John

There was this trooper in my company by the name of Tang Tat Fong, who was given the nickname "John", for he was abysmally unremarkable, and had a stutter that was exacerbated by stress.

Once, when his platoon (3rd) was being unreasonably punished by their maniac sergeant, SGT Vannan, through a series of individual verbal grilling, John landed his mates into deeper shit by not being able to answer his sergeant's persuasive questions coherently.

On second thought, John's exploits weren't unremarkable, for they are the ones I remember most, and although the description "fondly remembered" comes to mind, to say it is so is to be rather perverse.

John was a walking catastrophe. If anything were to go wrong, it seemed he was always involved. The funniest incident occurred one night during a battalion exercise. Most of the able-bodied troopers had dismounted from their APCs to attack an objective somewhere in the small Singapore jungle.

The sick and injured were tasked to remain with their vehicles to guide the drivers (who are effectively blind save for the tiny periscopes, which are muddied anyway) who manoeuvre them to rendezvous with the troopers after an objective was captured. John was, not surprisingly, one of the sick troopers, and had to guide his section's APC as a "vehicle commander".

This task involves little more than telling the driver to turn left, right, go straight or in reverse, all through the intercom system. Its only a little harder at night, for the driver is blinder than usual then. A bit risky considering rough terrain and an eleven tonne hunk of metal hurtling downhill at 60km/h. There was a ditch on the right side of the dirt track the APCs were travelling on, and John's APC was heading into that ditch.

Normally, the danger is averted through a sharp yell of "DRIVER! HARD LEFT!" or "DRIVER! STOP!" But according to the driver's recollection of the event later, the transcript of communications in the intercom system went something like "DDDD D DRIVER! L L L L L L L L L L ..." followed by a loud crash, for the APC had gone into the ditch, followed by a pause of about 20 seconds, then followed by John's ultimately futile instruction, "LLLEFT!"

I was behind John's APC on my reconnaissance bike, and informed commanders in a flurry of frantic radio transmissions. The Encik (as the company sergeant major is addressed) came to the scene to find the occupants of the APC shaken but unhurt, a sigh of relief was followed by a comment to John, more out of resignation than anger, that "is there ANYTHING you CAN do?"

Encik said this because a few nights prior to this accident, John was involved in another hilarious snafu, this time, on foot. Our company was tasked to do a recce patrol, which entails basically walking the whole night in a dark jungle, which would be darker if not for the lights from nearby HDB estates. We kept a minimum of 5 metres from each other (any closer and we'd cop a scolding for having a "cluster fuck").

Tang, being the designated MG-Gunner (a tautology - MG stands for Machine Gun), had a heavier weapon to lug, and within an hour of the exercise, had lagged so far behind that his platoon mates had to keep dragging him back near the front. After about four hours, he disappeared again.

At this time, we had been patrolling near one of the training camps which had a high barbed wire fence running at least four kilometres. Normally, the section commander would do a head count every few hours. This time, I think he waited too long. Tang was lost again.

Getting worried, and disregarding recce etiquette (i.e. keep as quiet as possible), the platoon shouted for him to hurry up. No reply. "JOHN TANG!" No reply.

They backtracked several hundred metres and shouted again. There was a faint and tired "coming coming coming". The other troopers cursed under their collective breaths and rehearsed the abuse they were going to heap on Tang when he caught up. He did catch up. Only on the opposite side of the high fence.

The bankrupt look on his face at that instant of realisation, I will remember for the rest of my life.

John was a slightly-built man, shorter even than I, and was saddled with bad eyesight (that's why the MG-gunner role) and prone to occasional asthma attacks. (On the night of his fence fiasco, he later collapsed with asthma and was left lying at the side of a road as the rest of the company moved on, having thought that he was only just lagging behind. Thankfully, an alert sergeant went back to retrieve him).

His plastic-frame (and this was years before they became fashionable) glasses were perpetually broken and held together with scotch tape. He seemed to break or damage everything he touched (I never let him near my recce bike, for the one time he was assigned to partner me in a listening post, we crashed four times in an hour).

He'd draw his MG from the armskote to mount on the APC, and come back to the armskote (where I was in charge, amongst my many other responsibilities) a few minutes later with a broken machine gun, stuttering his way through an explanation about it having fallen over the side of the vehicle. It is not often someone BREAKS a machine gun.

At the end of full-time NS, we had a ROD party at the Neptune restaurant, where being real troopers, we drank to excess and molested each other's dates. John had no date, but he did drink to excess. So much that we had to carry him home.

At his flat in Toa Payoh, he looked at my buddy and I and as tears rolled down his face and fogged up his glasses, told us that he didn't know what to do after ROD. Unlike the bulk of us, who were either going to university, a job, or jail, he said he had no prospects at all. I was slightly impatient dealing with his sobbing, as we always dealt with sissies harshly.

I said something to the effect of, "sure you can do something lah, we armoured troopers man, anything can do".

This was my feeble attempt to "boost his morale", as they say in NS-parlance.

He gave me his bankrupt look.

