#my overtime pay wasnt even that much honestly.

[exmeowstic]

truly the sadness cant be for forever right?

[the-entire-population-of-earth]

Amran's NS journey

Basic Military Training (BMT)

Bmt was fucking rushed. Everyone does not know what activities there are gonna be for each day up until the last minute due to the higher upper's uncertainty. But hey at least me and my bunkmates were the most bonded as fuck than the rest due to us always making fun of the commanders and other bunkmates. I was in a leadership batch but one way or another i didnt get to be a commander. Too bad we all split up from each other.

Unit life

1st Battalion Guards

I was posted to 1st battalion singapore guards as a storeman for hq company. I was helping with signal sets. Before guardsman troopers came in, it was a breeze. It was just doing our own branch work and report to the different timings and duties and its all good life. Not as good life though as there is this one specific person who is so fucked up due to his laziness. As a storeman, it was damn easy as it was just using a little labor and then the job is done. Everything was quite certain and routined until the troopers came.

Troopers

When the troopers came, i was involved in a major event. I didn't know how chaotic was the first day but when the days passed, it was chaotic as fuck. They were fucking jealous as hq company had a lot of welfare and the troopers would pinpoint little things such as hq not marching and having more time for ourselves. In my opinion, most of the hq personnels are not combatants so whats the point of us doing what they are doing. But then things settled down as the higher uppers try to ease the tension and shit.

Guards vocation training (GVT)

Gvt was the most fun i had in my ns life. I literally enjoyed every part of it even tho i only participated in the high keys. The high keys were only 10km fast march, 2km swimming and heli rappelling. Fast marches were my toughest one because i cant run for shit. Then came the incident but nevertheless i finished all of it in time for the final fieldcamp and right of passage (ROP). Then came the parade which was satisfying as fuck.

Laundry ic

Since the previous laundry ic had ORD, i had to step up to be the laundry ic. Being the battalion laundry ic made me realise how bad the troopers are being treated and how i was introduced to people that were out of course from being a trooper. By this time, i was considered "lao jiao", old caged bird, who knows the system well and we all knew that the company sergeant major (CSM) cannot fix the duty roster and will always tell us that we last minute have to do duties. Since i am just a storeman, and i don't receive combat pay, why should i have a need to do guard duty whereas there were like around 400+ troopers to do it. It was not as if they have other duties. But as a storeman in hq company, we have like 3 different types of duties; duty clerk, duty storeman and guard duty. Duty clerk is just manning the phone to which we must answer to cater to the caller's needs. Duty storeman is just to open up and close the branch at timings and also make sure all the store keys are accounted for. Guard duty involves to either prowl around the camp or to station at the gate to ensure security for the camp. In my opinion, guard duty isnt needed for a storeman because most of the time we dont handle weapon and we already have 2 other duties. On top of that, as storeman is a combat support service (CSS), we have other responsibilities from handling our stores to issuing items thus the need for guard duty is pointless as it really can clash with our other responsibilities. In my case, it did clash a lot of time due to poor planning for duties from CSM.

Ex lancer (Brunei)

Brunei was chill as fuck, being a laundry ic for just hq company because they have their own laundry department there. As there was not a lot of hq personnel that went outfield, i didn't do much. Out of the 2 weeks there, i only did around less than 10 hours worth of work and then spent the rest of the time catching up on my shows. But the food there was the start of my weight gain because it was really good.

Post brunei

Post brunei was the worst and hectic month because there was audit and then a month after that would be exercise wallaby. Higher uppers hold our bookout times till late afternoon and tasked with bullshit last minute works which they could have done in the time we were in brunei. Then a fucked up person came back and corrupted one specific race of hq. Before Australia, i had only 2 days to pack and attend to my personal commitments with my family and friends.

