The first two weeks

It was standard practice back then to have a compulsory two-week stay-in-camp at the start of BMT. But if you were enlisted in December, that rule can appear farcical. Four days after enlistment, I found myself home for Christmas. A few more days later, it was New Year's. A month later, it was Chinese New Year. So, for those who are "mama's boy" being enlisted in December is not such a bad thing! BMT was supposed to teach army newbies basic infantry craft. For us recent school leavers, the first two weeks were mostly spent being exercised and regimented. Exercise began early in the morning at 5.30 am. It was called 5BX. It was called that because it consisted precisely of five basic exercises. We would assemble at the parade square and in the dim spotlights that hung from the baracks, we all loosened up and stretched. Did our star-jumps, sit-ups and ran on the spot. A morning run followed after that. The runs were usually interspersed with more calisthenics like side running (crab) and push ups. The other formal exercises during BMT involved swimming and "combat training" which had less to do with combat than have your muscles stretched to the limit. One in particular involved the M16 rifle, a.k.a your 'army wife'. We soon found out that a person can do all sorts of exercises with The Wife, all requiring exertion, grunting and mostly regret. One involved holding her at arm's length and remaining steady for like10 mins. An empty M16 rifle weighs about 3.3 kg. That's roughly 1.5 times the weight of a two-litre bottle of Coke. Heavy? You bet. What if you do that after having jogged for five kilometres and completed numerous sit-ups and leopard crawls. Or after an exhaustive session of treading water in the pool? Yes, our platoon commander, sergeant and corporals were sadistic like that. After a while, they made us dread Combat Training. The only real combat training we did was to learn how to fight hand-to-hand combat with our rifles and bayonets (knives that attach to rifles). Sometimes we would put the bayonets on and charged at stuffed-up dummies that pretended to be our enemy soldiers. The first time we did that, I recalled reading about Singaporean women and children being bayoneted in such fashion by the Japanese troops during WWII. You don't have to do very much to spill someone guts out. Of course, all that slinging and slanging about with butt-hard rifles and pointed bayonets resulted in injuries. Quite a few of us ended up with badly bruised knuckles and cut arms. At times we got knocked on the head. Quite a number of chaps actually cried or collapsed because of such tough training, especially when holding The Wife out at arm's length. When that happened, the whole exercise was repeated again for another ten minutes. Our sergeant and corporals turned it into a blame game. It became a psychological war. About dropping The Wife: It's a cardinal sin in the army. Do not drop your rifle anywhere - not during training, not in the field, not in the bunk. If a corporal sees you dropping The Wife, it is an automatic Drop 50 (fifty push-ups on the spot). I was skinny, so this particular Hold-The-Wife-At-Arms-Length exercise was tough on my limbs. But I had been through tough badminton training before so I could try my best to bear and grin it. That's how I got through it. By sheer will-power. We all hated that combat training. The good outcome was that it served to bond us together against our corporals, sergeant and that Mad Dog platoon commander of ours. His name was L Wee. Physically, he was lean and tall and walked with a slight hunch. He had a mop of straight hair that swept from left to right. His eyes were beady and most distinctive of all, was his squarish jaw that jutted out. It made him look as if he was unhappy, in a jeering mood. Added to that ensemble was a small moustache that flashed above a pair of thin lips, making him look like a real mean son-of-a-bitch. He looked much older than his 20-something NS years. At first I had much respect for him. He spoke well and was very confident for his age. I thought he was a career officer. But no, he was doing NS like the rest of us. When he became unreasonable with his exercise demands, that's when I thought perhaps he was overdoing it a bit. I was very fit then, so I could bear with whatever he threw my way. But not everyone in my platoon was like that. One even had a back problem. But Mad Dog wouldn't hear of it. More about him later. In that first two weeks, we learnt more about routine life in camp. After breakfast every morning we performed Area Cleaning. Each section took turns to sweep the bunks, wash the toilets, clean the glass window louvres and to pick leaves and sweep the staircases in the general areas around the barracks. We learnt to eat at the cookhouse, where to pick up the stainless steel trays, get our food, sit down and eat, dispose of unfinished food, clean/dry and replace those stain steel trays for the next round of hungry recruits. In the evenings, depending on the time we finish with training we would get a bread bun (with red bean or coconut filling) or red/green