Age will not weary us

But reservist train­ing just might.

The aver­age NSman (the offi­cial name for ‘reservist’ since 1992, but sel­dom used out­side Min­def) gets called up for standby duties and train­ing stints until he’s around 32, now that the ‘train­ing cycle’ has been short­ened to 10 years.

I’m 36 and have just com­pleted the worst three weeks’ train­ing in mem­ory, hav­ing for­got­ten how bad full-time national ser­vice used to be.

There were a bunch of us at Exer­cise Wal­laby who were slightly past our use-by dates because we had skipped a year or two of duty through work or study com­mit­ments in the last 10 years. (For mine, I had deferred a total of 8 years).

The strain showed, we couldn’t sprint as much and as quickly, and we couldn’t see as well in the dark. At one point dur­ing the night in the bush, I stum­bled for 20 min­utes in a 100 metre stretch of for­est, try­ing to find my company’s tanks and vehi­cles, only to be stopped five times by the other com­pa­nies’ sen­tries, ask­ing for the night’s pass­word. Later on that night, me and my motor­cy­cle were felled by a tree stump.

At the other end of the spec­trum were young full-time sol­diers from the 40th Bat­tal­ion, SAR, who aver­aged 20 years. They were attached to our unit because we were short of men. These boys, they were quick, they rolled all over the for­est floor tak­ing cover from enemy fire, and they were only put in their place when they went crazy at the can­teen try­ing to down as many beers as they could while the older and wiser among us tended to limit our­selves to one beer a day.

And yes, I did tell one of them: “When uncle first put on this very uni­form, you wuz only 2 years old”.

Me and Pte Sng Lui, Thailand, October 1989

Me and Cpl Sng Lui, Australia, October 2005

Surf stop: Gerard's Flickr set of Ex Wallaby 2005

Technorati Tags: army, ExWallaby2005, nationalservice, Sin­ga­pore