| by comrade commissar | Thomas | @ Saturday, March 05, 2005, 6:26:00 PM | permalink |
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PS: I did N O T write this. Credits goes to "Keirin 'Kit' Chen" for this really good article. The original can be found here. (I did not ask for permission. Please don't kill/sue me. o_o ) Some changes have been made. This article is meant as a general guide, not as a reflection of my own personal BMT experience. ---- 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. I realise that this guide isn't a super comprehensive guide, and it's not even really edited or anything. I don't have all that much time, after all. I hope to write a few things not even to let people know what it's like to be in the army. For that, you should join the army and experience it yourself. I just would like to tell people a few things about what goes on inside, and how it works, and hopefully dispense a few humourous anecdotes along the way. Generally, just an entertaining read based on army related things, like a guide for confused people. 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, the first month 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, or calling the Sgt's mom a right bastard. 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 court: Not a basketball court. A sorry excuse for a basketball court. 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! 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, the wall is falling!", "Help, the exercise machine is falling!", "Help, the door is falling!", but I have yet to hear, "Help, my training instructor is falling" or anything of the sort. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Everything is done together as a platoon, or as a section. 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. There is something called the 'buddy system'. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Platoons, sections, and companies: In Singapore there are many Schools of training. BMTC, which stands for Basic Military Training Centre School, is divided into 2 schools, 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 labelled from A - Z accordingly. There are approximately 200 recruits per 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. Each platoon contains 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. More about Tekong: Being an island broken off from the mainland, it's pretty much got its own water and electrical 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. 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. 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 A means you're pretty much fine, but have to take meds. Attend B means no heavy duties; no training, no exercise. Attend C means you get to go home and rest there. 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. Buddy System: Your buddy is the most important person in the world. You must take care of them, when you do any of your practices, you have to do it with them. Therefore, you must get along with your buddy no matter what. You must never let them out of your sight. If your buddy does something stupid or wrong, both of you will get punished, so it's important to take care of him and vice versa. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For the first month, we haven't been doing anything much except exercising, trying to beef ourselves up and lose weight in general. We have had slow jogs, gym workouts, aerobics, pool activities and such, all headed by a nice person we come to know as a PTI. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Besides exercises, we have to do other things such as drills, route marches, and (for the first month anyway) Rifle training and camo outfields. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Drill: 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. Just last Thursday we 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 3 kilometers. The last one, before our POP, is 24 kilometers. The rest vary inbetween. 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. "Webbing" : Something that you stick around your waist. It carries rifle equipment like extra magazines and cleaning kits. It's inconvinient. POP: Passing-Out Parade. The final parade that you do before you are FREE! FREE FROM THE PAINS OF BASIC TRAINING! Something we all want, but never have early enough. 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. All of our bunks have blessed badges hanging above the doors to ward off spirits, and even then, many people hear things at night. Especially Thursday nights, which are said to be the height of supernatural activities. Besides ghosts, the forest also houses snakes, 20 foot pythons, wild boars, poisonous spiders, scorpions and hornets. Thursday Nights: Extremely haunted nights. It is true that on Thursdays, around 2 am, Children's laughter can be heard in my bunk, or so one of my bunkmates recollects. Another one claimed to see a dog walking inside the room at night as well. I was fortunately deep asleep on both nights. In addition, the lights in my bunk always trip off every few minutes or so, on Thursday nights, although I have yet to see actual signs of supernatural activity personally. My friends all call me crazy, really. My bunk is the one next to the window, the forest literally a stone's throw away from it. Sometimes I sit and stare into it, thinking about things. My friends tell me I'm just inviting the spirits to come and disturb me. Hasn't happened yet. 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 guard duty and confinement. Losing it gets you DB. A favourite occurance of the sergeants, and this has 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. 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 bad Stand-by bed or Stand-by Area check. 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. 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. '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. |
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That's a great story. Waiting for more. » » »
- by comrade 
@ times 9:33 AM, February 16, 2007
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