The Early Days Pics -Part II

It's amazing what you dredge out when you are clearing out your junk.

Here are 2 pics from the early days.

Quite what we did at ECP totally escapes my mind and who that is picking his nose in the front row third from the right also escapes me!



Here's another picture from the Yakult factory, I vaguely remember a consequence of the visit involving Terence consuming the CM's yakult? Terence, you care to elaborate on the said incident? I think we went there after our role as victims in some exercise on Jurong Island. Quite how going to the Yakult factory and learning about Lactobacillus Casei Shirota benefited us as future senior officers in the force is beyond me. Still, we did have fun and also improved our digestive tracts with good bacteria!

Food, Inglorious Food

Since Aziz mentioned it, I suppose I should try to get into the good books of the squad chairman by discussing the delectable cuisine from the Police Academy. After spending a large part of 16 weeks in the SAF [Yes laugh and scoff at the PTP permanent resident], the tale of crap food as a NS experience seemed to be the stuff of history books. The Singapore Food Industries catering was nothing short of edible and filling to boot, and we didn't even have to wash our mess trays because there were none! We ate on proper plates with real cutlery. I'm told the quality of food has declined somewhat since then, I suppose we were one of the first few batches to get the catered food so I suppose there was alot at stake to make the food taste good. Even the venerable old Police Mess has started to get catered food, so this might seem to be a quaint experience for anyone from the catered generation.

Nothing quite prepares you for your first meal at the mess, not even the stories of the seniors who had long since decided that lining their stomaches with palm oil from the tonnes of instant noodles that they ate in the barracks was preferable to taking their chances in the mess. And so, armed with our mess trays and cutlery we marched to the mess. During our first week, we marched off in half-u, but all subsequent dinners were taken in full walk out attire, that is shirt, tie, police pants and we even had to bring our rain coats just in case of untimely precipitation!

Then we laid eyes on it, the fighting fish, despite my best attempts to convince people that it was caught sometime before the founding of Singapore, was in its previous incarnation a selar fish that swam the seas until it was brutally hauled up by a net and after changing hands a few times found itself some time [uh actually, probably alot of time] later in the kitchen of the Police Academy and was subsequently deep fried in some very dirty oil for an extended period of time and then dumped along with many others in a huge pot and eventually finding its way onto my mess tray. Accompanying this delectable piece of seafood were some horrendously overcooked vegetables and some very hard rice and a piece of fruit.

Most of the time, those of us who ate to live would gobble down the food, wait for the others to finish and then head off to wash our mess trays using LAUNDRY detergent and then head off to the barracks wondering about the possible consequences of eating the food.

Seeing as that fish is more or less a universally accepted food, it appeared in almost every meal over the course of the week. Of course if the chef was feeling inspired, you'd get chicken in orange water (i.e. chicken curry) or if he was in a particularly sadistic mood, you'd get sotong delight.

Ah yes, sotong delight, something coined by Chia Tze Wei in an inspired moment. Of course, Mark and I couldn't resist building further on that, ocean fresh calamari simmered in a light tamarind sauce served on a plate of steamed rice accompanied by pan-fried garden fresh vegetables. Well, it was anything but a delight and it was a occasion for us to visit the canteen en masse after dinner!

Sometimes if we were lucky we'd get Briyani rice or towards the end of our stint at PA, spring chicken, for lunch, though the instructors often tried to get us to work off the calories after lunch! I still remembered running a 2 x 2.4 with a mutton briyani in the digestive system, but ah yes, that is also another interesting story!

Breakfasts were sometimes very strange too, some mornings, we'd get the bread baked by prisoners in Changi Prison with the spiciest chicken curry ever, just before PT as well or really non-descript bee hoon mixed with bean sprouts and salt! Despite all this, the teh or milo was really well prepared and was good for raising morale before the start of any day.

