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STAFF AND TRAINEE DYNAMICS
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THIRTEEN
V. AN ECLIPSE IN THE OFFING
assigned to SAFTI. It was to create a negative attitude among the graduates of SAFTI to
others who had accepted a secondment to the regulars from the Volunteers, despite their
personal abilities.
Instructors with Volunteer commissions were at a disadvantage, even if they had attended the
Preparatory Course, because their military knowledge was based on discontinuous training
camps at which the best they could hope for, was a cursory exposure to a significantly
abbreviated body of knowledge and practical application. As instructors, they were
caught between the regular officers—who themselves were strangers to the new doctrines
promulgated by the Advisors—and the trainees, who rapidly overhauled them in basic
military matters, not to mention in their physical conditioning. Any professional authority
they had, dribbled away by the end of the recruit stage of the first intake training and what
remained was only what the trainees were prepared to extend to their rank and perhaps their
age. Unfortunately, a number of these officers seemed not to have been as conscientious
about mastering the subjects of forthcoming lessons as they might have been. There were
comical episodes which would leave the trainees aghast or in stitches. One such involved an
instructor who asked a cadet to point to the north in the field based on the position of the
sun during a lesson on navigation. The cadet did so. The instructor pulled out a prismatic
compass, checked it and pointing in a direction less than 20 mills to the right of where the
cadet had indicated, announced pontifically, “Not there (where the cadet had pointed), but
there.” Honour satisfied, he proceeded to happily fumble through the rest of the lesson.
Some insecurity could be discerned as well among the instructors who were regulars. With
the benefit of the stricter and more demanding full-time regimen of military colleges in
Malaya/Malaysia and elsewhere, they had more substantial foundations to their professional
expertise. Many had also advanced to the ranks of Lieutenant or Captain. They had had
experiences in operations against Indonesian guerrillas during Confrontation and in 1964,
the turbulent days of racial riots in Singapore. All this, plus the fact they had opted for the
military as a vocation, tended to give them greater professional weight than their Volunteer
counterparts. But, their trainees were not only the receptacles of the concentrated essence of
the new wave, but also getting intense practical application which made them physically more
hardened than the instructors and more dexterous with military equipment and knowledge.
As a matter of fact, there were remarkably few occasions when the regulars slipped and
those instances showed—if anything—how demanding military leadership is. There was
the case of one FMC-trained officer who lost his bearings while controlling a section raid
exercise and abruptly twisted round the sleeve of his embroidered field rank insignias to hide
them on the underside of his epaulettes and announced that he was now a private, implying