Pick it up lah!

What reservists don’t look like

It rained all of yes­ter­day, piss­ing down on all of us while we were at the com­bat shoot range near Pasir Laba Camp (or Pasir Labia Camp, as we called it, which is built around Bukit Vagina, as we gig­gled some more like sec­ondary school boys, but you know, it’s a bit tir­ing to talk about how vul­gar our con­ver­sa­tions are when we’re in reservist.)

Strangely, we weren’t as mis­er­able as we ought to have been — being in wet clothes for what, twenty hours or so and being stung by mos­qui­toes hardy enough to with­stand our sat­u­ra­tion spray­ing of much Off as well as our lib­eral appli­ca­tion of many cit­ronella patches all over ourselves.

As a pla­toon mate, who shall not be named because these days, if you get named on this blog, every­one in your office gets to know about your exploits in camp, and I really don’t want that to hap­pen to you. Unless you want it to. If so, leave a com­ment and I’ll insert your names…

As I was say­ing, this pla­toon mate says to a bunch of grum­bling fel­low troop­ers who’ve started a con­ver­sa­tion with, “Wah lao, this kind of rain won’t stop one leh!”, that we should “think about it. How often do you get to walk in the rain?”

I think he meant for us to try to enjoy our day out, and the con­ver­sa­tion veered to how some peo­ple pay good money to enjoy get­ting stung by mos­qui­toes and other sundry insects while get­ting drenched on eco-tours.

You’d under­stand by now that despite being in uni­form and bear­ing the lat­est in auto­matic rifles and Army gear, we weren’t think­ing about how pro­fi­cient we were going to be as sol­diers — some­thing which, in this 9th year of reservist (I have to keep call­ing it that though I know the offi­cial name is National Ser­vice) train­ing, is get­ting increas­ingly laugh­able given our creep­ing ages.

The upshot is that for most of us, safety was always going to be the fore­most con­sid­er­a­tion, as an exchange at the com­bat range between the con­trol point offi­cer and a safety spe­cial­ist, over loun­d­hail­ers, in the dark, would testify:

SS: “Hold it! Wait! Wait! Wait!”

CP: “Yes, what?”

SS: “Live round (bul­let)! Live round!”

CP: “Where is it? Is it stuck in the cham­ber (of the rifle)? Is it dou­ble chambering?”

SS: “No!”

CP: “Then where?”

SS: “On the ground!”

CP: “Wah lau! Then pick it up lah! Idiot!”

Much laugh­ter ensued. And so, yes, W, you missed out on a good one.

Tech­no­rati Tags: army, MINDEF, Mr Miyagi, nation­alser­vice, Sin­ga­pore