Diary of a Chao RecruitÂ’s 7 days field camp in TekongDay 1
230803 Saturday (Sunny)The day started with my last civilian breakfast at the cookhouse. We have chee chong fan that morning. Many of my platoon mates considered that the worst breakfast menu in the army. I felt that they are too choosy, the food we are having now is way better then the kind of food served by the army chiefs in the past. Anyway, I tried my best to enjoy my “last meal” as we will be eating cold combat rations for our next 7 days.
Moments later back at company line, we prepared ourselves for our field camp. After warm up and the customary water parade. The whole Foxtrot Company was ready for field camp. As per normal, our very garang OC was there to lead the route march to our 1st campsite. OC was in his usual garang self with his super big alice field pack thrice the size of our field pack. I wondered how the hell he manages to walk with all that weight on his back? But the sight of OC in his full battle order gave me relief that he was leading us cause I know we will be in safe hands. He looks like a super soldier. You really should see it yourself.
So with my SBO, helmet, field pack and my wife Hebe (my M16) on, we set off for the 3km++ march to our destination. The march was exhausting under the hot sun, but no one fall out and we reached there as a platoon around noon. Our 1st campsite was on the tekong-reclaimed land. The terrain is full of open area with larang grass and neatly planted trees. Upon settling down, we began building our tents with our buddies.
Our 1st lesson for the day is camouflaging. It teaches the basic of using camouflage cream to conceal our face and how to use surrounding vegetation like grass and leaves to cover ourselves to bend into the enviroment. It was the 1st time we applied camou cream on ourselves. My buddy and I assisted each other by helping one another apply the camou. Nauturally, the “makeup” I applied on my buddy wasn’t as nice as it was supposed to be and he ended up looking like a panda. Hope he doesn’t mind. Haha.
Next up is how to use the vegetation to cover ourselves so as to break up our body shape to successfully blend into the surrounding. That proves to be rather difficult because our platoon sergeant ordered us to do jumping jacks so as to ensure the vegetation on our helmet and body donÂ’t fall off easily. Camouflaging ourselves into the surrounding was easy, but we soon learnt that while in hiding, we must also be able to see clearly what the enemy is doing. To put it in another way, it means the enemy cannot see you but you can see them. Only but achieving that kind of standard do we know that our camouflage is eye deceiving.
After that, we learnt tactical movements and contacted drills. It basically teaches us what we should do when an enemy starts firing at us. The drills is rather simple but hard to carry out. Upon contacted, we have to prone down as quick as we humanly can and duck to our nearest cover. Then we return fire in the direction of the enemy and gets ready to duck to the next cover. We have only 4 seconds to do so as 4 seconds is all it needs for the enemy to shoot us. If we are unable to reach the cover in less than 4 seconds, we will have to prone down fast and leopard crawl to the cover.
That was mainly the highlight of our 1st day and night was soon before us. We were not allowed to bathe with water (there wasnÂ’t so much water for the whole company to bathe anyway), so in order to keep ourselves clean, we powder bathed. We basically striped to our underwear and applied a lot of powder on ourselves. It was quite an experience because all of us have so much powder on our body we almost looked like ghosts.
To be continued...