This time I asked, "what are you good at? What do you like doing?"

"I like to play the piano".

Piranhas

Of the many things HQ Platoon were tasked, one of the more mundane was the organising of entertainment for the officers and men of the company. We had OC’s Evenings, which were events with stage skits, dancing, singing, but mostly beer drinking contests. We also converted a classroom into a video screening room and borrowed videos from Boon Lay to play on Nights Off, for the benefit of those wise enough to stay in camp instead of making the 20km journey into town, wasting more than half the Night Off.

In the platoon commanders’ office on the ground floor of company line, we had an aquarium inherited from the previous batch at ‘A’ company. It was empty when our batch arrived at 46 in March 1989, except for the pebbles and a plastic shipwreck.

HQ Platoon filled it with water, and went to Boon Lay to buy guppies. Encik Ang was unimpressed. The aquarium had to be something more entertaining. He asked for "fish that ate other fish". So we bought bigger fish, the names of which I do not know. These buggers ate all the guppies and then took bites out of each other. Encik Ang was livid, and abused the platoon for buying "useless fish". One of my bunkmates, Pte. "Big Fat Yoyo" Teo Ho Yeo, who was the soldier with the most "kang tow" (or connections), told us he could get piranhas, even though it was illegal to keep them in Singapore.

So we bought the piranhas, which looked more harmless than we imagined. But boy, did they eat every damned thing. Funnily enough (and to our benefit), they were not into cannibalism. On slower nights on company line (and there were few), we’d catch lizards and cockroaches and throw them into the fish tank, then watch the little buggers tear at them with their razor sharp teeth. Great care was taken to keep the creatures we caught alive until we put them into the tank.

This blood sport continued throughout my national service days. Money was extracted from the officers and NCOs of ‘A’ Coy for the maintenance of the aquarium, and for the purchasing of little frogs from Boon Lay market. Yes, we fed the live frogs to the piranhas. The officers would jostle for viewing space in front of the fish tank on "feeding nights" and members of HQ platoon including myself would take turns to throw the frogs into the tank.

Cleaning the fish tank was a task none of us looked forward to. There was always a risk of the little fish biting our fingers off. A garden hose was used to siphon the dirty water through the office’s window into the back garden. We’d empty the tank until the dorsal fins of the poor fish were above water and their bellies were scratching the pebbles. Once, an absent minded member (ok, it was me) of HQ platoon left the operation unattended and came back to find the piranhas thrashing about in two centimetres of putrid water. Clean water was then put back into the tank, and there’d be another fortnight before we drew straws (ok, lom chiam pas) to decide who would clean the tank.

Near the end of service, during the month of April 1991, 46^th was billeted to train in Taiwan for three weeks. Usually, there’d be a few slackers left behind on medical grounds. This time, amazingly, ‘A’ Coy was at full strength. On hindsight, it was probably because Taiwan was the most fun of overseas training destinations. No one wanted to miss out. Everyone had heard of the "easy Taiwanese chicks", even though that turned out to be more fable than fact.

Company line had to be looked after by some sick soldier from another company. HQ platoon painstakingly instructed this soldier to look after everything — water the plants, lock the doors, and FEED THE FISH. We told him that the fish were "meat eaters", as that was the closest Hokkien equivalent we could muster for "carnivore".

When we returned from Taiwan three weeks later, the fish tank was empty save for the pebbles and the plastic shipwreck. Encik Ang came into our bunk and said simply, "Fish are gone". We went to ‘C’ Coy to interrogate the caretaker. He said the fish had all died. We asked why and whether he had remembered to feed them. He said he did as instructed, feeding them "meat". We asked what "meat" exactly.

The stupid bugger had fed Spam to the piranhas.

Japanese Gardens

Sungei Gedong Camp 2 was a traditional Army camp. Four company blocks surrounding a parade square cum heliport. Each company block had a small carpark and little patches of green which were designated "platoon gardens". Each platoon was responsible for the design and maintenance of their little patch.

'A' (for Attila) Company's 1st platoon, which I belonged to for 5 months as M203 grenadier, was possibly the laziest. Platoons 2, 3 and HQ platoon came up with Japanese Gardens complete with koi ponds and aviaries (they went to the market at Boon Lay to buy canaries. Regularly too, considering the poor birds' lifespans were abysmally short once they arrived at 46th.)

We had a Garden Competition, which was won by Platoon 3 hands down, for their beautiful horticulture and koi pond. Platoon 1, led by Sergeant S. Nathan and 2nd Lieutenant Alan Ang, came up with a theme garden which I thought reflected our ingenuity more than our laziness. We called it "The Grand Canyon". It was made of nothing but rocks and pebbles of all shapes and sizes.

Garden Comp was the brainchild of Staff Sergeant Ang Teck Hock, the cunning but illiterate Company Sergeant Major (CSM) or Encik, as he was formally addressed. The competition’s aim was to foster camaraderie and hopefully provide little oases in an otherwise drab camp environment. "Boost morale", Encik would say. But one look at "The Grand Canyon", you'd only want to look overhead to check for vultures.