This is plain embarassing. Remembering what 1 Commando was like
ten years ago, watching my old unit fall from grace in this manner
really stings.
My loyalty still remains with the Commandos; such things are hard
to let go of. However, being realistic, I am not surprised, much
less offended, at the smudging of logistics records. For as long as
I have known, the ethos of the unit was that maintaining stores
held a very low priority in comparison to getting the job done. The
implicit assumption was that in completing the mission, plenty of
equipment, both ours and the oppositions, would be damaged,
destroyed or lost. This assumption was carried through to training,
and in the interests of focussing upon the mission, our willingness
to write off equipment was much higher than what would be typically
found in other SAF units. Certainly our logistics people earned
their pittance.
Call it arrogance, callousness or just plain sloppiness, but we
never paid much attention to the niceties of military life. We were
often cited for not saluting other units officers, employing
guerrilla tactics in BTEC exercises and, in one case, painting in
our own parking space at SAFTI. As Henry David Thoreau would have
it, "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be
as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand instead of a
million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your
thumb-nail". We were there to do a job and do it damned well, and
as long as that was achieved, we were, and I do believe we remain,
unabashedly unapologetic for all other transgressions.
What, if the rumours are true, shames me is that the fitness
records were falsified. A full score on the fitness tests was the
minimum required for the job, and a problem in this department, in
light of the ethos I described above, simply will not do. If the
units state of fitness was such that records had to be falsified,
losing the Best Combat Unit competition would be a foregone
conclusion anyway.
Another part of our ethos is that we tend to self-regulate, and in
terms of fitness our standards would be more demanding than what
Mindef sees fit to impose. As much as I would hate to disagree with
a fellow Commando, I would point out to DarrenWong that if we need
to falsify our records for the sake of meeting Mindef standards, we
have well and truly fallen even further below our own standards.
Unless things have changed radically since I left, Commandos are
self-starters; on a normal day, without need for instructions, most
of us would go for runs around AETI while waiting for the Duty
Officer to sign everything off. I was far from being the fittest
man in my company. However, despite all these years and a
relatively sedentary lifestyle, I can still clear a 2.4 kilometre
run in less than ten minutes.
Vis-à-vis the claims of Commandos turning their MILES harnesses off
during exercises, a major shift in culture must have taken place
for such practices to occur. Apart from the usual grumbling about
being unable to book out in the evenings, my lot rather looked
forward to playing OPFOR and having some real fun. Some of us
wanted to try out new tactics; other simply had plenty of
aggression to release. Either way, the net effect was that the
majority of us went out for the satisfaction of properly trouncing
the opposition. This, more so than any regulation, precluded the
idea of turning the MILES harness off. Again, it our
self-regulatory nature manifesting itself. If the current lot are
in fact trying to win for the sake of the record, half the unit
motto ought to be shamefully erased.
Those from my company who stayed on have risen to reasonably senior
positions by now; the last time I checked, all of the officers were
majors. I can only sincerely hope that they remember the way we did
things, and maintain or regain that standard.
A point of irony to note: thomasct pans the wild speculations made
by other posters, and immediately following makes some speculations
about tips of icebergs himself. This is somewhat inconsistent.
