It took the J-thing 31 years to finally visit Hong Kong, but he is back from a wonderful trip.  Good things and not-so-good things happened on this trip, but overall the J-thing has no regrets about choosing HK as the first destination of his free ticket.

But in any case, it will be some time before the J-thing blogs about his HK adventure (those of you who know why will know why lah), so keep a lookout for it later!

§ Technorati tags: all around the world

Time is passing too fast when you are having fun.. Time is passing too fast, one month has flew past since i came back from Aussie..  I have done many things, find a part time job, be on a food journey, attend weddings, meet ups with various people, pulled out my wisdom teeth and more.. Wow..

I am a little too tired to blog today, because i just came back from a wedding and i am seriously very tired.. But it sure was fun!

I just wanted to post up a little thought that i have inside of me.. Am i losing myself? How different am i since secondary school days and now? Am i happier before or now? What are the differences? Can i find my old self?

So many questions to ponder, yet the answers are definitely not easy to find.. Oh wells, i guess that is life right.. I should head off to bead.. Would do a proper entry soon.. Loves..

I read this in the news today:

http://www.straitstimes.com/BreakingNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_467192.html

Dec 16, 2009
Cheating in SAF contest
Two SAF officers and a specialist convicted; unit was disqualified
By Jermyn Chow

THREE Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) regulars have been convicted in a military court for doctoring their unit's test scores for this year's annual best unit competition.

The two officers and a specialist from the 24th Battalion Singapore Artillery (24 SA) falsified soldiers' results for the standard obstacle course, which requires troops to clear a series of 11 obstacles like a low wall and parallel bars in under 10 minutes.

As a result, the unit was disqualified from the annual competition and the trio - former commanding officer, Major Thomas Wee Swee Tat; operations officer, Major Sim Siang Ju; and specialist, First-Sergeant Lau Soon Teck - were convicted and fined by the General Court Martial on Nov 25.

I spent 6 years in active service with the armed forces, and I am not surprised at this piece of news at all.  In the course of those 6 years, I have worked with the Army closely on various opportunities, mostly when I was at SAF Careers Centre.  The 2 years at SAFCC really left me with a bad taste in my mouth on how underhanded the Army can get, how to them manpower is merely a resource, and what is it that they really value or care about.

However, the event which left the most distinct and indelible impression on me of all my dealings with the Army occurred before that and what brought it to mind was reading this article, because suddenly I realise that there could perhaps be another dimension to it.  I have written about it before in a comment, but I feel this story deserves a top-level entry.


When I was Manpower Officer of an Air Force unit, one of the duties I had to perform was to appoint an officer to sit on the Court Martial Panel whenever a serviceman from my brigade was being court-martialled.  Nobody wanted to do this thankless task so on every occasion I was the one who went since, being a CPT, I could sit as both the junior or senior member.  During these panels you see cases from all services of the SAF and it was on these occasions that I saw the bottom end of the spectrum, how the system can be so stupidly inflexible that it drives NSF boys to desperation, to do silly things like go AWOL for trivial reasons, just because their commanders did not care enough about them.  But the worst injustice of all was the one which I felt compelled to fight.

This was the case of an NSF from an Army unit charged with losing a live round of ammunition during patrol on Jurong Island.  Now most courts martial are open-and-shut cases: the accused pleads guilty, and the panel is tasked simply by listening to the statement of facts and any mitigating statements, and then deciding on the appropriate penalty using a pre-determined matrix table as a guideline.  So in this case, the NSF boy intended to plead guilty and would be sentenced to detention for a few months.  But upon hearing the statement of facts, I started to doubt that he was actually guilty as charged:

• The serviceman was part of a platoon assigned to patrol the island.
  
• At the start of his duty, he was issued a SAR-21 rifle and a magazine of 30 live rounds.
  
• Now one feature of the SAR-21 is that the magazine is translucent, with markings on the side to indicate how many rounds were loaded in the magazine.
  
• However, instead of being issued 30 rounds, the NSF was issued a magazine preloaded by the armourer.
  
• He was also ordered by the armourer not to physically count the rounds in the magazine one-by-one because there was no need to; he could just look at the 30-round marking.
  
• As per SOP, he put the magazine open-end down in his magazine pouch so that any rounds which accidentally drop out would fall into the pouch and not be lost.
  
• Throughout the course of his duty, he never fell asleep, and only took his battle webbing off twice, and he was right next to it on both occasions.
  
• When he returned the magazine, they found that there were only 29 rounds in it.
  
• They searched every inch of the island he was patrolling, along with all vehicles and personnel leaving the island, but could not find the missing round.

Upon hearing this, I started to ask the Defending Officer a few questions; what I uncovered made me even more unsettled.  It turns out that the round marking on the magazine works by means of spring-action: the spring that holds the rounds in the magazine determines where along the marking the last round lies.  If there are 30 rounds in the magazine, the last round would fall squarely on the 30-round mark; if there are only 29 rounds, the edge of the last round would still touch the 30-round mark.  Before being allowed to handle any weapon, every serviceman is expected to pass a technical handling course—it turned out that the NSF had never been trained on this technical handling.  So it is not inconceivable that the magazine was loaded with only 29 rounds, and since the NSF was told not to count it, he obeyed orders, saw the edge of the last round touch the 30-round mark, and signed out for 30 rounds.  What makes things worse was that due to differing spring quality, sometimes you could load a magazine with 29 or 31 rounds and the last would still fall squarely on the 30-round mark—in fact, the Defending Officer himself said he had almost made the same mistake before because of that exact reason.

