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OFFICER CADET TRAINING
250
ELEVEN
V. WAR STORIES
Centre to have their blisters attended to. As the exercise was planned towards
the end of the week, the weekends offered an opportunity for recuperation.
Red Beret provided a fund of anecdotes to liven up the boring interludes
between the periods of frenetic activity that characterised military training.
Parang-wielding farmers chased Officer Cadet Giles Miranda when they saw
Reserve Unit personnel going after him. Officer Cadet Chan Seck Sung was
offered a hospitable meal when he approached a farmer’s house. Officer Cadet
Ajit Singh of Platoon 1, which started off the exercise in a thunderstorm, was
‘rewarded’ for being first in his platoon to arrive at Cow Dung Hill by being
appointed the commander of the attack phase on Chua Chu Kang Hill. Officer
Cadet Hwee Man Lok was optimally overwhelmed with relief when he passed
the gates of Nanyang University during the ‘tactical’ withdrawal to SAFTI after
the assault. Officer Cadets Lionel Thomas and William Law, along with several
others, spent the night in the Hong Kah area where Controllers picked them
up the next morning. Officer Cadets Mukhtiar Singh and Chua See Tiew were
attacked by hornets and had to be evacuated from the Seletar Reservoir area to
the SAFTI Medical Centre.
Fortunately, nobody seemed to have lost any controlled combat equipment such
as bayonet, compass or rifle magazine because there was no indication of any
cadet being charged for such an offence. Most cadets had the good sense to pack
detachable items of equipment inside their backpacks for the whole exercise. If
anybody gave up without even trying to reach the proximity of the objective,
it was a well-guarded secret. But, there were no official announcements and
it is not known what part the exercise played in the final evaluation. In any
case, two cadets from Platoon 3 did not do the exercise because they had been
injured by shrapnel from a bangalore torpedo just before the exercise and were
recuperating from surgery. So, completing Red Beret could not fairly have been
made a deciding factor in the final evaluation.