Guess it's no harm revealing the following since they happened
many moons ago & my unit's already stood down.
My reservist recce group got a lot of autonomy to move around
&, once night training were concluded, the 4 battery-line Land
Rovers (& the RSM vehicle) used to individually sneak out for
baths, coffee-shop supper & - if the deployment grounds are
poor - find a secluded spot to retire for the night. Our favorite
haunt for the latter was at Yishun Sports Stadium, a deserted place
after midnight. We usually parked against a wall or pillar behind,
stored the M16s "furthest inside" possible (usually under our
fullpacks), rolled down/secured the back flaps, locked the vehicle
doors, & then slept on ponchos alongside. Not very tactical at
all, but the mentality was we're all light sleepers & would
anyway be awake by 5:30am to drive back for stand-to. Sometimes a
couple of us would stay up late to talk cock, & thus act as
indirect sentries too.
FWIW No trouble at all doing this through the years, but for 2
instances when it caused some mirth. Once was when we spent the
night thus along the long stretch of Lim Chu Kang Road, with most
of us "kooning" on the footpath - except for a signaller in the
back of the Land Rover ... & the driver who, during the middle
of the night, climbed to sleep on top of it (with
legs over the windscreen). There's the normal engine roar of the
cars/trucks that occasionally zoomed past, but all of us to wake up
when we sensed someone stopping. Turned out to be a police patrol;
they said they respected being out of the SAF jurisdiction but
advised us to rein in our driver's blatancy. Bit embarassing for my
officer then, though we later looked back & laughed over the
affair.
The other incident took place in ROC. Same "SOP": 10km+ drive back
to bath, too late for supper & looking for cleaner places to
sleep. The 1st night was at an unfinished condo block where we
informed (& bribed with combat rats) their guardpost, so no
harm done. The 2nd night ended up more improvisory, cuz it was a
small village &, noting the ulu environs, we chose to park in a
small lane & grab about 4 hours' rest.
Quite dumb to admit this, but up to then it somehow escaped all of
my recce group that we were in a foreign country! As chided by my
fellow recce mates (when told what we did), all our standard
precautions were a false sense of security - we could've been
easily ambushed by delinquents, let alone secret-society thugs
(which Taiwan still has a lot of) or, worse yet, the media if they
spotted a scoop & played up our "chin-chye" discipline.
All quite true - & we made sure to sleep in with the rest of
the unit thereafter -though in reality nothing really happened that
night. There were some wild dogs on the loose but they didn't come
near; what did wake us up was, I recall, a middle-aged woman nosily
opening her shutters nearby to get to her van. She looked at us in
stunned silence, before turning away as if to mind her business,
but smiled when we caught her eye again with our greetings. It was
already 1st light anyway - the sun rises at 5am over there. But,
out of civility, we couldn't urinate/defecate anywhere & had to
find a convenient Mom-&-Pop eating house to do our morning
business. The one place we chose loved our spending breakfast money
with them - there were 7 of us - but must've been befuddled at the
sight of us, one-by-one, using its toilet!
