my time at bmt provided me with plenty of laughter and lessons.
the people in my company were fantastic, from the instructors to
the recruits to the support personnel. i made lots of friends and i
hope to keep most of them.
from the first day itself, when i misread the instructions and went
to the SAF ferry terminal in shorts, only to realise then that i
had to report wearing trousers or jeans (i then had to swap clothes
with my dad in the toilet. amazingly, his shirt and trousers fit me
pretty well. it was quite a laugh seeing my dad walk around tekong
dressed in my clothes. he really looked out of place. kudos to him.
that man never feels embarrassed and i'm proud of him. and very
thankful.) to the remaining days, listening to the instructors talk
amongst themselves and watching recruits do the stupidest things
imaginable.
lots of little interesting/funny things happened too:
- my buddy's name is same as mine. but he's one of the weakest
recruits in the company. so he's always getting yelled at and
sometimes i don't know who my sergeant is yelling at. gotta watch
the eyes.
- the lady in charge of the cookhouse came down to give a talk and
at the end of it she showed us pictures of what the cookhouse was
like before our time, when it hadn't yet been commercialised. one
of the recruits asked her which year these photographs were taken.
she thought for a long while before proudly answering, "Before
commercialise."
- my sectionmate yansheng was asked why we need to work together as
a team and he was convinced that it was because "we are sleeping
together."
- another one of my sectionmates, samson tan, (he's half dutch,
half chinese) is a black man. he really is. he can rap really well,
he wears his shorts so low that it'd make an ACS boy blush and he
does fantastic grafitti work.
- they serve the exact same mutton dish every single day in the
muslim cookhouse but they change the name everytime. it's been
called "mutton mysore", "mutton madras", "mutton bombay", "mutton
semur", "mutton rendang" and "mutton satay." and it's the same
thing everytime (with the exception of mutton satay, which gives
the mutton dish a whole new, unique twist by having the pieces
skewered onto a stick.)
- my platoon sergeant can jump 216cm using only one leg, so my
friend bing kun (we call him biscuit because his name sounds like
the word for that in chinese) asked him with a wry smile if he can
jump 432cm with both legs.
- strangely, it's a nice feeling watching platoons march across and
past one another just nicely such that they don't have to slow down
or stop to give way. it's especially sweet when they turn just in
time.
- my malaysian sectionmate chinyi wanted to borrow my shoes in a
hurry so that he could rush downstairs. i asked him for what, and
he replied that something of his dropped down. i asked what had
dropped down and his reply: "my panties."
- i named the cat that roams around the muslim cookhouse "sergeant
major." coincidentally, his lifestyle resembles that of my
company's sergeant major (the sergeant in charge of discipline and
regimentation.)
- one of the platoon 3 guys has the most jumbled up mind ever. he
led one of the warm up exercises and shouted out this instruction:
"everyone, on your butts... up!"
- my company's smokers came up with a smoker's pledge that was
taken almost wholesale from our country's one, with some choice
additions: "so as to achieve equality in protein and
nicotine."
- during a match between the instructors from our company (kilo)
and alpha, one of the platoon 3 guys yelled a taunt at the shortest
alpha player on the pitch: "hey! stand up and play lah!"
- we watched a pirated copy of xmen in the lecture theatre during
our free time and samson and i spent the majority of the film
laughing at the ridiculous subtitling. examples:
"incredible nightcrawler" ----> "incredible black clown"
"we've got to stop cerebro" ----> "we've got to stop the
Vibro"
- during a first aid talk, sergeant redzuan, with the straightest
face imaginable (i mean, he was convinced that this was not very
obvious and that he had to tell us about this amazing detail or
else it might cost someone's life.), informed us that one of the
signs of severe bleeding (we're talking really severe here.) is the
casualty complaining that he/she feels sick and more crucially,
they suffer from (god forbid!) restlessness and thirst.
- i realised that the deeper you go into bmt.. army people slowly
stop giving you the benefit of the doubt.
