On the ball

It's been two weeks since I enlisted, and I'm back for the weekend. Time passes quickly inside, the routine keeps one going, at least some form of predictability in life. Training is tough, but manageable still. I think they'll up the tempo and severity now, since the adjustment period is over, and they get free rein to do anything they wish now. I want to get a book before I go in, but have no idea what to get. There usually is enough free time for one to read, during the night when I have no calls to make. All those in my detachment seem to be attached, leaving me to quietly while away my time between 2130 and 2200. I don't see it as a curse, some quiet reflection time is usually good, and getting ready for the next day usually fills this period which I have at night. But I guess it's just envy on my part, seeing all the other guys having someone they can talk to, and have someone listen to them.

Just managed to pick up bits of pieces of news while I'm out. Taupok, Meulaboh, Presidential Inaugaration, all these things have happened as I stayed in the time capsule that is my base. The world speeds by while I do crunches and pull ups (or attempt to). Subscribed to Time magazine, hope that can keep me up to date from week to week. The SAF really is doing a good job in Aceh, seeing from the picture above how they mix with the locals. The peacetime SAF really is showing itself to be worthy of 6% of Singapore's GDP. I wonder if I'll get my chance to do some work like that as well. As a recruit, I guess my job now is just to get my basics right, learn as much as possible, and prepare to deploy when I'm ready.

Watched Hotel Rwanda on Friday, can't say it was really that moving, I guess because I read up on all the statistics and the news coverage, and the fact that the film was sanitised, made it less impactful. The scouts I watched with seemed surprised, like they never heard of the incident. Maybe when we were in primary school, such things never stuck in our minds. I faintly recall the "Rwandan Massacre" when I was in Primary 2 or 3, and if not for my history lessons on the failure of the UN, I probably would be as ignorant as others. Like the reporter said in the show, "People are going to watch this genocide on their TVs over dinner, they're going to say 'Oh my god, those poor people'. Then they're going to continue eating their dinner."

It really seems so true, that the colour of our skin really matters. The only reason why the Western world even bothers with aiding in the tsunami is because white people in Phuket and Sri Lanka were involved. I don't recall the same amount of effort being spared to help those in the Iran Bam earthquake last year, or the Sudan crisis. I don't know how long it will take to realise that despite the colour of our skin, or the choice of our faiths, we are all still human. Maybe the next Ice Age.

I guess I'll have to try my best, sort the world out one person at a time. That's how miracles start, one small step at a time, and with determination to carry the task through, staying on the ball and sticking with it all the way, we'll make it. Like my former RJ principal once said, "The impossible we do now. Miracles, take a little longer."

Don

Under Section 11 of the Enlistment Act...

I enlist tomorrow morning, and I guess this is a goodbye. As my parents put it, a goodbye to the boy that was Brandon, who will now change. For better or worse, that we will have to see, but I guess it's something that we have to go through. Change, the only constant. I started this blog with that in mind, I hope I can start army life and like it just as much as I always think I will.

It's something I always look forward to, a new beginning, away from all the schooling and the people I know since Secondary 1. That second chance to start anew, I'm getting tomorrow. I hope I make an impression, and hope that all my dreams in army can be pushed through with sheer effort on my part. Officer, Sword of Honour, and being on an international mission. I can only cross my fingers that the commandos get sent over to Meluaboh, I do want to get my hands dirty and actually do something to help others. Let's hope the red berets are truly the pride of the army, and get some time overseas helping others, and not let the tan berets get all the attention all the time.

To a new beginning, and a brighter time ahead.

Cheers,
Don

They ask me why

Private First Class Edward J. Moskala, charged 60 meters to enemy machine-gun emplacements to destroy them with grenades. Covered the withdrawal of his squad, for three hours. Found that one of his squadmates was left behind, without hesitation charged back to get him. Protected the wounded while help was sought, found another man left behind, went charging into enemy fire to get his buddy back from the jaws of death, before being mortally wounded. Awarded Medal of Honor, the highest military decoration in the U.S. Armed Forces.

