Training Shed

It's Friday morning. The atmosphere buzzes, electrified by the unbounded enthusiasm of hundreds of NSFs looking forward to the weekend. There is no shortage of activity in the Civil Defence Academy today: having passed out the day before, our seniors - now sergeants - account for their equipment one final time, unlike other graduations there is no sad sense of nostalgia in the air, only anticipation for what the future holds; my own course-mates try on their chemical agent suits for the first time while servicemen from station, back for recertification, look on bemusedly; smoke billows from the Furnace, a nine-storey building with over thirty different fire simulations, where the 58th FFC are undergoing their Final Exercise; and as I write, recruits pound the pavement, listlessly running their 2.4km run under the unforgiving sun.

Benched for four weeks by the doctor's sentencing, I sit quietly in the training shed, alone but for my crutches. It seems as though my reflections, a process initiated in Sabah during my solo night, have yet to be concluded. A simple stress fracture, developed during my 11km final run, is what the doctor diagnosed. The situation is precarious: because of an 80% course attendance requirement, each day I involuntarily miss now is one that I will have to atone for later. Fail to meet the requirement and I'd be lucky to be pushed into the fresh, incoming section commander course, voiding my endeavours of the past ten weeks and restarting the countdown on my POP date. The less desirable alternative? Be categorised as unfit for active duty and get reassigned to a bureaucratic, pen-pushing hell whose meniality and redundancy belie the concept of "National Service".

Time meanders slowly, over-ripening my thoughts. Clarity turns to obscurity. Ideas and rationales become images and fantasies. I imagine parallel universes: a jejune sophomore, who had never known difficulty or failure, out at the local pub in Oxford; a freshman at Harvard, starved of knowledge, weathered by the events of his gap year, and brimming with intellectual curiosity; a section commander trainee running around the Field Training Area in a thick, unbreathable chemical agent suit.

A cold wind blows. I think of home. Like a bird in captivity that was raised in the wilderness, every fibre in my body craves for the freedom I once breathed. Shadows begin to disappear -- time for lunch. It's noon.