Friday, December 02, 2005


I would now like to take this time to explain a few things about the army, things that some of you would probably like to know in the event that you are going to the army for a number of reasons, not having a choice being one of them.

In addition, I must point out that this refers to Singapore's army, so your army somewhere else in the world might be a little different. So here we go.First of all, the army isn't as bad as they say it is. Depending on your vocation, it can be either really slack, or really shag.

Slack: Term used in the Singaporean army to denote when things are in a 'slack off' mode. EG: A day with minimal exercise, or strenous activities. Don't expect to find many of these.

Shag: Term used to describe activities or days which take up a lot of energy. EG: "Wah! Today damn shag siah!" Trans: "Wow, today's really tiring"

In any case, bmt has been an eye opener for me, fitting into the new lifestyle wasn't the hard part, but there's always the conundrum of movement.

There are only 2 forms of movement in the army.
1. Don't move
2. Move really really fast

If for some reason your movement falls between these two ends of the spectrum, you can expect to knock it down, or earn yourself many rewards for repeat offenders. Such rewards include area cleaning, or wall support.

Knock it down: This is what instructors use when they want you to get on the floor, raise your butt into the air, and ask for permission to start having sex with the ground. Yes, push ups. The universal punishment. You get it for everything, including digging your nose in file.

File: Things we fall into. Files are numerous rows of three, the standard arrangement that everyone must line up in and remain in while doing most travelling and headcounting activities.

Area Cleaning: Everyone is assigned an area of their company building to clean. Be it your bunk, the toilets, the offices, or the ground outside the building, such as corridors, pavements, or even the basketball court.

Basketball cout: Not a basketball court. No basketball on tekong.

Wall Support: The inability not to move in file occurs in two manners, either general movement, such as nose picking, butt picking, scratching, talking or whatever, or leaning on things. The first will result in knocking it down 20. The second, however, results in an imaginative punishment in which the recruit found leaning will have to push as hard as he can on the item he was leaning on, (let's say for this example it was a wall) and scream to everyone, "HELP! HELP! THE WALL IS FALLING!" in a vaguely comical manner until told to stop, which could be minutes or half hours later. If, of course, the recruit was found to be leaning on anything else, the word will be replaced. Up to date I have heard "Help, Help the wall is falling!", "Help, Help the exercise machine is falling!", "Help, Help the tree is falling!", but I have yet to hear, "Help, Help my sergeant is falling" or anything of the sort.

Everything is done together as a platoon, or as a secton. Fewer things are done on company level, but it is not an inoccurance. Everything else is also done a certain way. We have to eat together. We must march from point to point, no casual walking is allowed unless you're on attend B. Even a dog can walk to the cookhouse but recruits have to march there.

Platoons, sections, and companies: In Singapore there are many Schools of training. I am in BMTC School 2, which stands for Basic Military Training Centre School 1, which is housed on Pulau Tekong (Poo-lao ter-kong) which is an island off the coast of Singapore's mainland. It's a Malaysian name meaning Tekong Island. I don't know what Tekong means, although I speculate it could mean something like "Stress" or "Stomach Ulcer". Within each school, there are many companies, all labled from A - Z accordingly. There are approximately 200 recruits per company. I myself am in O Coy or AKA Orion Company. Each company owns their own building, which contains 5 floors of pain, 4 of them being bunks and the ground level being the offices. In each company there are 4 platoons. Each platoon takes a floor. I am in Platoon 2. Each platoon contains abt 50 recruits, and is further broken up into sections. Each floor has 4 sections, of about 12 - 13 recruits each, and each section has a room on that floor. I am in section 3. And of course, I have a bed number as well, which is bed 05. Therefore, my full designation is O2305. Our fallout tagline is Outwit, Outclass, Outshine, Orion, HooHah! much like our american counterparts the rangers.

