at last field camp's over!!!! i must say that it was a really trying and tiring 6 days ...


:: insects ::
tekong outfield is teeming with insects of all kinds: ants of various sizes and colors, grasshoppers that are fatter and longer then my middle finger(!?@!!), brown, green and red praying mantis, and the list goes on and on! everywhere you turn, they're everywhere but i must say that the most fearsome one has to be the centipedes .. the long, big, fat and shiny red kind. *shivers* disgusting insect man! during our fourth day, at our second field camp site, we were falling in with our field packs on the ground, all groggy and half asleep, when i noticed something crawling up the strap of my buddy's fieldpack ... CENTIPEDE!!!! wah ... pandemonium broke out immediately man; some of the guys jumped away in horror while others shouted at each other to kill it. that creeper was damn long, the length of my forearm, and it was inching its way into my buddy's fieldpack! without a thought, i kicked it off the pack and hacked it into half using an entrenching tool, and then another half, and another and another .. until by the time i was through, there were like 11 segments all over the floor. SICK! that aside, i did manage to see fireflies at night~! so ghostly yet beautiful; dancing so high up amongst the trees, in the dead of the night.

:: tekan session::
the "highlight" of the camp, imho, was the tekan session that the instructors made us go through during the third day. that particular day didn't start off very well cause i was raining cats and dogs by late morning. the whole company of us were all huddled in our own basha tents when suddenly out of the blue, the instructors shouted for us to fall in. and so it was that all of us stumbled out of our tents .. dazed and confused at what was going on. next thing we know, we were told to knock it down in the mud, reason being that we were too slow. wat the ?!@#?!. from our push up position, we were asked to lie flat in the mud, row to our left and right countless times, leopard crawl back and forth, do sit up and crunches, and basically just about anything that comes to the instructors' minds.
blardy sadists.
by the time they were done with us, all of us looked like shit, smelled like shit, felt like shit and it was onli 10 in the morning! we had to go through the rest of the day's training in sticky and heavy uniforms plus wet and soiled boots. on top of that, the rain didn't stop and wind was howling like mad! it was a really depressing day for all of us and by the end of that day, the morale of the whole platoon was at a all time low.

:: platoon ic ::
as some of you have already known, i was "arrowed" to be the field camp platoon ic at the eleventh hour. totally caught me off guard since i kept myself quite low profile most of the time. the platoon ic's job is basically to organise the whole platoon, account for every single person in the platoon, ensure that all timings are met and all tasks are done. its a really tedious job during field camp cause there are always so much things to do in outfield and the ic seldom gets much rest. so throughout the whole 6 days, i was running around, shouting at my platoon mates, trying to get things done. there were quite a few occasions when i was punished because my platoon mates simply refused to cooperate. its always like that ... they will only move fast when they see people being punished; not because they sympatise with the person being punished, but rather because they don't want to be punished next. haiz. such is the selfish nature of Man. anyway, i really want to thank you guys for praying for me cause it really made a difference to me. God's strength was demonstrated through my weakness and the best evidence was the compliment that i received from an instructor from ANOTHER platoon, who asked my for my name and said that i was a very good ic. so once again guys, thanks alot and praise be to the Sovereign Lord~