Last week some guys from the 'morale assessment department' in the SAF came to assess the morale of my company through a morale survey.

When I was doing the survey, I realised how meaningless life was in my current vocation.
Everyday, we would be either doing PT, doing vehicle maintenance(50% of the time), whiling the time away or doing component training. How boring.
Naturally, morale would be low in the company. I thought: The only thing that ever drove morale up was company cohesion. There was nothing else in the things we did that kept morale up.

After that survey, I thought about my infantry days. Oh boy, those were the days. Although we sweated, bled and struggled, those were the days man.

My favorite part of my infantry days were NavEx(navigation exercises).
I still remember leading my team through 2 navigation exercises. I was the IC, due to some random arrangement. My job was to bring my team to locate all the checkpoints and go back safely.

We clambered up knolls, traversed streams, crossed ditches, broke though thorny branches and helped each other up steep slopes. There was nowhere else where you could find this sense of camaraderie, nowhere except in infantry.

I still remember stepping into soft mud during one of the NavEx. I sank to knee depth almost immediately. Naturally, I panicked, and it accelerated the rate which I sank in. My team members shouted for me to remain calm and stopped moving.
I had sank in to waist depth by then. They took my rifle from me and then formed a human rope to attempt to pull me out. It took a while but after a few tries, I struggled free of the mud, then my feet found a root in the mud which provided a platform for me to support my weight and heave myself out.
It was dangerous I admit, but where else could you have a chance for such adventures?

We lost our way in the jungle that day as well. Haha. That's how NavEx-es are.
For 2 hours, we wandered through thickets after thickets of trees, up and down, up and down. We could not figure out where we were. My team was exhuasted. I looked at my watch and it was 6.45pm. We had less than 45 minutes of sunlight left. I shouted for them not to give up, to move on. If night fell, there was no way we could find our way back again.
I didn't rest at all during the time we were lost. Whenever my team stopped to rest, I would move some distance out to scout the area with another team mate to find out if there was an easy path we could take.
We never failed to find our way back to the main group, because the main group would keep on shouting and we would follow the sound back.

But at that time, I had already gone for multiple scouting trips. We had no idea where we were, and my best gauge had at least a 1km error.
The team was feeling down. But we perservered on. 5 minutes later, I noticed a familiar path in the woods. It might look like a gap in between two trees to others, but I knew we had been there before. We had passed through that area during the previous NavEx!
I knew the way out. 10 minutes later we were back on the main track.
We talked about how we would tell everyone we spent 2 hours sleeping in the trees after finding all our checkpoints.
Haha. But in our heart sealed away an adventure that will always be remembered.

Those are the infantry days. How could that be compared to my days in combat engineers? I once thought if I would rather have stayed in infantry or combat engineers. I concluded that infantry would have been more fruitful and exciting but engineers would have been safer. I thought infantry would be better though.
Of course, the people in infantry like Jia Xin wouldn't say the same.

The grass is always greener on the other side. But my grass is seriously brown.