Making life bearable

    What is adjustment week? Well, its the generous term that is used to describe the two to three week period that you first spend on Tekong before you're allowed to book out. It's different for everyone who enlists as the duration of your adjustment week is dependent on the day you enlist, because its meant to cover two weekends. If you enlisted on a Monday, you're looking at a 20 day 'adjustment week'. That is hell on Earth, because all you want to do is sleep in your air conditioned room on your own bed, eat some good food and not have to take orders. Now if you're lucky I was, it's a little bit shorter than that. But basically adjustment week is designed to help recruits adjust to military lives from their civilian lives, which makes sense. You need to get used to eating shit food, only sleeping seven hours a night and waking up before the sun comes out. 

    In the SAF they're very focused on safety as I've mentioned in previous entries, so much so that twice a day you have to record your temperature onto a little booklet, which I do by recording my temperature with the provided thermometer (are you serious? no I use my fucking hand because who cares). You also have to fill out your RAC (Risk Assessment Card) before any activity that's deemed slightly strenuous, you  basically just circle yes on the stuff that says you feel fine. 

    Lastly, you have to conduct a water parade twice a day which is too fancy of a term for what it really is. You have to bring your bottles up at a 90 degree angle together, take the caps of the bottles off, recite the SAF's eight core values, drink, check that everyone is finished by turning your head left and right, put the caps back on, recite your platoon motto and then you can put your bottle down (all of which is done in unison.) All that just to drink a few sips of water, mighty efficient if I don't say so myself.

   In the event that somehow you don't feel well despite all the safety precautions that are in place, there are two medical centres on Tekong. Some recruits become extremely familiar to these centres as they either genuinely have medical issues that must be attended to, or are what we call 'chao keng warriors'. Chao keng is the act of malingering, basically pretending to be sick or injured when you're not. People do this so they can skip certain activities and avoid doing anything laboursome. The Medical Officers (Mos) are tend to recruits and anybody else on the island, and so they explicitly tell every company's recruits to not waste their time with fake injuries so as to not take away from others that potentially need real care. If recruits are caught malingering, that's a chargeable offence and they can be sent to DB (Detention Barracks aka Military jail). Some people take it so far as to claim they have insomnia and other serious conditions which allow them to have a much more relaxed NS experience. The art of chao keng is dramatic in its nature, seeds have to be planted slowly over time, your injury or illness has to slowly worsen before you go in for the killer blow. If you're deemed to be genuinely injured or ill, you're awarded a status by the MO, which can range from RMJ (No running, marching or jumping), LD (Light Duty, you follow the group around but don't do anything) or Rest in Bunk (you just rest in the bunk while everyone else is outside doing shit). Rest in Bunk is a dangerous status however, as if you're given that status for a certain period and it crosses into your weekend, you're required to stay in camp till it is over. So, chao keng at your own risk.

 On Tekong, recruits were originally banned from bringing in camera-phones and for some of the military camps on mainland Singapore, that is still the case. So, you end up either using a nice Nokia brick or paying or someone to take the camera out of your smartphone. These protocols are set in place to prevent military information being public information. Nowadays, recruits are allowed to bring in smartphones to camp, with the restriction being that no in-camp photos are allowed to be taken. In order to enforce this, routine phone checks are meant to be done (checking camera roll, whatsapp group chats etc.) In-camp photos are a chargeable offence, and punishments in the SAF in general have a range off degrees of severity. It could be as small as you booking out late (leaving Tekong on a later ferry than everyone else), being given SOL (Stoppage of leave, where you're not allowed to book out at all that weekend) and the worse being a trip to the Detention Barracks (DB). DB is essentially as bad as it gets, because for however long your DB sentence is, that duration is added to your overall service time. It's the sort of punishment that everyone talks about and jokes about, and people share tales of how they know how this guy ended up in DB for this and for that. One of the most humourous DB stories is of a recruit being charged after attempting to swim back to the mainland in the middle of the night back in 2011. Yes, that is the degree of desperation some people reach.

  This is where selective discipline comes in again. If you choose to take a photo and post it for the whole world to see, you're a million times likelier to get charged. However, if you're facetiming your girlfriend, posting stories on your close friends or snapping people, the likelihood you'll get caught is much lower. Typically checks are done when you're about to book out, so I would imagine (no first hand experience here) people would just delete anything incriminating beforehand.

    As a recruit you're also not allowed to bring chargers in, you have to rely strictly on power banks. No one knows why that it's the case, you just listen. From day one you can tell who in your section is a phone addict, just based on the number of power banks they bring in. They either play too many phone games, call their girlfriends every second or watch too much YouTube. Another thing to note is that there's no Wi-Fi, so you're entirely dependent on data on an island where the signal can sometimes be a bitch. This is where your section-mates start to look out for one another, and trade starts to happen. Especially during adjustment week when you have people that are extremely prepared and have a fully stocked locker, and people that severely under packed and look lost. 

    During adjustment week you're also adjusting to the people around you, learning about them. Everybody is thrown into this new environment and you either can either choose to moan and complain or get on with it, I chose the latter. To me, everything I did during the week was all to get my reward of booking out on Friday. To achieve that book out, you had to not fuck up. One of the ways that most recruits are penalised is when a SBA (Stand by area) or SBB (Stand by bed) are conducted. These are the bunk inspections done by your sergeants, where they check to make sure everything is neat and tidy. If you fail that, then you're getting push-ups, a late book-out or maybe confinement (no book-out at all). And trust me, that first book-out after confinement was not the time that you wanted to be confined.

    I just wanted to end off this entry by saying I'm so grateful for the overwhelmingly positive comments people have been sending my way. It's insane to think that people actually enjoy what I have to write and that people are curious about what army life is like. Thank you so much!