Last week some guys from the 'morale assessment department' in the SAF came to assess the morale of my company through a morale survey.

When I was doing the survey, I realised how meaningless life was in my current vocation.
Everyday, we would be either doing PT, doing vehicle maintenance(50% of the time), whiling the time away or doing component training. How boring.
Naturally, morale would be low in the company. I thought: The only thing that ever drove morale up was company cohesion. There was nothing else in the things we did that kept morale up.

After that survey, I thought about my infantry days. Oh boy, those were the days. Although we sweated, bled and struggled, those were the days man.

My favorite part of my infantry days were NavEx(navigation exercises).
I still remember leading my team through 2 navigation exercises. I was the IC, due to some random arrangement. My job was to bring my team to locate all the checkpoints and go back safely.

We clambered up knolls, traversed streams, crossed ditches, broke though thorny branches and helped each other up steep slopes. There was nowhere else where you could find this sense of camaraderie, nowhere except in infantry.

I still remember stepping into soft mud during one of the NavEx. I sank to knee depth almost immediately. Naturally, I panicked, and it accelerated the rate which I sank in. My team members shouted for me to remain calm and stopped moving.
I had sank in to waist depth by then. They took my rifle from me and then formed a human rope to attempt to pull me out. It took a while but after a few tries, I struggled free of the mud, then my feet found a root in the mud which provided a platform for me to support my weight and heave myself out.
It was dangerous I admit, but where else could you have a chance for such adventures?

We lost our way in the jungle that day as well. Haha. That's how NavEx-es are.
For 2 hours, we wandered through thickets after thickets of trees, up and down, up and down. We could not figure out where we were. My team was exhuasted. I looked at my watch and it was 6.45pm. We had less than 45 minutes of sunlight left. I shouted for them not to give up, to move on. If night fell, there was no way we could find our way back again.
I didn't rest at all during the time we were lost. Whenever my team stopped to rest, I would move some distance out to scout the area with another team mate to find out if there was an easy path we could take.
We never failed to find our way back to the main group, because the main group would keep on shouting and we would follow the sound back.

But at that time, I had already gone for multiple scouting trips. We had no idea where we were, and my best gauge had at least a 1km error.
The team was feeling down. But we perservered on. 5 minutes later, I noticed a familiar path in the woods. It might look like a gap in between two trees to others, but I knew we had been there before. We had passed through that area during the previous NavEx!
I knew the way out. 10 minutes later we were back on the main track.
We talked about how we would tell everyone we spent 2 hours sleeping in the trees after finding all our checkpoints.
Haha. But in our heart sealed away an adventure that will always be remembered.

Those are the infantry days. How could that be compared to my days in combat engineers? I once thought if I would rather have stayed in infantry or combat engineers. I concluded that infantry would have been more fruitful and exciting but engineers would have been safer. I thought infantry would be better though.
Of course, the people in infantry like Jia Xin wouldn't say the same.

The grass is always greener on the other side. But my grass is seriously brown.

I am a castle.

Its been a very tough week. I haven't had a week like this since my BPCC days. My aching muscles and back can seriously account for that.
Its back to the days of component training again! Training, equipment maintenance till 2am, sleep, wake at 5am, continue training, rinse and repeat.

I am going to have another component training in February. Dreading it already.

Then Thursday my camp had a Green Campaign Day. It would have made sense if not for the senseless activities planned for the day. I thought the talk and lecture was reasonable, but spring cleaning wasn't. Neither was the massive effort for a beach clean-up which I didn't see the person initiating it on the ground helping out.
It was super tiring for the people on the ground - us - to launch the heavy equipment(total weight adds up in tonnes) needed manually and of course to do the maintenance on the equipment after that.

The effort just wasn't worth it, in my opinion, considering the result of the whole event.

The talk on the other hand, was ok but it would have been better if the speaker hadn't called Al Gore a presidency-wanna-be(he lost the presidency to George Bush) and made him out to be a guy using the environment to win Oscars.
Mind you, Al Gore doesn't wan to run for president and his effort to save the environment is definitely more than what you can do in your lifetime.

And my weekend ends off with a COS duty on Saturday. What a weekend.
I still got to return to camp to perform my COS. Taking a mini break at home now.
Hopefully next week will be better.

I am losing it again...

Goodbye 2008! Come 2009 the first thing I thought of (or rather many people reminded me of) was: What are my 2009 new year resolutions?
But before that, backtrack a bit. Did I fulfil my 2008 new year resolutions?

I went to take a look at my blog entries in January 2008. There was only one blog entry and it was posted on the 20th of January. Oh my god. That means I did not make any new year resolutions or I didn't note down my new year resolutions for year 2008 in any form!

So forget 2008. Let's throw it out of the window.
Yep. There it goes falling 10 stories out of mine.

And sooo... back to year 2009!

This year may be different, but my aspirations are not much different from the past few years.

I resolve to:

Study hard!!!
This is important!!! I have been procastinating over studying some basics for my university course for a very very long time! First I told myself after I leave BMT I will study. Then it was SISPEC. Then I told myself trainees didn't have much time so I will start studying after I pass out of trainee life. But its been 2 months since I became a specialist and I haven't gone down to some serious studying yet. Ahhh. This cannot be the case! I must study!!!

Stay safe throughout the year!
National Service is never a safe vocation and never has been. After witnessing so many incidents for the past 9 months, I have lost faith in the safety of the system. My only resort left is to pray hard that everyone will all ORD in one piece and of course to look out for the safety of others.

Stay healthy!
I am going to try hard for this. I have been coughing continuously for the past 2.5 months now. Never recovered, never thought I would. But I can't deny the importance of health so I will watch my habits (such as blogging at 2.45am) and do away with unhealthy habits!

That's my main 3 new year resolutions for the year 2009.

I hope 2009 will be an enjoyable year ahead, hopefully with less natural disasters, riots, political conflicts and a bullish economy.

To everyone I know and care for:

STAY HAPPY, STAY HEALTHY, STAY SAFE! DUN FORGET TO START WRITING 09 INSTEAD OF 08! ;)