More about Tekong: Being an island broken off from the mainland, it's pretty much got its own water and elecrical system. Only phonelines are connected to Singapore itself. Upon arriving, you will experience what is known as the Tekong Cough, which is caused by drinking what is essentially very dirty water treated with too much chlorine. This of course, causes everyone to get sick. Right now I'm also suffer from this. In addition, Tekong is the only military camp, which is notorious for being haunted and having the rudest military personnel ever. Every sentence is basically laced with a number of creative swear words, even when they're not scolding you. It is said that you can't go to Tekong and come out and NOT learn how to swear. Of course, there are other camps on the mainland. It's only Tekong. About the haunting, there are numerous graveyards all over Tekong. Many bunks in the school are haunted thusly, and there are countless stories about incidents, most of which involve deaths related to vivisection and the removal of intestines and the like. It doesn't make it easier to sleep at night, but of course, some people see things and some people don't. The forests in Tekong are especially haunted. To get here, we have to take a ferry from one of the military docks in Mainland Singapore. It's a tedious, tiring procedure, but hey. You gotta do what you gotta do.

Chao Keng: A Chinese term referring to an action, or someone, related to skiving. People who do not like to do anything and just sit around and sleep or talk on the phone while others are cleaning are 'Chao Keng'. Faking an illness is 'Chao Keng'. We would all love to do it, but sometimes we don't have a choice.

Attend: There are three classifications of attend; A, B, and C. Basically when you are ill, you go to the medical center to get manhandled by the Medical Officers(MOs). These people hate you. They are the first doctors I've met whom seek out to prove that you are not 'chao keng'ing in the worst way ever. They will check to see if you have a broken leg by trying to bend it in the wrong direction. When you do fall ill and decide to see them, you will be given a status. Depending on your status, you will do one of many things. Attend B means no heavy duties; no training, no exercise. Attend C means you get to go home and rest there.

PTI: A PTI is a Physical Training Instructor; someone whose sole purpose of being in the school is to make OUR lives miserable and painful in the form of physical activities. These people are usually very hard to please, and they require you to shout really loud and move really fast. Faliure to do so will require you to do the exercise switch routine, which is a favourite of PTIs. This dandy routine is basically where they ask you to get into position for a certain exercise, and then make you change to another exercise because you moved too slowly to get into position, and then change again because you were too slow for THAT position, etc... until for the next 20 minutes or so you're switching between a prone position for pushups to a on the back, legs-in-the-air position for crunches, or an on-the-spot jog for jumping jacks over and over and over until you hear the magic words, "Have you all waken up your idea yet?!" which is when you know the actual exercises are going to begin. It's all very tiring. Try doing jumping jacks and counting ONLY the odd numbers.

Besides exercises, we have to do other things such as drills, route marches, and Rifle training and camo outfields.

Drills: Drills are where you fall in in your files in a special way, and you march around the parade square executing fancy ass things with precision timing. Well, that's what they want us to do anyway. In the end we all just look like confused buffalos trying to squash invisible cockroaches with our boots. It doesn't help that the instructions aren't in English either, (They're in Malay) so many of us get more confused. And let's got go into rifle clearning drills either, cause they're evil. If we don't do them well, we get to knock it down, as usual. Drills also refer to the course of action and procedures you have to take in many different occurances. We had sniper drills and artillery drills during field camp and even had a 'Hornet Drill', in which they taught us what to do in event of a hornet attack. (Run.)

Route Marches: Route Marches are just where you have to carry around your FBO everywhere and generally get tired on extremely long walks through haunted forests. the first one is 2 kilometers. then 4, then 6. The last one, before our POC, is 10 kilometers.

FBO: Full Battle Order. Basically, when they tell you to wear your full battle order, you have to carry your full backpack, your webbing, your helmet and your rifle, altogether weighing about 8 zillion tons.

SBO: Skeleton Battle Order. FBO minus the fieldpack

Webbing: Something that you stick around your waist. It carries rifle equipment like extra magazines and cleaning kits. It's inconvenient.

