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DAY ONE AND THE FIRST SIX WEEKS
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SEVEN
his family from Beach Road Camp; it was a time when public phones hardly existed and in
any case, very few homes had telephones. As no send-off arrangements by family members
had been catered for at Beach Road Camp, there was nobody to pass the details to, such as
they were. So, it was left to the enlistees to send home messages by post or phone after they
had reached the camp. No one recalls if any postcards with some details of the location and
perhaps a guide map were distributed to simplify and standardise the process and it probably
wasn’t.
There was a small group among those who reported in the same batch who were not sent
to the same destination and they discovered later that they were going to MID HQ. They
were apparently dispersed around MID in civilian clothing doing odd clerical and messenger
jobs. No one cared to explain the situation to them and 40 years on, no one remembers what
the arrangement was all about. As far as one enlistee was concerned, it meant that he would
be going home every night until told otherwise, which was quite all right with him. But, it
suggested that there were subtext arrangements going on regarding those who had been
enlisted and it would seem from snippets of information picked up from various sources
that later in the day, or perhaps in the days immediately following, Beach Road Camp was
visited by a further batch that was transported to Simon Road Camp, off Parry Avenue, near
Yio Chu Kang and apparently another lot in Haig Road Camp. One possible explanation
for the group sent to MID was that MID wanted to keep a reserve card up its sleeve for
dropouts from Pasir Laba because the enlistment documents had offered the recruits the
prospect of quitting within the first three to six weeks if they could not take the training.
Another was that their records had been mislaid in the confusion. Or both.
III. IT’S A LONG, LONG WAY TO PASIR LABA
As all the enlistees who were earmarked for Pasir Laba had already experienced military
3-ton trucks when they were ferried there for the physical fitness tests during the selection
process, the experience of a ride in one was not new, but that did not make this trip any
more comfortable. On that occasion, the break at Jurong Town Primary School for the IQ
test had given the enlistees the impression of a shorter distance from the heart of town.
Given the anxieties each privately harboured about what they were in for, it was practically
interminable this time round: down Bras Basah Road, Selegie Road, Bukit Timah Road, into
Jurong Road and then Upper Jurong Road (all then two-way). As it turned out, the enlistees
had been embussed in the 3-tonners in two distinct groups though they did not know it then:
the lead vehicles carried those meant for ‘A’ Company and the rest ‘B’ Company, with the
latter taking a long detour to arrive after ‘A’ Company had been in-processed at Pasir Laba.
In either case, for most, it was their longest trip to the ‘ulus’ at one go and around Upper
Jurong Road, the sense that they were not going to see civilisation for the next six weeks
began to filter through. Also for many, it was only when they reached Pasir Laba Road that
they realised that this was where they had come for the physical fitness test.