Would not be enough to convey the sheer amount of life that has transpired while my online presence has been, for lack of a better term, lacking. I do hope that’s over and done with, though: I’d hate to think I blew all that cash on my very own domain for nothing.
I must say, though, it has been a rough couple of months. I was recently involved in my Army Open House held at Pasir Laba Camp from the 3rd to the 7th of September, which preparations required me to (finally!) get out of my normal holding area in Sungei Gedong camp and over to the much-more inhabitable world of the School of Infantry Specialists.
Well, at least outside of the school, at any rate. Anyway, long Army rant ahead, so yea, if you want the really juicy bit, scroll all the way down.It was a pretty goddamn crazy two months (and even now I still have to settle some retarded issues related to the fallout from its less-than-stellar ending which I’ll elaborate on later) and I’m sure I can even describe all of it without getting charged with breaching some retarded SAF Act or other.
Which is why I’m going to attempt to give as detailed a summary as is possible with mere words. It’s feeble, I know, but this story must be told.
Where to begin? At the start, no less.
So anyway, basically it all began when mon capitan from my depot called me and another driver into his office and asked us to volunteer for the Army Open House event. As we’re kind of short-staffed on drivers (or vehicle operators, as they like to glorify it) and none of the new drivers had anything approaching what we’d call experience, the experience necessary to survive in the harsh/hostile (humid?) environment of the outfield, both of us would have to go.
Now I was apprehensive about this. For one thing, I wasn’t sure whether this gig would be a stay-in/out tasking, which would mean that I would to have, for the first time since my Basic, stay inside a goddamned camp overnight for more than 48 hours consecutively. Additionally, the Army Open House has not had a very proud tradition of being awesome for the little people, meaning, us.
But really, there was little choice in the matter. I could not, in good conscience (I didn’t know I had one, incidentally), send out my understudy to drive vehicles for which he had little experience in and shown already to be extremely reckless in. It would not be so.
Therefore it wasn’t.
The Army Open House was not designed to be an actual representation of our Army. It was designed to be pretty. It was also designed to appeal to the big shots who would be dropping down to support our 3rd-generation force. For all intents and purposes, it was like staging a photographic portrait shoot for a model, only with tracked vehicles, choppers, guns, small arms and lots of green uniforms.
Unfortunately, the designers were them. You know who I’m talking about.
The kind of people who, during the photo shoot, will constantly bitch and whine about every single fucking detail that the photographer has already taken into account (and deemed irrelevant, I might add), will change their minds according to something as prosaic as the weather, ‘Oh, let’s have that prop over there instead’, causing a clusterfuck as the photographer has to reposition the elements in question, recheck the lighting and shadows and basically waste a fuck-ton of his time. Oh, and they have absolutely no idea what the fuck they’re talking about, or even where the shutter release is on a camera.
Now replace ‘people’ with ‘people wearing stripes’, ‘bitch and whine’ with ‘shouting and screaming’, this whole photo shoot with a Combat Safari (I shit you not, that’s the exact name they used) and you should have a pretty clear picture by now of what the experience for us was mostly like.
My part in the event would consist basically of driving visitors around a pre-determined course in the jungle, where they would get to ‘engage’ targets with, for my vehicle type, a FN MAG. They’d be using blanks, and while I imagine they probably enjoyed themselves a little, I can’t really say the same for me or my vehicle commander, who would be standing in the turret cupola and trying his darned best not to fall asleep from boredom.
It wasn’t all bad, though. It was stay-out, thank fucking God. And our direct superiors for the event were pretty cool people (though they were honestly fucking lazy and more than willing to push their work onto each other). It was pretty sweet to drive outfield, on your 10th round, look up at the turret cupola and see your vehicle commander reading Sherlock Holmes. Pretty fucking boss, if I do say so myself. If only he was allowed to smoke a pipe and wear a paperboy cap instead of those goddamned CVC helmets.
On retrospect, though, it was a pretty good thing HQ Armour requested our presence (my driver and I are actually attached to a maintenance depot, but we’re still technically part of the Armour division) for the event, because everyone pretty much had no fucking clue what you need to do when you have vehicles going outfield. Especially our vehicles.
I mean, when an ‘Engine Pressure’ warning light comes on, do you really need to ask whether the vehicle can still keep going? Even better, when the ‘STOP ENGINE’ and ‘CHECK ENGINE’ lights go on, do you ask whether the vehicle can make it until the end of the day?
And don’t get me started on the other issues, like diesel. It’s almost as if they think tanks/APCs can function on the pure willpower of the driver. I even saw a sergeant get yelled at while guiding a vehicle because he apparently wasn’t’ using the proper hand signals’ with a glow stick at night. (There are no official signals for glow stick guiding, by the way: we’re supposed to use torchlights.)
