Reality
I was enlisted about two years back. Back then, I was pumped with passion for the military life I was gonna go through. My impression of the armed forces was a glorified one. It was painted action, firepower and adrenaline. I remember watching war movies like Black Hawk Down, Tears of the Sun, We were Soldiers and the list goes on. They were all good movies. Some were inspired by real life events while others were fiction. Yet above all, they shared one great similarity. They dramatised the battlefield with blood and bullet; reduced the life of soldiers to training, fighting, killings, trauma, remorse and moral debates. Was it realistic? The uninformed thinks of it this way. Those serving NS view them as action flicks based in the real world, infused with an unattainable degree of military skill and discipline. Still, we can't reach a conclusion about their realism because we are totally missing the point.
Why? Because "all we have been doing is walking around in sand. We didn't even get to kill them (iraqi soldiers). They are all dead". That is the one statement a USMC trooper said which sums up the entire idea behind the movie Jarhead.
It all starts the same way: Recruits fall in while their trainer unleashes an unprecedented chain of vulgar sentence that made so much sense you won't be able to make it out. Push ups. Sir Yes Sir. The bottomline, civilians are reduced to green jars - empty inside. Then comes training, from the basics of camouflage to the elaborated combat tatics. With that, the grinding desire to see action, to be in a real life situation to fire that shot. To kill or be kill. To be all you can be. To live life by the edge. This is precisely where all this bullshit breaks down. Emptyness and a sense of waste, the result of baseless boosting of fighting spirit, take over.
"We hydrate. We patrol the empty deserts and we dehydrate. We throw hand-grenades into nowhere, navigate imaginary minefield. We fire at nothing...we look north towards the border and we wait. This is our label - we wait."
"mastubattion, re-reading of letters from unfaithful wifes and girlfriends. Cleaning your rifle. Further mastubation. Rewiring walkman. Arguing about religion and the meaning of life. Discussing in detail every woman the marines ever fucked. The differences between cuban and mexican; harley versus Hondas; Left versus right handed masturbation. Further cleaning of rifle. Studying the philliphine mail order bride catalog. Further masturbation. Imagining the first meal when we return home"
This is an extract from Jarhead, after the mariens spent 2 months in the Gulf. See the parallelism with reality thus far? For those who have been on overseas exercise, this should sound nastily familiar.
And the truth is, even at the frontline what you get is not a taste of combat. Rather, its the thirst for combat. All you really get is the amplified version of shit. And its a true shit-hole out there. You just want to get out of there, not because you miss home nor because you fear dying from a gunshot wound. Its plain full of shit. Saikang in local context.
When you get back and parade the streets after a 6 month long campaign, the public cheer you on. People whom you don't even know wave and salute. You are a war hero. When you walk out of camp with your long awaited pink IC, they cheer you on too. You are a trained soldier now andhave gone through NS, the unescapable predicament of all singaporean males. You are "different" now. What reasons they know not. It is no wonder though, because all they can see beyond the gates are based upon imagination. Imaginations built upon images from ARMY daze and BSaving private Ryan. Thats realism to them. How real is realism?
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