Let's see we've talked about breakfast, lunch and dinner, of course, for the hungry or those trying to go on hunger strike against the food regime, there was night snack. This rather quaintly consisted of a tin of Lion Brand biscuits (to last 2 days?? [correct me if I am wrong]) and 2 kettles of milo per squad which 3 unfortunates had to carry back to the barracks after dinner. Try sharing that amongst 42 hungry officer cadets when the average squad size was about 30 plus! The first to go were the chocolate flavoured biscuits, then the lemon cream biscuits and this was followed by anything with a modicum of flavour. By the end of the week, there would be an accumulation of the unflavoured biscuits and by the end of the month, Fauzi would be the one who had to consolidate all the unflavoured biscuits into one tin! But eventually, we ate them all.

Finally if all else failed, you'd bring in food from the canteen or outside the Police Academy. Now, either could be potentially hazardous. Any attempts to smuggle food from the outside had to run the gauntlet of checks at the gate on book-in nights, so that was never a good avenue to try. Even if you succeeded, there were other metaphysical barriers! Apparently the area that we lived in was formerly a cemetery, so anything with any pork content tended to be viewed dimly by the supernatural elements co-residing with us who were apparently Muslim. I've never seen it but some have claimed to have woken up to their beds shaking violently because of an errant char siew pau. Well, not for the faint hearted that's for sure.

But we, in the lower barrack, plus Terence, the permanent resident, were far more enterprising than that. Mark, who had gotten married sometime during junior term, was given a night off on Fridays to spend time with his wife, so he kindly offered to buy us food. Buy us food he did! It couldn't last, and it didn't! One night he returned bearing packs of Mee Goreng, in the darkness of the barracks we were wolfing down the mee goreng when suddenly we heard a voice, "OCT, what do you think you are doing?" Not waiting to find out if it was an instructor or an instructor come back from the grave, we, brave officer cadets dived into bed and froze. Thankfully, it wasn't someone like Liew or Adrian or Hassan for that matter because he chose to ignore the scent of mee goreng coming from the table at the end of the barracks and warned us to go to bed. Stay in bed we did!

Go Back to Army lah!

Many of the seniors warned us that everyone would hate us, I think this was one of the few very useful things that they taught us. Well the other being that no matter how bad it got, all the nonsense would end by 1730hrs.

Initially, I scoffed at that suggestion, would everyone hate us? No way..... or so I thought. Two days, it was all true! Apart from a few senior instructors such as Sri Kanthan, Hassan, Firdaus, Zakaria and some younger ones such as Gus Miao and Clifton; EVERYONE, the JO trainees, regular or NSF; the NSF instructors; the younger regular instructors all set out to try to get us during the first few weeks. Everyone was out to get the fresh meat on the chopping block, all rubbing their hands in glee, "yeah man, let's see how tough these guys are"

In the first 2 weeks every single lesson took on a hellish routine of tekan after tekan after tekan. From the drill shed to the pool to the dojo, it was all a series of tests to see how tough these former army boys were. I still remember FI Liew making us do the step up and down on the stands in the drill shed for a supremely long time. I found it tough, goodness knows what the JO trainees who were caught in the crossfire during the session made of it. Without wanting to sound too cliched, thank goodness the army training came through for us and so we prevailed somehow or other.

Certain instructors like Liew were just out to get us and out of training they tried to get us at the mess when we went for lunch or dinner, or when we were walking out, a stray strand of facial hair or a minute amount of dirt on the boots was enough to get us despatched to the barracks. They even tried the barracks but they were quite scared of treading on Hassan's toes and so eventually the barracks became quite a safe haven from the other instructors but we could expect Hassan to appear at any time of the work day and even in the evenings at a time that we least expected. But from keeping us away from the innane rubbish from the instructors he might as well have been the messiah to some of us. Later on of course, Yusman and Young Azman tried their luck, uh, well that's for another post on its own of course.

The other hazard was the abuse directed as us from the JO trainees, most of it wasn't terribly intelligent or witty like Terence mentioned in the early post, "OCT go back to army la" or just plain abuse. Of course eventually we sorted them out in one way or another, whether it was at the mess when we were on mess duty and we returned the favour by dispatching them back to their barracks for poor bearing and turn out or just by thrashing them on the sports field.

Eventually, we all got numb to the abuse and the other instructors mainly stopped trying their luck. Of course there was the odd incident here and there, but things got quite bearable by the end of the second month.