We even got our lieutenant in a spot of trouble when our vehicle ran low on engine oil. (Yea, we got the ENG PRESS light of death as well and a crappy transmission to match) They kept questioning him why we didn’t perform Before Operation Service on the vehicle in the morning, which would have prevented this problem. I didn’t bother telling them that there’s really no point in checking whether you’re low on oil if you have no fucking oil.
(The oil ended up being drawn from our tech store back in Sungei Gedong.)
I think the most telling part of this whole sorry exercise, though, was the resulting chaos when one of the Bionix (BX) vehicles threw a track during the actual event.
(Basically, tracked vehicles don’t function the same way as a wheeled vehicle does. Instead of wheels, sprocket wheels much like gears act as the final drives. The teeth of the sprocket wheel hooks onto the track links, and the tracks move the vehicle forward. When the vehicle throws a single track link, the entire track will pretty much unravel and shoot off sometimes, which can be pretty exciting if someone’s standing directly behind/forward of the vehicle. You pretty much have a 50/50 chance of getting a Bruce Lee-punch of track in the chest.)
The entire command area went berserk, making frantic calls over the radio for the maintenance team, yelling at the driver for going too fast (keep in mind this was at a 90-degree tight turn and thus his speed was probably less than 5 km/h at the time the vehicle threw the track) and from the way they acted in general, you’d think that a bomb had gone off.
Anyway, that’s not really the point. Until this moment, the entire open house had not really mentioned the service and support side of the Army, the side that really keeps the entire armoured division going. Well, when I saw my sergeant finally earn his pay as he set about re-connecting the vehicle track, all I could really think of was maintenance represente!
And that’s the problem here. It took a downed vehicle to finally get our open house, of all things, to finally admit, grudgingly, that sometimes, it’s not all about spit-and-shine on boots that matters. That sometimes, painting vehicles that are about to go outfield to eat dust is not really the Army. That, really, it’s the minor NCOs that form the backbone of the armed forces, and not the stripes/officers.
That, just maybe, our Army isn’t really all as cracked up as it’s touted to be.
(Also that a 3G moniker that they’re applying to everything is fucking retarded. Who the fuck even came up with that?)
This story isn’t over yet, though. Not by a long shot.
On the final run of the last day, there were only a couple of public visitors left to go for the joyride. A couple of lieutenants from command decided that they might as well have a ride in one of the LSVs (Light Strike Vehicles), which is essentially a car with a rollcage for its upper body and nothing else. One of them was from my platoon in Basic.
When my turn came to proceed on the final run, I made all of a klick before the warning from one of the marshal stations where the road meets jungle came. We were told to halt, and, after a while, to let our passengers down to head back to the waiting area. This wasn’t anything unusual: usually when there’s an extended delay the passengers are allowed to leave before the end of the ride and are brought back to the start point in a conventional SUV.
The delay turned into a very long delay, however, and then bits of information started trickling down in the typical Army manner (from random people): the LSV vehicle had overturned, meaning flipped over. Apparently they went over a bad bump on a 40-degree slope and the driver fucked it all up.
Let me say first that I have not heard of a single incident where a tank/APC overturned in which no one was killed or seriously injured, so you can pretty much understand the possible consequences here.
Luckily for them, however, the injuries were pretty minor, culminating in a broken wrist for one of the el-tees and a severely sprained back for the other. The driver was fine, save for surface scratches. I guess those things weigh a lot less than full-size tracked vehicles, though.
Anyway, the incident was pretty much kept hushed-up, and I have to say, I’m more than a little pissed off by that. When I got back to camp and told my warrant officer about the incident, his reply was essentially that as long as it wasn’t a member of the public that got injured, it wasn’t that serious.
I’m not even fucking kidding. That was exactly what he said to me, and I seriously had to restrain myself from smashing his bloated face in yelling at him. I mean, what the fuck? What kind of attitude is that to show towards your own fucking army? How does someone even think this isn’t serious in any way possible?
And it’s not just him, either. Mostly it’s REMFs who have the same response, to be fair. Most of my sergeants were pretty shocked (in the typical Army manner, meaning holy shit, good thing I wasn’t that guy) that such a thing could actually happen at an open house, let alone at an average speed of 20km/h.
Is this really what our Army has become? So dedicated to putting on a front for everyone, even within the Army, that we’re willing to forgo everything we stand for? Professionalism, ‘Care for Soldiers’, Honour; are these values, or just that, words to be repeated over and over in the vain hope that they actually mean something?
I’m sorry, I know it seems a little abrupt as to how I’ve suddenly gone off-tangent on this, but I will say that this is only a small example of what happened during the Open House that makes me want to mouth off. And when you take into account that this incident is pretty serious, the implications thereof are, I would say, pretty fucking big.
I’m glad I get out soon.
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