Good Morning, or Afternoon or Evening Sir, depending on what time you are reading my reflections for field camp. On the whole, I find field camp a really different experience as compared to what we have experienced in camp. During field camp, the things we learn are actually more related to being a soldier and meaningful as compared to all the PTs that we go through.

On the first day, I marched only 6km as compared to the rest so I’m feeling a bit bad as my fatigue level wouldn’t be as high as the rest of my platoon mates. I thought we could try to push the re-route marches until everyone would march 8km together for it to be fair?

The second day was tougher as shell scrap digging required much much more effort since I was taller and had a tree right beside my spot. The carrot given by 2LT Kent definitely helped at the start but eventually the enthusiasm died off after fatigue slowly took over. The hands started aching, blisters started forming and everyone eventually started giving up. However, eventually we persevered with the thought in mind that we could rest after we are done and managed to complete the task.

The real training, I feel, started on the third and fourth day as on these two days we did the firepower movements and the drills, so the leopard crawling and running from cover to cover required more energy from our bodies. Luckily I didn’t have really blur group mates so we didn’t have to do it over and over again. I thought more could be done to enforce the 4 second rule since it would help saving our own lives. Thanks to the rain, we had quite a fair bit of rest and the feeling of being clean until it ended and started to regret since our shell scraps were all flooded.

During the turnout on the last night, I was caught unprepared and there was a lot of confusion regarding the attire and all. We could have improved on passing the message and making it clear that we had to bring along everything, including the sandbags and firesticks. Paintball fighting on the last day was disappointing since it wasn’t the real paintball fight that we usually see. However, it did teach us the importance of finding good cover since I’m probably dead after getting shot in the head.

As we came back to company line, I was proud of the effort that most of the platoon put in when we washed the store items despite feeling tired. We eventually managed to get the job done and made booking out for the marksmen possible.