In Continuum.

I was supposed to be sleeping, I was supposed to be dreaming by the time it was two in the morning. But I wasn't asleep, despite the fact that I have been in bed, at that time, for for nearly three hours already. I was troubled by thoughts mostly, and inside my head I conjured up a dozen different outcomes for the unlucky self. There was only going to be one possible outcome of my deferment getting through, but a hundred different possibilities if it got rejected all over again. Those possibilities came alive in my head and swam around like zombie mermaids or something, and I pictured them that way as I shot them all down with my optimistic gun of doom. However, in the battle of zombie mermaids versus optimism, sleep had to be sacrificed at the very end, and it eventually was. By two in the morning, I was still drifting in and out of dreams, and most of them were about going back to the military. It wasn't so much about fear for the most part, but the idea of being back in the army. That idea can send chills down any man's spine and jolts of ice into their hearts. It is an idea that nobody likes to entertain, especially for those who haven't got a choice for the most part. I wasn't exactly worried about the trouble, but just the whole thing in general. It felt like a whole pack of fail to me, let's put it that way.

At around four in the morning, I received some messages from the girlfriend who just finished her project at that point in time. She sent me a message and I replied, after which I was pretty much wide awake and listening to the sounds around the house. It was less than two hours before I was supposed to wake up, and I could hear the sound of my mother sneezing in her bedroom from mine. I listened in for a while and was curious as to why it didn't stop, and that was when I decided that I didn't want to be in bed any longer. So I got up, asked if my mother was OK, and remained online until I was supposed to be waking up and dressing up at five forty-five in the morning. It has been a while since I've decided to stay up, but I guess it was the right thing to do, considering the fact that trying to sleep didn't stop the worrying at all. It made it worse if anything, and surfing through the internet certainly helped with the distraction department. Anyway, I made my rounds around the house and checked my equipments a little bit, hoping that I wouldn't need to take any of them out of my bag when I reach the camp. In my head, I dearly wished for myself to be in and out in under two hours. But I know that with the military, I have to shave my expectations about anything by about half. Everything disappoints in the army, and I do not lie to you about that at all.

By the time my alarm clock went off, I was already dressed up in my military uniform, with the luggage pulled out to the front of the house. I was ready to go, but my stomach was growling and I haven't got much to eat yet. My mother stumbled out from her bedroom with her hair in a state of disarray, and she staggered into the kitchen to make me breakfast. I read the papers a bit and pretended not to care, and then later found the fastest way to drive from my house to the camp in the middle of nowhere. It is one thing to be in a camp like Kranji Camp when it is five minutes away from the MRT, and the other when you are in the infamous Sungei Gedong Camp. The name itself is enough to make any army man curse, because we all know that camp is at world's end, and that is a place where even the wild animals will not venture to bury their poop. If you have ever driven to this camp, you'd know how far away it is from everything - and I mean, everything. The closest form of civilization around the area is the vast expense of land that is the infamous Lim Chu Kang cemeteries, and everybody in that neighborhood is buried underground. Then you get vast expanse of trees and grass, and then chicken farms that smell like bird shit and other horrible things. It is a place that your souls go to die.

That was the place that I was supposed to go, the camp in the middle of nowhere, the place where even the army boys didn't want to go, even when we were in that other camp down the road. That place pretty much meant "outfield", and we hated that to its very bones. The roads in the morning were clear, and we pretty much sped down PIE at maximum speed despite the fact that I wanted my mother to drive as slow as possible. I suppose the clear roads were too alluring, and my mother was at Jalan Bahar in no time. Then the buildings fell away to give way to thick walls of trees, and the roads converged to become this long stretch of runway, at least ten lanes across from one side to the other. I showed my mother around, everything from the chicken farm to the route that I took, from the cemeteries to the little mount by the edge of the road where I camped one night a long time ago to watch people race back and forth. My mother was fascinated by the graves, and I was somewhat worried for her, thinking that she might get lost on her way home or something. She isn't all bad with directions, but it was near Sungei Gedong after all - it is a twilight zone of death that sucks everything into its vortex.