Posting Day - The Tekong Version

For us at Tekong it was not much different. I received a call from my Sgt saying I will be posted to the Police Force and to report in civvie and bring all my barang-barang to dekit. The ignorant me, never heard of OCT before, and so I asked my Sgt what we'd be doing the there? Either he said the following due to jealousy or just plain last ditch psychological torture before I escape from his grasp, he said, "You will join the VC squad and carry pump gun and jaga the station as sentry." And maybe just to add some truth into it,"But you will get to wear white shirt, more special than everyone else."

I had ambitions to go OCS, as much as it scared me, so this piece of news did not make me happy one bit. So I dragged my demoralised self to Nee Soon and when I saw my other platoon mates in Army full-u, I was still clueless of my fate till some mates threw friendly curses (you know what I mean), "Eh c*bye.. you lucky bugger! Power man!". That kind of friendly curses. And some gave me the evil eye, and some just said I was one lucky fellow. I joined the rest of the civvy clad mates and only then I found out the good news! I dekitted with a big smile even though I had to empty my wallet to replace the socks I lost, the towel I forgot to bring and some other stuff.

We were told to come back a few days later to go to PA (Police Academy). So thats how I got into OCT.

Reliving back, I enjoyed Army life. As hard as the training was, the conflicts, the arguments, the punishing exercises, somehow I looked forward to each book-in day. I really enjoyed the camaraderie!

Musings of the Chairman

I finally got my own google email account. How sweet is that? Ahem, anyway, let's get down to some serious blogging business. Can I have law & order please? This is the chairman of OCT 3&4 speaking. Well folks, this pretty much sums up my experience as the squad chairman. It was nothing less than a debacle, I have to say. After being elected (aka sabo-ed) as the honorable chairman, I was ready to take on my new role with pride on honor. Oh boy, did my pride and honor last. NOT!

It was chaos trying to manage 42 future leaders of the SPF who had raging hormones tipping the scales. Maybe the word chaos is too subtle. But I have to thank my lucky stars that FI Hassan (you guys mentioned him yet?) had the squad under complete control. At this juncture, I have to stress on the word ‘complete’ because for all his ninja and wayang antics, he did an excellent job of managing 42 bright and promising but recalcitrant individuals. Well, some had their own agenda for their nine months tenure. But I couldn’t care less. By the way, did I also mention that this FI of ours was one helluva master of camo. He could just blend into the greens that our good ol PA had to offer and make his appearance when we were least expecting it. No wonder he was notoriously known as the Ninja among the cadets. (btw, FI Hassan doesn’t know that we had a nickname for him)

Initial stage was quite a terrifying experience. When I meant terrifying, I was actually referring to the food. In the army, even though ‘tekan’ sessions took place every other minute, there was something to look forward to. The food! All hail the Singapore Food Industry for cooking up great meals day after day. When the first meal was served in PA, we were thinking to ourselves that we were better off with the SAF despite the frequent jumping jacks and thousands of push ups that accompanied every meal. The all time “Favorite” in PA was the fish delight. (I could swear that the gills of the fish moved at one point while it was lying on my mesh tray)

I was wondering to myself, food sucks, can my fellow cadets be any better? How wrong I was! On the contrary, these are same bunch of guys who I managed to clique with for the next nine months of our stay in police academy. In case I have not, in alphabetical order, let me introduce you to the famous five. Asri, Daryl, Mark, Terence (or is it Nunis) and finally yours truly, the chairman of the board. Aziz is the name.

For all the screw ups and subsequent push ups that we were subjected to, we had our fair share of fun and camaraderie. I have to say that it was one good memorable experience. I couldn’t believe my arse luck when I was not selected for OCS ten years ago. But now, in retrospect I am still thanking my lucky stars that I was selected to be and officer cadet with the SPF. Because not only it taught me criminal law, but it also taught me the law of friendship. To eat, sleep and shit with the same bunch of guys for nine months is no easy feat. I guess all of us passed that test with flying colors. We deserve a pat on our backs and some hot coffee. Pervert seats, anyone?