Stories straight from the bunks

After my male friends got enlisted into National Service (NS), I constantly found myself drowning in NS stories with terms I didn’t understand.

But there were some NS stories that caught my attention. Here are some refreshing (and funny) tales of serving the nation that you probably don’t hear about every day.

Neo Fu Jie, 23, Commando officer

“During my time in Officer Cadet School (OCS), when I was in Brunei, we had a river crossing activity. We completed the river crossing but the job wasn’t really well done.

My instructor was pretty disappointed and asked all of us to gather around for a debrief.

He said “settle down”, so all of us sat down in front of him.

That’s when I noticed a friend beside me was in push up position, so I asked him what was he doing. He looked up at me, then around him. All of us gave him a confused look.

He quickly got up, and sat down just like all of us. Then he apologised saying that he thought he heard the instructor say “knock it down”.

All of us burst out laughing, including my instructor.”

Ronney Poh, 25, student

“When I was in Basic Military Training (BMT), I was really afraid of becoming the recruit in-charge (IC) of toilet cleaning.

To avoid that, I acted overly enthusiastic and volunteered to be the (marching) song IC instead.

However, I couldn’t really escape fate and ended up becoming the toilet IC, on top of being the song IC.

I spent my whole BMT life picking up pubic hair from toilets.”

Marcus Khoo, 21, NSF

“It was right after my field camp and I was glad I was almost done with BMT.

After booking out, I woke up in the middle of the night had a really sharp pain in my stomach. I thought it was nature’s call, but it hurt so badly and was something I never felt before. I knew something was wrong but I didn’t want to think too much.

The next day, the pain persisted and I ended up going to the hospital. I found out it was appendicitis and had to go for surgery.

I was on MC for two weeks and thus I had to recourse and do my BMT all over again.”

Hariz Ikhwan, 20, NSF

“I have been bigger sized all my life and I was put into the overweight intake when I went into BMT.

But for some weird reason, on the day I enlisted, I was moved to the fittest platoon in my batch. I didn’t really know why, especially since I was bigger than most of the other guys there.

I took it that the NS gods were on my side and decided to go with the flow.

Four days later, I was told that I was being kicked out of course (OOC) for being ‘too big’.

So much for NS gods.”

Muhammad Yusof, 22, student

“I had a platoon mate whose social night date cancelled on him a few weeks beforehand, and he was left with a broken heart and without a date.

We knew we had to help him find him a date or he would get charged. The whole platoon asked around but nobody was keen on being a ‘desperate option’.

We resorted to go on Tinder to find him a date…and it worked!”