Today is Singapore Armed Forces Day.
Every year I watch the parade and take the day to reflect on what my service meant to me. Specifically I think about my friends, the other guys like me who were injured, maimed, or otherwise left with some kind of debilitating chronic condition. I wonder how they’re doing, whether their injuries still bother them in civilian life. No one I’ve told about my lung rupture and its subsequent collapse believes me when I say that I got off lucky, but whenever I think about what happened to some of the other guys, I’m convinced someone had to have been looking out for me.
I’m mostly okay now. My knees hurt sometimes. My back hurts a lot. Every now and then my chest hurts and I have to slow my breathing so I don’t aggravate the scar tissue on my lung. And I remember what it was like lying there, in that hospital bed, confused and wondering what was wrong with me.
But you know, it could’ve been worse. I know that because I knew people for whom it was worse.
Anyway a little while back I wrote a post remembering some of my Army stories. I figured today might be an apt day to recall a couple more.
That Time I Tacitly Blackmailed a Medical Officer
When I was younger, I used to be really prone to getting throat infections.
They were nasty events. My throat would seize up and it’d be hell to try and eat or drink. I’d spend the entire time coughing up radioactive-looking yellow-green phlegm with fevers that ran hot enough to scramble eggs. But after years of suffering through them, I got used to it. I knew that a course of antibiotics would make me right as rain within a couple of days.
So one day in basic training, I came down with a throat infection. It felt like shit but that’s just how it was. I went to the camp medical officer and I told the guy (let’s call him Captain J) exactly what I’ve told you: that I get these all the time but I just need antibiotics. He gives me paracetamol and tells me to fuck off. Thanks doc.
Probably a good time to mention that I’ve never actually had a good experience with an Army medical officer before. One guy told me that if I went to overseas jungle warfare school with my lung condition, there was a good chance I’d die. Again, thanks doc.
Anyway so off I fucked with my useless paracetamol. I tried going again after a couple of days to tell him that it wasn’t enough, but again the order was to fuck off. He didn’t have the patience to deal with ‘yet another recruit’.
So I suffered through more of basic training, coughing my lungs out every five minutes and spitting out the refuse wherever possible (and swallowing it down whenever impossible). Then the weekend came where I got to go home for a bit, and the first thing I did of course was to go to a doctor to get some antibiotics because I’d gotten worse, and the phlegm had evolved from custard yellow to baby vomit green. Yeah, you’re welcome for the imagery.
My usual doctor wasn’t open on the weekend, so instead I went to a different clinic nearby. They only had locum doctors for the weekend but I really didn’t need anything fancy, just a basic course of amoxicillin because again, not an unusual occurrence. I knew what I was doing. My number comes up and I knock on the door before pushing it open.
And who should I see behind the desk but Captain J, the same medical officer.
Now for the uninitiated, it is very, VERY illegal for medical officers like Captain J to moonlight as locum doctors or practice medicine outside. It’s illegal for everyone serving in the military, obviously, but especially so for medical officers. The official rationale is that moonlighting is exhausting. Since the moonlighter is doing another job in addition to their military duties, it will inevitably affect their ability to perform said military duties to an adequate standard. As a medical officer, such an impairment could mean soldiers dying. Hence, illegal.
I’m not a religious man, but in that moment I felt God himself reach down to touch my face and literally yank the corners of my mouth upward into a smile.
I sit down and I say, “Captain J?”
Without looking up he just says, “Yes?”
“You’re my medical officer.”
He looks up, “You’re from BMT (Basic Military Training) School 4?”
“Yes Sir.”
His eyes widen behind his thick, black-framed glasses. He sees my shit-eating grin and it dawns on him that he knows that I know what’s up. If I report him to the Medical Council or the Army, his practice license will be in jeopardy. I’m holding all the cards here. So he asks me what’s the matter, and I tell him that I’ve already seen him twice for my throat infection whilst in camp, and all he told me was to fuck off with some paracetamol. I told him I still felt like shit, and that what he’d prescribed me hadn’t been nearly enough.
“Okay. What do you want? A medical certificate so you can stay home?”
“No Sir, I just want what I told you to give me the first time around: antibiotics.”
The man writes the prescription immediately, and I’ve got the meds in hand within 5 minutes. Sure enough, I was better by Monday when I told the other guys in my company what had happened. We all had a good laugh, and they remarked I was a dumbass for not getting an MC to take the whole week off.
