Saving Private Gallagher

       Well...plenty has happened in the last two months since I last posted here. It wasn't a matter of my life being mundane and nothing happening, but rather me struggling with issues ranging from my football 'career' to my future beyond the army.       For the past four months my army life has changed completely, I've been able to live a childhood dream in the form of playing football for a professional team and to represent Singapore in a way that I would have never thought could materialise. However, at the same time my Army commitments haven't taken a back seat and I've had to juggle them both and it hasn't been the easiest at times. Don't take this as a complaint because I absolutely love the opportunity and challenge that 'living two lives' presents, but I can now empathise with the top professional footballers who deal with issues with their mental health. Everybody outside the world of football thinks that its easy to kick a ball aroun...

     Excuse me for the extended hiatus, but life got in the way. Between the three jungle visits, football starting back up and a host of other things on my mind I let the blog slip. However, today I feel like I have a peach of an entry and hopefully can share some tasty army life morsels.     Let's start with my top five packing essentials. 1. A   Field chair      Whether we're deployed in a conventional (jungle) or urban (buildings) setting, a field chair is a 10/10 must have. When you're sat on your arse waiting for hours at a time for your enemies to make the trek to your deployment, what better way to relax and enjoy your assortment of snacks and Netflix downloads (which I'll get to later). As you gain seniority you see variations of field chair change, the closer you are to ORDing (finishing your service) the further back your chair tends to be able to recline and thus the comfort levels. I have to mention that the equipment you bring o...

There will be defining moments in your life, that when you back on them and think wow, that could’ve gone so differently, probably for the worst. In the last 2 months I’ve been down in the dumps like never before, evaluating what it is I’m really doing, what am I chasing, what version of myself am I happy being. I almost gave up on the one thing that makes me happier than anything else in the world and yet here I am presented with the opportunity of a lifetime to grasp something I’ve been working tirelessly for. At the same time I’ve been brought back down to Earth, being forced to realise that I’m not the perfect human, and I’ve got so many areas I need to grow in and mature. Making mistakes is forgivable, but sitting in silence, not learning from them isn’t, and that’s something I want to preach.  I probably sound like some pastor worshipping different values, but in the past month, I’ve realised more than ever that the work you put in when no one is watching will always be more ...

 The last few weeks in camp have been pretty dull, so in today's entry I'll be answering some of your questions from IG as well as discussing my life outside the army and what that's like. Trying to balance my footballing ambitions and NS commitments      For as long as I can remember I've been chasing the dream to one day play football professionally and maybe represent Singapore. In the past 16 months I've been closer to that than I've ever been before in my life, training with a top professional set up in Kitchee in Hong Kong and coming back here with an opportunity to join the local setup. However, the current global pandemic has severely limited my options and left me with little choice but to wait for things to die down. Having played nothing more than a few weeks of football in Singapore over a few summers prior to enlisting, I had few contacts and didn't really have any hope that I could play over here. Since then, I've started working with some ...

 I'm now over a third into my NS journey, which is depressing to think about when I see friends constantly finishing their two years before me. With the amount of free time I have to sit in my bunk and stare at the ceiling, I've been able to reflect upon the past 7/8 months of my life.  *Disclaimer* I'm not saying any of the observations made below are unlike me or what I do, just things I've noticed =) The army is an almost entirely male organisation, and it is what I imagine a boys school would be a little bit like. Nothing but a swarm of horny, egotistical and arrogant young men. Now that is an exaggeration but not necessarily to the degree one would hope.  Horny. Any relatively young woman that sets foot into an army camp will receive attention similar to that of a diamond dropped in front of burglars. They enter a frenzy of oogling, whispering and pointing, leading to one person daring another to ask for her contact details or making a crude comment about her figur...

Do you remember the days when we used to get bored of our extended holidays and want nothing more than to be back in school and having some sort of schedule and structure in our lives again?  Yeah, that’s the army pretty much right now for me. It might sound so stupid to complain about my schedule right now, which consists of breakfast, exercise on alternating days, lunch and dinner. That’s all I do everyday. Obviously I use the gym and read and do other things to try and keep sane but I can only watch so much Netflix before I feel my brain melting. There’s obviously an abundance of things I could do with all this spare time but it’s so hard to find the motivation to get off my ass and do something. I’ve recently gotten into investing, I want to learn Spanish and I’m starting the process to get my driver’s license, but the feeling of being unproductive is inevitable.  On top of that seeing people from your past and friends outside the army living their best lives, enjoying the...

       I'd like to start by wishing everyone a belated merry Christmas and a happy New Year! I've written this blog for almost half a year now and the support that I have gotten has been so unexpected and so appreciated, I hope you guys continue to enjoy reading the stuff I write!          As I mentioned in my previous post I was going out for my last bit of my training phase, a dreaded field camp that the seniors in the company have nothing but encouraging and 'great' things to say about. There was a weird feeling going into it within our platoon because our expectations were so high in terms of how much we were going to get fucked. We expected things to be hectic and rushed the moment we got there but surprisingly for the first two days things were relatively normal, it was the standard we were accustomed to. We had to do training and an evaluation in the jungle in which we fought our way through a course which lasted over an hour...