First off, the title is a misnomer, since my confinement was actually 18 days, which according to hearsay with my friends in other platoons is one of the longest confinement periods. It definitely sucks to know that your book-out is later and shorter than everyone else's, and that you're having your field camp immediately after you book back, and that you're getting 'A' level results immediately after field camp, and that there's yet another field camp after getting 'A' level results. I can't talk about the details of all that because the army likes to be secretive and all (so much like DSO -.-), but basically life is going to get pretty rough for the next week or so. But as my friends have advised me, the important thing in NS is just to take things one day at a time, so for now I'm going to enjoy my long-awaited book-out day :D
In truth, my NS experience thus far hasn't been all that horrible. Yes there's the waking up extremely early every morning, and the physical training that we have to do every day, and the punishments we get for seemingly petty offences (which is still physical training anyway), and having to do ever-increasing work in an ever-decreasing timespan, but if you do manage to follow the commanders' instructions dutifully then you would have saved yourself a lot of push-ups and learned how to be a more efficient person at the same time. It's a bit like school, except that the teachers skip the basic chapters and go on to second-tier topics immediately, and punish you severely for not succeeding. All in all I'd say that it's a survivable experience definitely, but excelling in that kind of environment is another thing entirely. Being a so-called "leadership batch" which is being groomed for potential officer or specialist cadets, I find myself wondering very often whether I'm good enough to meet their expectations or not. Should I just drift my way through and remain under the radar contented with what I have, or should I keep pushing forward, potentially landing me in a situation where the training is 3 times worse than what I'm going through now? The big question now: OCS/SCS or not?
Drowned in all the army talk, squeezed silent by my helmet straps, somewhere at the back of my head, lies a greater ordeal. In a flash, 18 days went by just like that, and now there's only about 5 days left to the release of 'A' level results. The worse part of this particular problem is that even though it is so critically important to succeed, even though a misstep here could literally ruin my future, there is absolutely nothing I can do about it except sit and wait. So I sit, and I wait.
Five days. All I have to do is take it one day at a time, five times.
