29th 10 Years On

Everytime one of us goes back for ICT or drops by TRACOM / HTA, the old timers would always say that we were the best batch to ever pass out for the longest time.  Looking back, our squad accomplished many, many things.  Maybe it's because almost all of us were ambitious in our way.  Some of us hated each other.  Remember this guy LTW?  Daryl used to call him LT Fucking W - LTFW.  He was amongst the most incompetent of us.  But he got posted to MHA.  Someone in the government valued him when we knew better.  Try dragging his 140kg kayak all the way to the Southern Islands when he wasn't paddling & see how much you remember the guy a decade later.

In the end, how many of us actually signed on in the service?  Daryl went to PID, Teck Leong is probably a Director now.  But the rest left.  Frankly, there was no career path for us.  But many years later, Recruitment wants us to come back when all the rats are jumping ship.  You know things are bad when Old Walrus himself prefers to shape lives as a teacher rather than ferreting out the little weasels and sending their arses to jail.

So where did it all go wrong?  For me, it went wrong at the interview for posting when the lard bucket virtually admitted that he interviewed us because he didn't want to be seen as discriminatory but he preferred someone who could speak Mandarin.  I don't think it should be our problem if after at least 10 years of formal education, he could barely be comfortable in English & preferred a Chinese successor.  Definitely not Singapore government policy.  Merely the fear of the different.

Maybe the 29th Batch should get together after all these years and actually try & do something together.  I believe that we should all try to build a legacy.  We're on the wrong side of 30. Soon we'll be on the wrong side of 40.  I'm not content with remembering our accomplishments with rose-tinted glasses.  We were better than the rest because we tried harder when they were all content to sit on their asses.

One by one, all the familiar faces we knew in the Force are leaving.  It is the process of renewal.  But perhaps it is my entrenched cynicism when I see that the new hardly fills the shoes of the old.  Maybe Singaporeans in general are getting soft.  All of my siblings are in the military of the force.  It says something that the backpacks have wheels, regardless of whether they use it or not.  It is a statement of intent, inadvertent or not.  But anyway, I'll build on this theme when I can.