Walking along a water village on our last day
It feels a little disorienting to be back in Singapore after our 20-day "mission" in Brunei. I would call it Exercise Laying (on the Bed), but that's used before in one of our previous outfields. So, I shall call this Exercise Maggi, because a lot of my memory of these 20 days involve cooking instant maggi noodles outfield.

By right, Brunei was meant for the other three companies as well as my company's recce and pioneer guys, but because they needed us to role-play as the enemies, plus it won't be very nice if everyone came but mortar and signals, we went as well. As a result, there wasn't much we were required to do. Most of our time was spent in the bunk, reading, talking, watching movies, etc. I've watched more movies and read more in these twenty days than in the past two months.

There were three main things that we participated in, though.

Navigation Exercise
Our navigation exercise was a highly toned down version as compared to the other companies. We just had to find a minimum of one checkpoint in the forest, habour for a night, and we were done. So, we started habouring at 10am when the actual habouring time was meant to be 5pm. For the first time out of many subsequent ones in Brunei, we dedicated a lot of time to doing up our shelter, collecting logs, building a fire, and cooking maggi. It was nice at night, after a rain (it rained every evening), when we sat by the fire and just talked.

Opposition Force
The finale of the entire Brunei "mission" was a long march, followed by two fights. Mortar got deployed at the final objective as enemies. Generally, it was a lot of waiting, maggi, fire, climbing up and down a hill in the middle of the sector I was in charge of, and some fighting. Certain points of the whole process were quite entertaining, but I think I'm not supposed to talk about it.

Rest and Relaxation
For the first portion of R&R, we went to a water village to eat kueh and use the toilet. Immediately after that, we were brought to the only shopping mall in Brunei, creatively named 'The Mall'. Most of the mortar people wanted to play lan, but I didn't want to, so a minority of us decided to watch a movie called 'Lights Out'. We spent the rest of the time walking around, exploring, playing with some explosive kids' toy thing, and playing at the arcade. Although we were given eight tedious hours to spend the time at a relatively boring place, I thought it was quite nicely spent time.

We reached Singapore at around 2am, but had to wait till 4am to get our duffel bags back because the airport sent them to the wrong terminal. That's more or less how the whole Brunei trip went for us.

Labels: NS, overseas, things that happened