This happens ever so often, and World War Two may have been 60 years ago, but courage like this still lives on. Why do men take such risks to themselves, for others? Ask our Hollywood composite character Hoot in Black Hawk Down, he'll give the classic response a Delta guy, any army dude, would give. "They won't understand, that it's not the war, it's about the man next to you. That's all, nothing else matters."

Military types think only they have this type of bond, but I guess the current disaster shows otherwise. The ourpouring of goodwill is unprecedented, you cannot imagine how much aid is being poured into the affected regions. I was working as a volunteer at SPH, and the amount of logistics we are sending over is phenomenal, there is no wonder why a bottleneck occurs, I cannot imagine any airport, cow herds running over the runway or not, will be able to cope with all the materiel. And aid money is estimated at 2 billion dollars, well over a hundred times worth the initial amount pledged. Some may call this guilt at work, we are alive and well but they aren't so let's pour in money to assauge our guilt. I call it basic compassion. We feel for those who may be thousands of miles away, in a totally different life, because we are all human. Religion, culture, politics, take a back seat.

And look who are on the ground first, providing the humanitarian assistance. Soldiers, the military. U.S. , Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, all have military personnel on the ground first to do the heavy lifting. The next time some pacifist goes rioting, asking for world peace and demanding an end to starvation and suffering, let him see who first goes in to give the helping hand. The next time some idiot at the U.N. complains how much the U.S. spends on the military instead of humanitarian aid, he should be denied space on the aircraft carrier sailing on a beeline to the devastated region. Maybe people should be reminded, that those with the greatest power to take lives, also have the strongest urge to give life back. These are the guys who will not only do it for their brothers-in-arms, but also anyone in particular. That's what they exist for, to defend lives and livelihood, and I swear the next idiot who comes up and complains about the military being useless/unworthy/wasteful/no longer valid, will never hear the end of me. No other organisation can muster the strength and discipline needed to truly provide the aid necessary for the victims. Who will do the airlifts, clear the roads, mop up the area, bury the dead, set up the refugee camps, and organise all the aid? Not the Red Cross which does not have such equipment (besides if they do, they don't have the expertise), or some church or mosque which can send all the money and a token number of people but not its congregation who nevertheless can only go there and pray for aid since they have no organisation whatsoever to handle the humanitarian work, or some aid organisation or the U.N. .

Why the military? Precisely because they don't ask why, they do the necessary without the questions. Like PFC Moskala, only the military can see if something needs to be done, and do it, well and without any bureaucratic nonsense or politicking. Or at least without the notion or perception of it, much better than politicians or bureaucrats who take forever to decide what needs to be done, and still not do it. Soldiers do it, because that's what they signed up for, to help defend freedom, life, livelihood. Defend something, that's what they work towards. Civil strife, genocide, terrorist camps, nuclear weapons proliferation, unrest, insurgency, natural disaster, man-made disaster? Send in the marines.

The weapons of war are the greatest tools for peace. Paradoxical? Open your eyes, and take a new look at that Chinook, LST, CVBG, C-130 Hercules, that man in camouflage uniform. He will make the difference, because he's trained to. You can ask him why he does it, but don't expect an answer. He's just there to do the necessary.

Don

An article on the Straits Times

Read this on the Straits Times today, an essay by Asad Latif, titled "Amid tsunami hell, a glimpse of heaven"

"THE words have all but become a signature line: Hell is other people.

Spoken by a character in No Exit, a play by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, the line captures the claustrophobia and hopelessness of a banal world where people loathe one another from the shallow depths of their fickle being and false words seduce communication.

There is more to hellishness, of course.

Hellish characters have peopled history and they lurk in the dark alleys of the present.

From Nazis, fascists and perpetrators of genocide, to those who profit from slave labour, to intellectuals who rationalise injustice or are silent about it, hell is these people.