bean soup. For the latter we would have to use our own green plastic mugs, forks and spoons. These drinking mugs doubled as our brush-teeth mugs as well. Then there were the armskote procedures that governed how took out and returned our firearms (i.e. M16 rifles). Our rifles were taken out every morning to be cleaned and prepped ready for use during the day. When training ended, we would have to clean the rifles (outside and inside), polish that leatherised butt with kiwi and have it for inspection before getting it accepted and returned by the armourer. If you didn't do a good job, your rifle would be rejected and you would have to clean the rifle again. This would hold up the whole platoon. The person most mad about this was the camp duty officer for the day, who would rather have an early night than wait for a bunch of blur recruits forgetting how to clean a rifle properly. You see, before we retired for the night, the camp duty officer had to "clear" the armskote, meaning he had to certify that all the rifles had been returned and chained properly to their resting stocks. Else, there would be BIG BIG trouble. Of all things an officer would want to avoid is to lose a weapon on his watch. That's like throwing his military career out the window, no matter how NS or career signed-on brief it is. Or it could simply come to a "henta-kaki", which is Malay for "marching on the spot", i.e. going nowhere. A camp duty officer, of course, had other things to do, like making sure that things at the cookhouse was in order, or that the meals for late-returning soldiers were delivered or prepared. Cooks often treated the duty officers well and would cook up nice suppers (like fried rice or mee goreng) for them. It became a kind of a tradition all over the SAF I think the two biggest adjustments anybody had to make going into BMT were the waking up/sleep patterns and bowel habits. When I was born, I slept through most of the morning and day. That became my habit. I am what people might call a "night person". I didn't like waking up early then and would go to sleep pretty late. For better or worse, that's my natural circadian cycle. But life routines, as we know, can be changed and adapted. So the early rise, late night sleeping in camp was not much of a problem for me. It helped that as a student, I often had to wake up at 5.30 am to make my way to my junior college near Toa Payoh, just to get there on time. That's the price I pay for moving all the way up to Singapore's ulu north. As for bowel movements, that took a big adjustment. Up till that moment, I had been trained by my parents to "do my business" early in the morning and be done with it. It became clockwork. But BMT with its extra early morning wake-up calls, 5BX and breakfast afterwards, gave a shock to my system. Besides, everybody had to do their business before the toilets were cleaned, which meant extra pressure "to perform". It took a while before some of us started to adjust and go to he toilets at night, which was the better bowel removal time table (unless you were on night topography). Yes, I was tight-assed for a while, but I was actually very relieved to be able to get over that kind of strict bowel regime. The life lesson is: Give and Take. Or was it Take and Give, Anytime? When the two weeks of compulsory confinement came to an end, my family came to visit me. I was particularly touched when my eldest sister presented me a transistor radio (see pix above) that could also receive TV channels (some of us still hankered for the HK dramas over Ch 8). Till today, it still works. TV was not allowed in the bunks and it was only through radio that we were connected to the outside world. The Sony Walkman was new then and not everyone could afford one. The best was to have a small radio and a ear plug to listen to music and the news whilst relaxing on a bunk bed. If you had wanted to watch TV, you could do that at the commercial canteen. Each camp had one such makan place. The canteen was the refuge for guys who could not tahan army food. There were coin phones too to call home or chat up a girlfriend. I recall each barrack having a public phone at each end of the block. I seldom went to the canteen. It's a sinkhole for your money as well as morale. Not being able to stomach army food was not a good thing. Yes, the beehoon felt like barbed wire, the veggie was yellow and tasted like diesel rags, but there were bright moments too. And as a recruit you had to eat to survive the tough exercise regime. Being picky about food was not very smart. Besides, at each table in the cookhouse was a jar of sweet-sour plum sauce that looked like yellow marmalade. Put that on your rice and meats and you could imagine yourself eating at some fancy Teochew restaurant! Well, if only Mad Dog gave us enough time for that even. At times, he gave us only ten minutes to enter and exit the cookhouse altogether. If the queue was long, that got cut to a meaningless five minutes. So, as the two weeks passed, we slowly began to sample Mad Dog's sadistic intent. He had a reason and a method to it all. But it would later backfire on him.