But I didn’t want that. I just wanted my damned antibiotics. And by God, you bet your ass I got them.
That Time I Became Immune to Mosquito Bites
A couple of months after that, I was selected for Officer Cadet School (OCS). I then entered OCS, had my lung collapse during OCS, and got removed from OCS because of the subsequent medical downgrade.
As I mentioned last time around, you get into OCS by virtue of your performance in basic training. It demands a high standard of performance because officer training fucking sucks. It’s hard and painful and physically strenuous to the point where one training company when I was there lost something like 25% of its strength due to the injuries alone.
The ones who got injured or maimed during training were sent to the place I found myself in. Officially we were called SITs: Soldiers-in-Transit. Basically we sat around all day in the OCS HQ building, parked under a unit with a nebulous job description, doing odd jobs for whichever training company required bodies and menial labour.
Most of the time we were left alone because our sergeant major was a great guy who told most of the companies to fuck off and that we weren’t just free manpower. He recognised that we’d each given up something for the country already, by virtue of us even being in this ‘brokedick platoon’, and that we didn’t exist to just be exploited further. But every now and then, a legitimate request would come through, and someone would have to draw the short end of the stick.
One day, that was me.
A training company was doing a livefire exercise, and they needed bodies to go man a sentry post on a key road into the area to control the flow of traffic into the area. Obviously when you’re shooting live rounds in closed terrain like a jungle, where you don’t have great visibility, you need to make sure no one’s wandering around in the background without your knowledge. That’s what I and another guy named Corporal D had to make sure of.
D had been a senior cadet when he tore up the ligaments in both his knees. I’d only been a junior cadet when my lung popped, so he was senior by virtue of the fact that he’d been in longer than me. I followed his lead.
We showed up to the company line at 0400hrs and moved out with them. While we were waiting we told the cadets who we were, and how we ended up doing their bitch work. I’m sure they must have felt sorry for us. We balanced that out by regaling them with stories about how we usually got to go home every day at 1700hrs, and how most of our days were spent playing board games (fun fact: I learned how to play monopoly and took my SATs as a SIT). I don’t think we managed to convince any of them that it was a worthwhile trade though.
By 0500hrs we were set up at the sentry post. It was a tiny concrete box with three walls and a man-sized hole in the fourth facing the road. It had one concrete ledge on the inside that was meant to be a table. We took out our folding chairs and we stayed there for the next 22.5 hours.
Now, the duration wasn’t particularly arduous. I mean it was boring, and it was hot, and we couldn’t sleep, and at one point it stormed and we got soaked even despite our raincoats, but that’s not what sucked about it. No, what sucked were the mosquitos.
Over the course of that 22.5 hours I killed roughly 60-70 mosquitos (D killed about the same number) and still I got bitten over a hundred times. My body the next day was a patchwork of angry red lumps so voluminous that my skin looked like a series of rolling hills. And the itching, good God the itching.
But you were wearing your fatigues, I hear you say. Where did they bite me?
Well first they bit my face, my neck, my ears, and my hands, but the ones that tried to bite exposed skin were usually easiest to kill. See, the ones that really got me were the ones that bit me through my GODDAMNED UNIFORM. I actually got bitten so much that day that, as the chapter title says, I became immune to mosquito bites. I’m still immune. Whenever I get bitten, my body just doesn’t react anymore. The skin barely even swells up and it’s always gone within an hour. It’s like a superpower honestly. It was super useful for the rest of my Army career.
But at the time it was the fucking mosquito apocalypse. We burned everything to try and keep the damned things at bay. We burned mosquito coils, and when that ran out we burned dry sticks and leaves that we scrounged. After it rained, we started burning random scraps of paper. We burned tissues. We burned a book. We burned scraps of cloth from a sewing kit. We burned the ration boxes our lunch had come in. We burned first aid dressings which we’d laced with alcohol-based insect repellent gel. And at one point, we got it in our heads that technically, instant noodles are just stored chemical potential energy, so they should theoretically be capable of burning.
We set fire to a pack of those too.
You remember that old Youtube channel where a guy in a lab coat sticks random things into a blender? I think it was called ‘Will it Blend’. Yeah, this was like that but for burning random items we had on hand. At one point we turned the entire sentry post into a hotbox of (in hindsight, probably toxic) smoke and we didn’t care - we’d have inhaled any amount of smoke just to keep those damned mosquitos away. Not that it mattered one bit.
