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PULLING TOGETHER
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TWELVE
VI. INFORMAL COMPETITION
a vicious cycle. In later years, as National Service attitudes began to pervade the military
establishment, these practices contributed to a severe backlash against what is appropriately
termed ‘military bull’ and less elegantly, ‘anal-compulsive’ behaviour by Dr. Norman Dixon
in his book,
On The Psychology of Military Incompetence
, arbitrarily taking with it many other
practices which were probably of intrinsic value in a military environment.
2
There are those who argue that it was not pointless to insist on permanent inspection level
personal standards. One unacknowledged element in all the fastidiousness is that at any
point in time the individual trainee, or soldier in an active unit should be ready at a moment’s
notice to deploy fully equipped instead of fumbling around for one item or another of
his battle order. Another argument is that one of the objectives of a training phase is to
inculcate lifelong habits and in this case, develop an uncompromising mindset towards
excellence, which became the motto of SAFTI. There is certainly something in that. But in
the matter of personal turnout, there are far too many exposures towards negative examples
from superiors coming from varying backgrounds to make this an immutable commandment
of military training. It could even have unintended negative consequences.
The fact that there was little scope for competition among the cadets is not to say that total
harmony prevailed amongst them for the whole duration of the training. Friendly rivalry
was common, especially in shooting and physical fitness. Although no gala sports’ day was
scheduled during the course, there were several qualifying tests which stoked the competitive
spirit among trainees simply because they provided the opportunity to strut one’s stuff. One
was the sixty-minute ten km run in full battle order with the ten lb SLR, conducted during
section training, which brought fame to Recruit Ponnosamy Kalastree, a school marathon
runner. Others included the fastest times for completing the obstacle course. There were
also informal personal rivalries over completing the 3-mile runs along the Pasir Laba Road
and the odd soccer and hockey matches. Surprisingly, there was little effort to promote
sports during the course despite all the facilities that could have been used.
A more universal activity, if only for a brief interlude, in which all trainees had to take
part, was the boxing championships which WO1 ‘Tiger’ Hong Seng Mak refereed, thereby
concentrating every cadet’s mind. The training was neither professional nor systematic
because the basic idea was only to inculcate in each cadet the grit to face an opponent one-
on-one, attack him coolly and defeat him in combat. In the first intake days, it was run on
the basis of inter-platoon only, but every cadet was paired off with someone of his own
weight class to identify a representative for each of the weights to take on the other two
platoons. The finals were a real treat and co-operative or not, the finalists held nothing back,
as photographs of the event attest.