Who says NS is useless?

yea!!! ord lo!!! finally... got my pink ic back. but not after paying five dollars for an id tag. Didnt know that the new ruling now is "No id tag, no pink ic" Wat the heck rite... why would the SAF want such a small item back for. So that they can issue it back to us when we go to war? Wierd... looking back at my ns life i wonder wat i have learnt frm my last two yrs? wat have i gained frm the past two yrs?

1) How to endure lack of sleep. During Bmt, we slept at 1plus sometimes and wake up at 430 in the morning to draw rifles everyday. Sometimes the sergeant himself can't wake up(despite being called up) so we end up waiting for him for abt an hr. He's in his bed, while we are standing there in the file waiting for him... Then u start to see some pple fall asleep while standing. Then the diver course started and we have to wake up at 3 in the morning to run 6km in 27min. And during hellweek no sleep for five days... How the heck did i go thru all that? Nowadays i sleep at 12midnite and wake up at 11 in the morning....

2)How to endure being cold, wet and hungry.(Therefore appreciate Spore better) There was this exercise in some reservoir where we stayed in the water from 9pm till 3 am for all three days of the exercise. That was the worst experience. I remember most of the guys were peeing in the water just to keep ourselves warm... sick.. swimming in our own pee(just realised that). Then my friend Yak(his name), vomitted in the water after eating combat rations. Can rem the smell of his puke... Pasta with tomato sauce... Then i was eating the Khong Guan biscuits cause i was really too hungry... Wat an experience, eating while floating in some deserted reservoir. Lucky we didnt see any crocodiles, the water was so dark so maybe cannot see...
Then there was Brunei, survival training. Three days w/o food in the jungle(i know ocs go thru 5 days so im not complaining much) They put us in the jungle for three days with a parang and of course our SBOs, fieldpack and rifle. Then made us build houses out of Logs and leaves.(sounds like the movie castaway) The worst part was not the hunger but the cold we had to endure because it rained everyday. When our uniform became abit dry, it would start to rain again. I remember the jungle started flooding and then me, Loy and Clarence huddled together at nite. Shivering and trying to admire fireflies we saw... At night, i would wake up shivering because it was too bloody cold. In the morning, we would cook soup using rainwater and instant noodles seasoning(we smuggled that in our First aid dressing(FAD)). Then we ate raw ferns that the instructors gave us as rewards and put the ferns in the soup. We started the fire using our notebook which was also wet. Kept the fire gg by feeding more paper frm the notebook till we ran out of paper. Yummy... Seriously it was the best soup i had tasted... My friend said sth very funny when we got out of the jungle,"If my mother sees me suffering like that, i think she will cry..."

3)How to work when your superiors are ard. 'Wayang' or 'showmanship' is very important. I'm not saying we shouldnt work when your superiors are not ard... but then again not everyone shares the same view. There are those who work irregardless of the situation(These are the pple who get things done). There are pple who skive when no one is watching and only work when their superiors are ard(These pple are smart but they can be a pain in the ass) . Then there are those who never work. One thing is for sure, if u do not work when ur superiors are ard, u will be deemed as having a negative attitude towards ur work.

4)How to be a taiji master. Ok, this may sound abit wierd but when Higher ranking pple assign tasks to us, sths its not even our duty to carry them out. So we have to push the responsiblity of completing the tasks to the appropriate pple.(taiji)

5)How to endure inefficiency. Wait and wait and wait... no need for much explaination here.

6)You get to meet alot of guys.

7)How to keep a straight face infront of pple u do not like. Refer to my entry i posted last mth abt officers and specialists in Ndu.

ha... i'm tired of typing.. maybe next time, till i think of more things i have learnt frm NS. For now, this is it... Ya anyway was watching a highlight frm a French show abt this 2 gays(wat a coincidence, i met one that day w/o knowing(see previous entry)). Its a special feature in a dvd my friend lent me...Cant tell u who, if not u might think his gay too.. Tot that this part frm a song he was singing to another gay was quite nice... The title of the movie is A Summer Dress.



As the words of this song go.. "I will never forget, Bang Bang!"
I will never forget my NS days. Good link eh...