Our Army

Pho­to­graph of Selarang Bar­racks dur­ing the ‘Selarang Bar­racks Inci­dent’- from the Aus­tralian Broad­cast­ing Corporation

Things are mov­ing pretty quickly with the Sin­ga­pore Armed Forces. They’ve caught up with YouTube (whom Google has caught up with) by ban­ning cam­era phones in mil­i­tary instal­la­tions. No more pic­tures or videos from train­ing.

That also means no more unof­fi­cial pic­tures of his­toric Selarang Camp, where I went yes­ter­day for this thing called Phase II Med­ical, where I was deemed fit enough to undergo Reme­dial Train­ing. (I have to undergo RT because I for­got to take the Indi­vid­ual Phys­i­cal Pro­fi­ciency Test before my IPPT win­dow closed for 2006). If all goes well, I will be reme­died by the end of the year despite my most valiant efforts at con­vinc­ing the M.O. that I was a chain-smoker and at risk of all sorts of prob­lems, like tired­ness and grouch­i­ness, and not lik­ing being at Selarang Camp very much.

While there, and after I had uri­nated on a test strip and pre­sented it to the clerk-in-charge-of-being-presented-with-urinated-on-test-strips, I read an old copy of Army News, which, among other things, men­tioned some­thing about the brand­ing of Our Army.

I can’t recall a lot of what was writ­ten, mostly because nor­mally, I’d take a snap­shot of a page with my cam­era phone, which unfor­tu­nately was lodged yes­ter­day with the Reg­i­men­tal Police at the guard­house at his­toric Selarang Camp. But it can be said that with the brand­ing or re-branding of our Army, our Army is now known as Our Army.

But there was also the tale of PTE Hiroyuki Ochi, who in June, appre­hended a snatch-thief who had just robbed a Russ­ian tourist (by chas­ing him into a drain or some­thing — like I said, I can’t really remem­ber what was writ­ten), and then pro­ceeded to take pity on the snatch thief and give him $50. Well done, PTE Ochi.

iTunes is play­ing an ille­gal copy of Seven Nation Army from the album “Ele­phant” by The White Stripes of which I have the orig­i­nal CD.

Tech­no­rati Tags: army, google­v­ideo, nation­alser­vice, google, Sin­ga­pore, youtube