The smell of a military camp sucks, and you can smell the amount of stupidity built into the walls and into the stairs. With my duffle bag on one shoulder and my own bag on the other, I ventured into the camp and saw some familiar faces. It was somewhat comforting, but discomforting at the same time because those were the faces that I didn't want to see anymore in my life. They are nice people, but they also meant "duty, honor, and country" to me. We carried our "barang barang" down the road and to a checkpoint where our temperatures were tested. We had to fill out a form to say that we weren't running a fever, and then ushered to an area to have our hair checked. This is where I was forced into a line to get my hair shaved, and I must say that they did a horrendous job. I have half the mind to shave it completely bald right now because of how bad it is. If you have ever seen the state of a chicken wing after you have thrown it to a dog, you know how my hair is like right now. I suppose it is the contrast between what I had and what I have now, and it is even more frustrating that the lady barbers couldn't be bothered at all to cut an inch lesser despite the fact that I went back to defer. If you have seen a dog after you've trimmed too much hair off, you know that depressed look. I am feeling rather low on self-esteem at this point, and very very vulnerable.

For the rest of the day, we did nothing. Nothing. You would think that if they label a training as being "high key" and that they make a big deal out of people trying to defer themselves away from it, it'd be a pretty busy period of time in the camp with things happening all the time. But no, because we didn't do anything today after we checked in, so to speak, and that was the case even after I left the camp. While the officers went about doing their paperwork, the camp was in a lazy mode with nothing much happening other than stray soldiers walking about at the company lines and to the canteens. Hell, people even came late and it's not like anybody bothered to give them a phone call to confirm why they weren't around. The officers were also reservist personnel, and it's not like they could care less about such things at all. My officer in command owns a spectacles shop, and he seriously isn't the kind of person who'd bother with charging someone over such a minor offense. When you have an officer in command who cannot care less what you show or give to him upon your deferment, a 2IC who doesn't even know if you have deferred or not, a platoon commander who also wants to defer at the same time, you pretty much know that nobody is going to be motivated to fight a war. In fact, if the only regular in the entire battalion is the head and everybody else are pissed off looking reservist personnel, you have a battalion of unmotivated soldiers who are not going to fight a war at all.

It is somewhat saddening to see where the taxpayers' money goes to. It goes into stupid military exercise where nobody really does anything other than moving things around. You start to realize the gravity of its stupidity when you look at the makeshift model of a live firing range in the lecture room, and you see the little wooden stumps stuck to the board with glue and little plastic toy soldiers being placed in different positions to fire at wooden boards. That is the kind of "war" that we fight, that is the kind of enemies that we face. They are always the kind that are fixed to a little machine that goes left and right, up and down. They never fire back, they never even shout anything at you to scare you. They just go left and right, up and down. All those money goes into supporting soldiers who cannot care less about being in camp, and maintaining weapons and vehicles that never seem to work when they are needed to work. Everything in the military is about waiting for something to happen. Waiting to move, moving to wait, that is something you are going to hear a lot in the army. Productivity and efficiency is something that the officers merely fantasize about, but it never becomes a reality as everything becomes delayed and pushed back. Like how everything was today when it was all shifted back and all was haywire.

