Mindef Reserve

with LTC (NS) Ong Kien Soo, CO, 433 SAR

“Should I set alarm clock for tomor­row?” asked Dave to no-one in par­tic­u­lar before answer­ing, “for­got, we got human alarm clock in the bunk”.

The human alarm clock was Jonah “Marsh” Lim, who earned his nick­name because dur­ing every in-camp train­ing, he’s the first to wake up and wake every­one else up to go for break­fast. He’s earned a few other snipes for being so con­cerned about us miss­ing the most impor­tant meal of the day. He takes it all in his stride.

He doesn’t have to any more, though, because we’ve just com­pleted the last of our armoured battalion’s train­ing camps, which was capped off with what to some was an over elab­o­rate parade fea­tur­ing sol­diers, armoured vehi­cles and fam­ily mem­bers who were game enough to come to camp with us early on a Sat­ur­day morning.

Hav­ing deferred from national ser­vice for eight years, I hadn’t had the chance to serve out my NS days with my orig­i­nal unit, but I’ve been for­tu­nate to have been posted to this unit com­pris­ing the best fel­las any­one could hope to be bud­dies with. Join­ing them in Decem­ber 2001 as a rusty trooper who hadn’t had any train­ing for a decade, my new pla­toon mates helped me out, and once, even dragged me by my uni­form through the jun­gle when I couldn’t even stand up from sheer exhaustion.

There’ll be more to reflect on, once I get clear­ance to talk in greater detail. But in the mean­time, well done men and com­man­ders of 433 SAR for com­plet­ing 10 years of service.

Autho­rised pho­tographs: Ex Wal­laby 2005, ICT 2004

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