanese water torture)

• Ghost stories – some gems: some guy who brought Bakkwa (Pork Jerky – all pork products were forbidden due to Malay customs) into camp, angering the Pontianaks (native Malay spirits to our training island of Pulau Tekong) into possessing him and all sorts of poltergeist activity. Another one: A soldier goes missing during a route march. The entire company searches for him for the entire night to no avail. That night, his buddy dreams of him lying dead somewhere in the forest. The next day, after more searching, they find a horrifying scene – his body cut up and with his organs – heart, lungs, kidneys, intestines – all neatly lined up on the ground in a military style inspection.

We are presented with our ‘wives’ – our M16 rifles (photo shows a SAR21, a new, Singaporean-made rifle), during a solemn ceremony held at the parade square.

Nearby, a statue of a soldier in battle gear, brims with pride as he shoves his bayonet (attached to his rifle) into his imaginary foe. The inscription on its base reads a quote from the architect of modern day Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, just after Singapore’s separation from Malaya in 1965:

If you who are growing up do not understand that you have got to defend this, then I say in the end we will lose – Lee Kuan Yew, Ex-Prime Minister, 1967

(The full quote ends with ‘Other people will come, smack you down and take over.’)

We recite our version of the Rifleman’s creed:
(I don’t have the exact wording but it’s adapted from the US Marine Corps)

This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. My rifle, without me is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot him before he shoots me.

The rifle was an extension of our soldier-selves. It was exciting and scary at the same time – the feeling that you, with this cold, heavy piece of metal could kill, and kill easily. You learned the ins and outs of it – how to clean it, how to shoot, how to carry it. You became so familiar with its shape, its weight, its innards – you could assemble it blindfolded. You learned to keep it close to you and never to let it out of your sight – it was a favourite pastime for your sergeants to take it away. I hated its weight during days of walking, and I loved it at the shooting range.

Beyond physical punishment and being confined on your weekends due to minor offences like losing your weapon to your sergeant, there were the really big screw-ups which everybody really tried to avoid – the really serious ones – the ‘chargeable offences’. Understandably, most of them were with regards to weapons and ammunition. One of the most feared was ‘misfiring’ – any discharge from a weapon, whether blank or live round, that occurred without intent and proper aim. In outfield exercises, when you were scrambling about in thick foliage in suffocating gear, your gun getting jammed up and jolted from all around, an accidental discharge was a real possibility even for the most careful soldier. Even worse was losing any weapon part – especially the little pieces in the gas chamber, eg. the firing pin, the bolt of the M16, all of which you had to remove for cleaning. After every exercise, we were especially careful to check we were clean of any rounds, blank or live – possession of any ammunition outside of training exercises was also a big no-no.

Being formally charged with a military offence had a number of consequences – a stain on your record, suspension of leave, and worst of all, the possibility of going to detention barracks (DB), aka military jail.

Home to AWOLees, drug offenders, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gang members, and other unfortunate military personnel who had found their way on the wrong side of military law, DB was not a place where you wanted to be. There were many stories surrounding DB, some of them truly horrific – carrying 18kg sandbags for hours around the parade square, having to ask permission for every single thing that you did, solitary confinement, to name a few. Thankfully, neither myself or my peers experienced this in BMT, although these cases were more frequent in unit life.

We looked forward to lights out for our 7 hours of mandated sleep, we looked forward to booking out on weekends and seeing our girlfriends, eating home cooked food and sleeping in our own beds. We looked forward to passing out of BMT and not having to repeat it (you could get injured and would need to start over when the next batch came in). Many of us, like myself, wanted to get into the command schools – OCS (Officer Cadet School) or SISPEC (School of Infantry Specialists – for NCOs). (Oh the joy! The thought of your BMT sergeant having to call you ‘Sir’! My sergeant didn’t like that one bit, I think I did some push-ups for that =))

Eventually, the passing out day came – we threw our jockey caps in the air after a seemingly endless route march. We waited eagerly as our sergeant announced our names and our next vocation one by one – I had made it to Officer Cadet School! The next stage of training would be much longer – 9 months (“just like a baby”, my sergeant says), and I would meet many of my peers in Junior College again…

Leave a Reply Cancel reply