POC: Passing-Out Ceremony. The final ceromony that we pes c recruits go through before you are FREE! FREE FROM THE PAINS OF BASIC TRAINING! Something we all want, but never have early enough. discounted POP...

Haunted Forests: Tekong is a hazardous place. Despite the fact that the whole island was originally used as a friggin' gravesite for victims of the Japanese Invasion, the forests are haunted with many, many spirits. One of my platoon mates said he saw a white figure among the trees during field camp... haha. Besides ghosts, the forest also houses snakes, 20 foot pythons, wild boars, poisonous spiders, scorpions and hornets.

Rifle Training: Generally we get to do fun things with the rifle such as learn how to shoot and kill fake enemies, and disassemble them and clean them, and drills in the event of something that goes wrong. I personally despise cleaning the damn thing. The rifle we use is the M16S1 rifle, an old piece of junk that is older than I am, literally. They, however, are being replaced by the new SAR21, which is cooler. I guess. I wouldn't know. Rifles are basically the most evil things on earth, because they can get you in the most trouble. Misfiring at a range or dropping it earns you great rewards, like knocking it down, guard duty and confinement. Losing it gets you DB. A favourite occurance of the sergeants, and thank god this hasnt actually happened to me, is for them to go around during company level outfields and STEAL people's rifles and magazines if you don't take care of them properly. Then of course, all those people who lost things will get into a lot of trouble. Fun.

Guard Duty: Where you must walk with one friend of yours around the whole school to protect it against whatever. This usually takes place in the wee hours, and yes, you are required to go very close to the border of said haunted forests. It's a punishment, but sometimes some unlucky freaks get it as routine orders. It ends around 2 or 3 am usually.

Confinement: Where you're not allowed to go home during the weekend for a number of reasons, punishment being the most common. This explains why sometimes you can never be sure when you will return home. The most probable cause of confinement is due to a pissing your platoon commanders off.

Stand-by Bed/Area: Stand-bys are basically where you have to clean every single damn thing until it's spotless, which is pretty much an impossibility. Everything has to be neat, clean, arranged nicely, and placed in special ways. Stand-by areas are for the whole room, where they check for dirt in the most unlikely places, (on the fans, under beds, in the corner of your foot cabinet, that wooden thing above the doorframe, etc.) and stand-by beds are like the areas, except they check your cupboard too. They pretty much try to find any small tiny thing to 'tekan' you, like (real examples) your shoelaces not tied, your toothpaste still in the box, your spoon placed upside down, and your sleeves not folded properly. And once in your course you will experience the TORNADO. Of course, it's very annoying, because we will never get it right, and we will always end up either knocking or getting confined. I'm just glad for now it's just knocking.

Stand-by Universe: This is where they check EVERYTHING including your civilian stuff.

Tornado: This is where the whole bunk gets messed up by sergeants. Boots tossed around like vegatables, towels flung around, beds overturned. really fun.

'Tekan': Malay word used when someone does a bad thing to you or punishes you for little or no reason. If they HAVE a reason, it's 'discipline'.

DB: Detention Barracks. Do not go here. Never go here. This is jail, army style. Where you sleep in an empty room with a few other men who hate you, and every day you do sandbag PT (Physical Training) Which means carrying sandbags and running forever around the DB courtyard. The worst punishment ever. It also goes on file, so people will know you're a troublemaker forever.

Outfield: This is pretty fun! We go into the haunted forests, and have a few hours of training. For the first time, I had camo training, which required us to paint our faces with green and black and also stick leaves and crap into our webbings and helmets. This is so that the enemy will think you're some sort of human shaped bush holding a rifle, and not a real soldier. Word to the wise with this true story; putting on camo makeup like Gaara in Naruto does NOT make your sergeant amused. Also, the stuff is very hard to wash off.

Gonna pass out next tuesday. will post my general feelings when i'm not so tired... zzzz

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