hollaback_
Friday, January 27, 2006
gong hei fat choy to all! (who still read)
so i'm here blogging now, when almost everyone else is back sleeping in the bunks. no, not because i'm sick, but because i got special treatment! hurhur. everyone going overseas in my company for CNY got to book out a day earlier, which is actually a day later by normal standards, since by right bookout should happen on the same day as the end of Field Camp (thursday). but because of some "special CNY lunch", it got pushed to saturday morning. i get to leave friday evening! yay.
talking about the "special CNY lunch", it was a marked improvement for their standards. instead of one piece of meat, we got 2! a chicken leg and a duck leg (LOL) as well as a cold (as in, just take out from the fridge kind of cold)
char siew soh as well as a curdled egg tart. oh, and an additional fried wanton. smashing! guess i can't complain, the food is usually not as good. was a bit disappointing, but expected after all that buildup, especially since we had to stay back longer just for it.
guard duty was really fun, and boring at the same time. all we did was patrol (prowl) around the whole campus at least twice, for 2 hour shifts with 4 hour break intervals in the span of 24 hours. i guess i've already completed my 24km route march, and those who can still count after math is no longer central to our lives (trying not to get F) will know roughly how long the perimeter is. i was happy that i was in the team that was walking in the other direction as the other team, because that one had to do all the checkpoint motions, which basically involves wielding a metallic dildo-like rod thing and shoving it into metallic plates so that a red light flashes, indicating that the checkpoint has been passed. at some places, the route gets really dark, which made things especially creepy at night. like the time my partner and i walked past a flickering street light which lit up after we passed it, in a different colour (white) from the rest (yellow). but i survived, so there. during the breaks we played card games, and tried to catch up on a bit of sleep, as much as we could on dirty-looking beds and mouldy, bloated pillows. they did provide bedsheets and pillowcases, but we decided to make do with the beds, and threw the lumps pretending to be pillows aside.
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i am glad to say that i have completed some of the integral things of BMT, such as field camp and live range shooting. although there's still live grenade throwing as well as SOC. shooting at the live range is better than the air-conditioned simulator because the targets are bigger, and they take time to come up (About a second, not to be scoffed at) instead of flashing instantaneously at the screen. the only thing that sucks is wearing the earplugs. the sergeant whom i got for my first round was really nice, because he asked me if i was scared at shooting live rounds. i wasn't, because i have shot them before, just that i'm scared of the earplugs falling out (lol) and he gave me a new pair! this is another thing that puzzles me. in a war, who's got time to wear earplugs and eyepatches?
on the whole, i think i did ok. unable to get marksmanship, because i'm just not that great. not a "bobo shooter", but not a sniper either. oh and night shooting was really fun, it just seemed more surreal and cool, and the fact that it's "Own Time Own Target", which basically means the target won't go down after some time, but will stay there until you finish all your rounds. i fucked up my very last one because the assistant didn't flash his torchlight properly, and in the rush of it all i slotted my magazine in the wrong way, and when it was finally remedied, i was too thrown off to shoot those last 4 rounds properly. i missed them all. annoying bugger. but it was a great experience, besides the horrendously long waiting time. because i'm in platoon one, and there are four platoons worth of people, you get the picture.
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field camp really wasn't as bad as i expected it to be. i just saw it as an extended sec one orientation camp cum OBS outdoor thingum. throw in some of the stuff that i've done before in NPCC, and it didn't seem very bad. apart from the combat rations. none were good, some were ok, and the rest were highly disgusting. cold meals sealed airtight in dark green packets that have expiry lifespans of about 2 years i think. eaten without utensils, just tear, squeeze and chomp.
extremely weird things that i am thankful i never have to do in my daily life include sprinkling powder over my faecal matter after i'm done so that the smell won't be that strong, and then covering it up, or shower in a three by two metre makeshift shower area with ten other people within 3 minutes, or strip down to my underwear and slippers along with forty-over other people and powder myself to high heaven on the rest of the days when a water bath is not a luxury.
don't let anyone ever fool you into believing that you'll lose your brains in the army. on the contrary, you exercise it more than ever. there's just so much to learn all the time. such as battle formations and file formations, as well as how to spy and camouflage ourselves with flair and effectiveness. true, there's a lot of physical stuff but the brain works really hard too. there's a constant inflow of information, and processing done. so don't be afraid of going stupid and becoming a mindless drone. the only caveat in all this is that the brainpower is working on a military, kill or be killed instinct, not a quiet, academic one. when people said that learning was a lifelong affair, they weren't kidding. randomly, i am rather amused by the 4-second rule, which basically means that while in a battle, you can't be standing up for more than 4 seconds, like when you move from one tree to another, because that's apparently the average time it takes for someone to aim and shoot. but it's not as though everyone shoots, or runs in unison. that part didn't make any sense to me at all, but oh well.
the last two nights would probably rank very high on the Weird but Ultimately Memorable and Interesting List. we had 3 campsites, and those two nights were spent at the last one. on the second last night, we reached the campsite in the evening, and so we had no tent roofs for that night. we just lay on groundsheets. for the previous 4 nights, it didn't rain. it only had to rain on that Very night! so there we were, at 1 in the morning, rudely awakened by a downpour that lasted over an hour with no shelter, huddled under our raincoats and close to each other, boots soaking wet and us shivering vigorously. that was especially strange considering someone remarked before sleeping that we were lucky it hadn't rained yet. hot milo in the morning never tasted so good.
i must say though, that that cannot hold a candle to the last night. we had to dig these one-man trench-like thingums called shell scrapes. their size is supposed to be standardized for easy replacement of men (ie, when you die, the reinforcement that arrives will be able to fit). you're just supposed to lie in there and shoot, because it's a defensive setup. the soil of course, is piled up on either side of it. when you imagine this on a macro level, it's like a graveyard. and yes, we had to sleep in it for one night. and because we had to use these black sticks that look like bubble tea straws called out-of-fire sticks to mark the outline, they looked like joss sticks at a grave. add to that certain people (including me) burning candles in the shell scrape to keep warm, and it really heightens the spooky graveyard effect. i felt like a zombie when i got up. hmm, zombie army. i think quite a few people got stepped on. thankfully mine was near the corner of the boundary, which meant less chances of that occuring. oh and i got picked to do sentry duty that fateful night, although i only did it for half the time before i had to scoot off to do my business (no one checks anyway, all the commanders themselves are sleeping). as i was squatting at some random tree, i heard someone coughing from a direction where there shouldn't be people. and that wraps up my one and only supernatural experience during outfield.
hrrrm. i want the fieldcamp photos! got to obtain them somehow. i look good in camo paint. =P it was so funny that we would preen ourselves and apply on more "makeup", asking each other if we looked good, glamming ourselves as much as we could before hamming it up for the camera. (on a little sidenote, some fuckers are such annoying camwhores, when they're so fugly, not even hulk-green cover and three haphazard black lines could save them. if you wanna camwhore, at least look good.)
you know, i'm really keen on obtaining the
Army Daze movie, or the playscript. might be quite hard though, it's been 10 years since it came out.
the best thing that has happened so far this year, is that i treated my family to dinner at a restaurant. feels good to pay the tab for all, in an odd way. and i guess it's about time anyway. i really do want to earn more than just a measly $350 a month though.
leaving for malaysia tomorrow for a few days, so ciao.
mike just took up your time at
11:50 pm
th time!