Hell is ordinary people as well: corrupt bureaucrats, black marketeers who profit from food scarcity, the denizens of Third World high-rises who sleep peacefully while, in the slums below, children cry out in malarial delirium.

Hell is anybody who glides through life, gracefully immune to the blighted reality of millions of other lives.

But such is the destiny of man that if hell is other people, so is heaven.

Unfortunately, it sometimes takes a calamity to prove this truth.

The year 2004 ended with a resounding reminder of the truth.

Like the Greek Furies, the cataclysmic tsunami fell upon its victims with the pagan force of nature gone berserk.

Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, residents, foreigners, animals, trees, homes, shops, boats, cars - whatever stood in the way of the maddened waves was snatched up and swept along with manic abandon.

Everyone and everything was dispensable. What mattered was how angry the waves were, how far inland they invaded, how long they battered human habitation before retiring, clawing screaming innocents away from life and land.

The tsunami has left in its wake an epic trail of death and destruction.

The dead are gone. It falls on the living to wail, powerless to give even decent burials to family and friends who were torn out of their lives and, sometimes, their very hands.

Mankind stands reminded: Nature is more powerful than him. Nature is supreme. Nature's hidden moods determine the Darwinian rituals of life and death.

But mankind refuses to be humbled, to bow to tyrant nature's decree and give up on itself.

Even though battered by an earthquake that may have permanently accelerated the Earth's rotation and altered the global map, humans have reached out to one another in the very midst of their collective punishment.

Heaven is such people.

Stories abound about them.

People who lost almost everything themselves offered clothes to protect the modesty of a couple whose clothes were ripped off by the ferocity of nature.

There have been reports of looting, pillaging and theft, of course. It does not take long after the waters have subsided for human nature to sink to its lowest common denominator.

But far more numerous have been uplifting stories of human solidarity.

My colleague Ben Nadarajan reports from Sri Lanka about the head monk of a Buddhist temple on a hill. The monk had looked with disdain at the people pandering to the foreigners who lazed on the beach, played in the water, and gathered around the seafood and the nightlife.

But since the calamity struck, the monk has turned host to about 1,000 of the same people, whether tourists or locals.

The stricken have found a place to stay at three temples.

Truly have houses of worship fulfilled their human mandate as well.

Over in Iran, where thousands were killed by an earthquake in Bam a year ago, an Associated Press report mentions struggling survivors thinking of the victims in this part of Asia.

'Some school kids came to me and asked how they could help people in South-east Asia,' a primary school teacher said.

Across the world, including in Singapore, the response to appeals for aid has been overwhelming.

Looking at the outpouring of human solidarity, it is impossible not to think that heaven is other people.

Heaven is other people working for the community, compassion and comradeship. These are the higher possibilities of the human condition.

People are working for them.

For me, the tsunami has brought about a rather strange conversion.

Coarsened by the hellish suffering that has become commonplace around a six billion-strong globe, I have wondered for some time whether there are not too many humans around for their own good.

Famine, pestilence, war, civil war, religious strife, inhumanity to the old, the infirm, children: these multiplying attacks on humanity are fuelled, after all, by the sheer numbers of people who are willing to kill, or are helpless to fight and are therefore ready to die.

Perhaps a world of three billion would have fewer monsters and victims, I thought. The scale of human iniquity might go down even if the propensity towards violence did not, I thought.

Then came the tsunami - and the heartbreaking images.

And this old, calloused heart of mine stirred. I saw each death for what it was - one too many.

The vile idea that there are too many humans vanished.

I looked more carefully for signs of life in the murderous epic. I found them in stories of humans holding hands and facing the ravages of chance.

I realised: Hell might be other people, but so is heaven.

And heaven is more powerful than hell."

Maybe there is hope for the human race after all. Score one for the humanist good guys.

Don. PS, Happy new year, may pure, simple humanity take the wheel this year and let compassion flow forth.