So here we were, young and fresh to the world still, having been sheltered from the outside world for almost 2 decades, and now the forces that be threw us all together on these island, all not knowing what lies ahead in our lives. The question still remains to be answered. Just what on earth were we doing on this Island?
Other fresh faces abound, some tired, some not caring the least, all of us only knowing that NS was just… something that had to be done. That if you were a Singaporean, that you needed to go through this NS in order to be properly called a Singaporean, especially a Singaporean man. So we were told, by our fathers, by our brothers, by our uncles, by our grandfathers who suffered untold suffering from the Japanese. And then a history lesson would follow about how small we were, how weak we are, that we need to own the land and the only to own what we you have is to protect it. Even after 2 years doing what seemed to be a little bit waste of my time, it somehow still triggers some pangs of patriotism. But then all of it just fades away after a night’s sleep.
Senior commanders would come and talk to us, about how we felt serving our nation. We are the Black Hawk Down generation, the Saving Private Ryan generation. I don’t a lot of us had watched films like, We were Soldiers by Mel Gibson about the Vietnam War… We had watched Jarhead, and we thought that Jarhead was the most realistic of films actually, because it represented what most of us felt and did during our time. We are trained to fight, but we never do. A taut string can’t stay taut for long. If a taut string remains taut long enough, it becomes slack and never taut again.
Feeling high on those images of war, it never occurred to us that people don’t become soldiers overnight, never occurred to us that it takes a special kind of person who is willing enough to take on the mental and physical punishment that soldierhood entails. Yet there we were, in the cinemas, taking it all in, as Eric Bana and Josh Hartnett went about their business in Mogadishu. Why didn’t we appreciate Jarhead more?
All of days there, in military camps or in the outfield, in the jungles, in the mud, never really quite answered our most burning questions in our hearts. Why NS? Why the commanders? Why here? Just what the heck am I doing here?
These questions were always with us, all the time. Yet, they were never really quite answered. In defence of this country? In defence for our family, for our loved ones? In defence for our way of life? Just what exactly was it we were defending?
‘In event of war, you will be here to protect the country and your loved ones’. That was the most common thing that we heard. Well, because you guys have been militarily trained, you guys will do really something useful here.
It makes sense for like 5 seconds, until you realise that in event of war, my parents would be trying to get on the ticket to Australia, China, Indonesia, Taiwan… anywhere but stay here. And once I know that they are safe, well, there’ll be nothing left for me to fight for but to scramble for that last transport to… anywhere but war zone.
What is Singapore to us? Is it anything at all? If what we have here can mean nothing, then NS would be for… nothing, ain’t it?
Why are we dissatisfied?
We are not satisfied simply because we can’t see beyond the lives that we live. We don’t have hope for our future in Singapore. It is not that we don’t have hope for the future of Singapore. Deep inside every one of us, we want to believe that things can be better, and that things WILL be better. Yet in all of us, there is still a longing that we can do something else, something greater than the things that we are doing today, something that will really define our existence in Singapore, as Singaporeans. And that is the key thing that is missing in this country.
We want our voice to matter, that as individual persons, we can make a difference – to belong to a community, for the happiness of the people around us in that community. We want to make our own meaning to our lives, not merely as economic machines constantly growing our GDP, but as real persons, not just as another face in a crowd, but as unique individuals, all of us. In other words, we want to be valued as persons, not as another cog in the Singapore machine. Until and unless we are valued as persons, the dissatisfaction will always remain, and Singaporeans, in their deepest of hearts, will always want to emigrate, and NS will always seem a waste of time.
While we serve National Service, are we serving for a machine, or are we really serving a Country of 4 million people?
Is this the country worth defending?
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