Ex wallaby ( Australia)

During the flight to Australia, i was in full denial as i didnt have enough time to fulfill my commitments. Australia was fucked up from the day after we landed. There were non stop taskings after taskings due to there were no resources/stores on Australia. We had to unpack and issue out the items while the troopers spent their time resting due to the recent death which lead to safety timeout. We had to load up a lot of the stores to the forklift and then go to the places that are around 1km from each other just because the containers for the stores are far from the issuing point. All of my time was in full denial and might have dragged my branch down but i tried my hard not to. On top of issuing stores and settling accomodations, we also had to take part in operations. The battalion expects us to do all this even though we don't receive enough pay to do all this. There were no such thing as weekend and logistics need to be settled. We actually did overtimed more than usual.

But rest and relax there was good enough for 2 days and 1 night. The motel was ok as i shared with my branch mate and one random guy. I went to a bar for the first time in my life to meet up with my superiors. We talk cocked and did stupid shits to unwind ourselves from the fucking busy exercise.

Post Australia

I was so lazy by that time that i dont even care about shit that i used to care. I even envy all of my friends who are not from the army and are able to see their family by the end of the day everyday. This unit had already thin out all my patience. Other than my opinion, the taskings that im doing are easy and can be done and also our CSM fucked up duties again with fucking last minute duties.

Pre pre ORD

Pre pre ord was the most toxic time as the schedules planned are all so rushed and the CO doesnt even trust the troopers to do a good job hence "more training". With more training comes more store items being issued out, meaning i have to carefully issue the different items. I have changed my jobscope from a laundry IC to a comms store assistant. Its an easy job but everyday they keep asking and exchanging items will make our side of the system to not tally up as i lost track of what is being issued/serviced. Whats more worse is that my QM started playing with off privileges just so we could settle the system. On top of that, the servicing uncles also scolded due to "our poor" paperwork. Honestly at this point in time i wish i wasnt so hardworking so that i set their expectations of me so low. All of these problems arose due to our lack of a regular IC or a regular sergeant. Since we took our past IC for granted, meaning we would always ask him what things there are going to be, like a man behaviour than a commander, we had a lot of things we needed to figure out such as paperworks and who have the rights to the system and who is in charge of us and shit. There was a period of time we dont even know what jobs there are until the last minute we had to do a lot. This uncertainty period really fucked me up because my RQ would always scold me. That's not an issue however but one day I might blow up due to a lot of pressure and thaty really takes a lot of my patience. It was these period that the contractor really blacklisted my unit for poor paperwork but all i can think of is that i most probably wont be working with them in the future Luckily everything finished around later May and then it was a long 1 week break for Hari Raya.

Pre ORD

After hari raya, i had a little shock cause it was a bit of a cooldown period as i was going to almost ord in about less than 2 months. The 2nd month was quite a chill period as i already have 2 understudies with me and rq already told me to slowly hand over to them. But boy, i had the shock of my life during the last month as my QM started saying shit like i never handed over properly to them as they still had a lot of errors. I am here trying my best to teach them but they had a fucking high expectations for me to make sure they will be like me. Thus i tried to ask for offs here and they to "let me go" and they said no. All my other colleagues who were gonna ord near me had already left and im here still stuck. And on top of that literally 2 weeks before ORD, QM gave me 3 extra duties just because of a minor mistake. What a nice way to squeeze out a person. The extra came and it fell on my birthday which makes being 23 damn depressing.

Ord

To be honest, my life in the army was just not fair and fucking unreasonable due to the superior's lack of brains. They think they are doing the right thing and will just shrug off our opinions and commitments. The way they treat people like me is as if they are the only ones that matter. Even though we did try to raise the different problems we faced, they just say something around the lines of standardisation or "suck thumb". And not just that, even if we are given the things we wanted, there are sure people to take advantage of it but all of us must suffer together even though we are not with them. To be honest, collective punishment isn't the way to go in hq because there is a lot of factors needed to be considered. I am just so glad that i got out of the toxicity and continue on to my civilian life. Again.