Saturday, July 29, 2006
Today is the 2nd official time that I am booking out of Tekong, and we booked out at 11am, reaching Pasir Ris at 12pm. Life in camp is pretty much starting to become routine, punishments starting to increase steadily.
Well, since I've gone to camp, I can only book out of camp once a week to go home, and I'e started a paper diary to document my life in camp, a short paragraph or statement each day and I don't have the time to write long reflective entries. Last week I was taken ill so I didn't update this diary. But today I can try to write a little more about camp life.
Well in the army, we rush to wait and wait to rush. A lot of things are done inefficiently because of the rank system, commanders take their time to make decisions, the commands take time to pass down the chain of command down to us and we get fucked for it in the end. When we have free time, we idle around being unproductive because we do not know when immediate orders will come, as such a lot of time is wasted when it could have been put to better use, hence the term we rush to wait and wait to rush.
As a recruit, you are the lowest life form on earth in the army. The focus of the army is regimentation and psychological torture to ensure complete obedience to all commands because in times of war, you don't want your soldiers to be questioning your orders. But unfortunately because of mandatory National Service, all of us have come from civilian backgrounds and take time to adjust to communal living and regimentation.
But life in today's BMT is far better from all our ancestors, we have near-modern buildings to bunk in, ceiling fans, better food from NTUC, but still there will always be complaints. Still there has to be a lot of getting used to.
Before entering NS, I thought I was fit, but little do I know, when I have to serve, I am not that fit after all. I always get gold for my Napfa fitness proficiency tests, but for NS IPPT you have to run a 9.44min 2.4km run to get the gold, every station has to be gold as well, as long as one station is not gold standard you don't get the gold, and I ran a 10.15min for the first IPPT categorization test, getting Silver for the first time my life! You need to pull 12 pull ups as well. These are the 2 stations that I really need improvement on.
Well more about Army life to come! It's just that I don't have the time to sit down properly and pen my thoughts and reflections for the day.
6:15 PM