But hey, at least I learned that with enough alcohol-based insect repellent gel, you can in fact set fire to a pack of instant noodles. The smoke is jet black by the way, in case you’re wondering.
That Time I Invented a Disgusting New Way to Eat Noodles
On the topic of instant noodles, I have one last story for you. This is when I invented cold brew noodles.
Yes, you heard me. Cold. Brew. Noodles. Et voila.
I was overseas in [redacted] for a long field exercise. I was starving. We’d been issued with packs of noodles as supplements to our MREs, but we weren’t allowed to start any fires to actually cook them (God knows why because it was a stupid fucking rule). So there they sat, taunting us. Honestly the noodles weren’t even that good (they were the Maggi ones) but when you’re that hungry, literally anything is good enough. We also had these 1.5L bottles of mineral water that we got issued to hydrate ourselves with.
I put two and two together and cut one of the bottles in half, and filled the bottom part with cold mineral water (this was a temperate climate by the way so it was fairly cool outside as well). I then took a pack of noodles, poured the seasoning into the cold water, then broke the pack in two and dumped them in. After half an hour, the noodles were cold and soggy, but edible at least and no longer stiff. And let me tell you, it was some of the best food I’ve ever had in my life. I made three packs of the stuff in the same makeshift cup, reusing the same water each time. It took about 2 hours to actually eat it all, but it was worth the wait.
Unsurprisingly, no one else wanted any at first, but as I was eating my second pack a couple of other guys came around to it. So there we were, in the cold, eating cold noodles together, lamenting the fact that we couldn’t start a fire. Yes, it was objectively gross. No, I wouldn’t do it again today. But it’s still a very fond memory and an acute reminder to never underestimate hunger.
Bonus: That Time My Platoon Commander Asked Me to Write an Essay
I lied. I have one more story for you. When I was in basic training, my platoon commander found out I was a writer, and he asked me to write something. This is what I came up with:
#
I start at five, when the darkness of the previous night has yet to release its grip. I wake to the sound of shuffling, whispers, coughs and metal lockers closing, birds in the trees and the morning wind.
I rise, I dress, I rub the sleep from my eyes and wash away dreams, and then I begin.
I descend to the company line, and I sweat. I grunt. I exhale stars and burning aches, and I breathe in cold fire. An hour later, I eat. Another hour later, I go back to work, and I stand in a field of sunlight and dragonfly heartbeats.
This is my day.
#
I see the lights of the city again, glowing bright against the shimmering outline of the sea at eight, and it looks like a million fireflies took to fluttering against a backdrop of deep, abyssal obsidian. It is beautiful. The city reminds me of what I have left behind, and in that, it reminds me of what I have gained, and what lies ahead.
I smile. There is no greater love, affection, or adoration, than that of a man’s fidelity towards whatever work he chooses of his own volition, and I choose my work every day.
#
I hear children laughing, screaming, amidst the din of metal striking onto porcelain plates, and I remember something else. Faint, like a dream half-forgotten from a restless night. I think at some point I might have been annoyed with them.
Now their voices remind me of why I must return on Monday. They are my charges, my duty, the recipients of the care I shall render and the protection I shall provide. My task is simple, pure, honest, and that is why I love it. My occupation lacks all pretense and presumption. What I am to do, I do for love.
I look out the window, back upon the blanket of earthbound stars that is downtown in the dark, and I smile.
I do not know what comes next. I am without trepidation, or question. I have no doubt, no reservation, and no hesitation.
I am a soldier now, and all I know is that tomorrow will be stranger.
Tomorrow will be different.
#
I never actually heard back from him on this one. He must not have liked it.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning
I’ve got other stories too, more exciting ones with gunfire and running through the jungle and I’ve even got one with a car chase (I’m not allowed to tell that one in public though). Maybe someday I’ll even tell some of them here. But that action movie stuff is what children believe the Army is.
Truth is most of the time, we were just normal guys, trying to get by in bad situations. And our stories aren’t the sort that get made into hit movies or inspire crowds into a patriotic fervour. But at least they’re ours.
Today was Singapore Armed Forces Day. We didn’t have a choice in serving, but we did the best we could. Everyone gave up something. Some of us gave up a lot. A select few of us gave up everything. We didn’t get much in return. Only those of us who were there will know what it meant. No one else will remember who we were.
But we did our jobs anyway, and I think there’s something to be proud of in that fact.
Happy SAF Day.