So, in the midst of the chaos, I spent some time with my old platoon mates, and found there to be little to no changes in them at all. They are all the same, with the lot of them spotting the same hairstyles for the most part. It's like they never actually left the army, and has been in there ever since I left. They still talk about the same things, act in the same way, and react to things that reminds me of that musky smell in my bunk. I suppose for a period of time, it was pleasant to catch up with them for a while. But as the day draw on and the commanding officer still not in sight to approve my deferment, I was beginning to feel a little daunted by the idea that I could be staying with the same group of people for two weeks straight. It's not because they are bad people or anything, but because they simply operate on a different frequency than the rest of us. At least in my platoon, there is a clear distinction between the A levels and polytechnic people, and the rest. For the rest, I'd like to think of them as "the others", like the ones from Lost. They are just different, and they are interested and excited about different things. As we sat around in a circle in our bunk today, they spoke of their "sexcapades", so to speak, and their adventures to shady night clubs in Singapore and having their penises sucked by hostesses at a price, and how they are willing to do anything to you as long as you have the money to pay up. It is one thing to hear about such things happening in Singapore, and something else to see the people that you know so well engaging in it.

So the commanding officer, the guy who has the say in whether or not I can leave or stay, was supposed to meet us at two to discuss the issues at hand. He was held up at a briefing, and apparently was delayed till about three in the afternoon when Han Wei and I decided to evacuate into the company line and hide in the bunks while they had a mini-parade of sorts. Here's the thing, nobody cared about where everybody else was, and nobody ever questioned somebody else where we were at that time. We camped out in my bunk and talked about games and deferment, and a bunch of other stuff that revolved around the past. Anyway, it was fun to do something like that again, and it was not until about five in the afternoon did the commanding officer actually had any time to see us. There were a lot of us at that time, and I was glad to be the first few in line to talk to him about things. I was number ten, and apparently a bunch of people weren't around when the queue started, so we jumped a few places forward. There were over twenty people applying, and he was only entertaining people until six in the afternoon, so you can see that it is pretty urgent for us to get things done as soon as possible.

The commanding officer didn't seem like he was in a terrific mood when I first met him. Every commanding officer has that kind of look, the vibe that oozes of pride and patriotism for the country. He, however, had an overwhelming amount of that, and even more so than Dominic Ow, who was my commanding officer in my army days. I mean, my old commanding officer was shorter than most of the men around, so in that sense he was disadvantaged already. Anyway, the queue went by relatively smoothly, and my platoon commander was in line for deferment as well. We talked about the odds of us getting through, and it became fairly optimistic after some time that full-time studies was going to get through. I had my hopes up all the way until the moment I sat down in his office with his seat just inches away from mine. He saw my letter of approval from my school and immediately mentioned that SIM is not a recognized school by the military - which is incredibly stupid. Like I mentioned before, if you are not from the three local universities, the country says "go fuck yourself" for the most part. The commanding officer didn't care that I was from SIM, or UB, or all the other assignments that I will be missing. He didn't even like the fact that I wrote "full-time studies" because, supposedly, it shouldn't be approved as if it isn't a valid reasons. At any rate, he approved at the end because I have exams on this week and the subsequent weeks, and he said that he approved of my deferment almost as if he felt like he was doing me a favor. I had to smile, of course, and patronize the big boss before leaving, though it was nice of him to wish me good luck on the papers.

So I went back to bunk, packed up my things, and Han Wei and I got out of that camp in no time at all. There were already cabs waiting outside the camp to pick people up, since I suppose the distance of that camp from everywhere else is a good way to earn a big wet load of cash. We dumped our bags in the back of the cab, told the driver where we were headed, and we were caught in the middle of a jam and civilization in no time. That was when my fatigue really struck me hard, because I hasn't slept for a long time by then. But the emotions were rolling about in my head, and it still all seemed somewhat surreal to me that I managed to get myself out of the mess despite the haircut. I mean, I hate the haircut, but at the same time I am not inside the bunk right now trying to fall asleep in the excruciating heat. I am at home right now, getting ready for school tomorrow, and hoping that the hoodie would be enough to cover up the hair a little bit. Anyway, the trip home was slow but enjoyable somehow. Han Wei and I both breathed a sigh of relief when we moved away from the trees into the more familiar concrete jungle. I got home and crashed into the shower, and that was when I really felt safe from that horror of a place. So, I am home, and I am just glad to be here all over again.