Now you don't need any form of legal training to realise that the case has not been proved beyond reasonable doubt.  So upon conferring with the president of the court martial panel (a trained district judge), I recommended that the case be thrown out.  The president agreed and told the Defending Officer (a 2LT from the NSF's unit who was probably arrowed to just write a mitigating statement) to investigate more thoroughly and to prepare a defence for him.  When the next trial date approached, I called up the Defending Officer and realised that he had done absolutely nothing at all—because the unit CO and Manpower Officer instructed him to "just get it over with quickly".  They didn't seem interested at all to uncover what really happened, but would rather send him packing off to DB for a few months just to close the case without much fuss.  I was horrified.  This was a few months of a man's life we're talking about here, and they didn't seem like it mattered a lot to them.  I told the 2LT that as an officer, it was his job to stand up for and defend his own man from his own unit.  You can't be expecting an Air Force officer from another unit to be doing that, I told him.

I didn't want to see a miscarriage of justice, so I called up the Court Martial Centre and requested to specifically sit in the panel on the day the case would be mentioned again.  On that day, the NSF wanted to plead guilty because he "didn't want to drag the issue", also I suspect because he was afraid that by fighting for his innocence, he would incur greater wrath from his superiors.  The Defending Officer (as expected) did nothing.  Unfortunately the term of the judge at the previous mention had elapsed and it was a new judge who was presiding.  I told the new president about the facts of the previous case, but apparently, military legal procedure states that if the accused insists on pleading guilty, even if we suspect a miscarriage of justice, nothing can be done.  We were compelled to record a guilty verdict and we sentenced him to the barest minimum allowed.  Nevertheless, a man went to the Detention Barracks for 3 months because of an offence he most likely did not commit.

This is just one of the incredible things that you will never find in the Navy or Air Force.  I'm sure many other ex-regulars will have their own equally disturbing stories to tell.  The unit in question was an armour battalion.  This incident was seared in my collective memory from that day forth and after many other encounters with people from Armour, of all the branches of the Army, I despise Armour the most.


After reading the news today, I just realised that the evaluation criteria for the Best Unit Competition most likely also includes the number of disciplinary cases, including the number of courts martial the unit is involved in.  By throwing the first case out I had made 1 case appear at 2 sittings—if I had thrown it out again, that would probably have been 3.  The CO probably told his 2LT to "get it over with quickly" to provide minimum fuss and to contain the damage to the unit's chances at winning the best unit competition.

It is amazing enough that senior Army officers will think nothing of falsifying records in order to win a competition, but it is certainly very distasteful that they gamble with people's lives in order to do the same.  It really makes you wonder what is more important on their list of priorities.

For more info on the General Court Martial system in the SAF, you can read this article.
You will notice the line: "The SAF has about 200 trained defending officers."  I don't know if the system has changed in the past 3 years, but if it hasn't, these "200 trained defending officers" are merely those who have gone through the basic manpower officers course, where you get a package on the roles of a defending officer and a rough guide on what is expected of you.  Don't expect top-notch legally-trained officers skilled in rebuttal.  Nevertheless, even this little bit of "training" is better than having an NSF officer of your unit just arrowed to do the job—like the hapless 2LT in this case.

[ X-posted to sg_ljers ]

§ Technorati tags: issues

I have wanted to watch Mulan since I heard that Jingle Ma (I can never get over his name) was filming a real life adaptation.  Finally there would be a film that would do this tale justice, without talking dragons, crickets and horses (thanks to Disney).  Of all the Chinese fables and tales, I have always liked the story of Hua Mulan.  Moreover, the fact that Vicki Zhao Wei was cast as Mulan made it all the more appetising.

Before watching the film, I was warned by several reviews not to expect too much from the battle scenes, and that it is primarily a love story set on the battlefield.  Also, Yun Huei warned me that it was going to be very emo, even too emo.  Nevertheless, I decided to give it a shot.

In the end, I felt that it didn't disappoint on both counts.  The battle scenes were filmed quite well. Of course they don't match up if you compare them to Gladiator or Kingdom of Heaven, but it was adequate to the film.  The gem of the movie is really the acting.  Both Zhao Wei and Chen Kun display very believable chemistry and perform their roles to a very high standard.  Even the acting from Jaycee Chan and previous unknown Liu Yuxin were good.  The film also had a couple of scenes which if, taken as a snapshot, I liked quite a bit.  One example of this is the scene where Mulan regains control of her senses and restarts training of the army.  I quite liked the shot where as she walks up to the platform, they show for a moment the fact that she is wearing not just her own but also Wentai's dog tags on her belt.

Perhaps the biggest complaint I have about the film is the jerkiness of the plot advancement in the beginning.  It was as though Jingle Ma rushed through the starting just to establish the frame of reference for the events after Mulan becomes a general.  One moment she enlists in the camp, the next moment she's in training, then the hot spring scene, then she gets arrested, then suddenly she breaks out and rejoins the army in battle.  It's like everything flashes forward in scenes of two minutes or so each.  After a while it gets very disjointing.  Also, in terms of the plot, the believability of the conclusion is really sketchy.  They don't explain what this 'poison dragon' is (I gather that it's a sandstorm of sorts, but why the funky name?)  Also, the part about Mulan breaking into the Rouren camp incognito and then killing their Danyu is a little too far-fetched; and after that, how did they break out?

Also, the comment about it being too emo was rather justified.  There is a lot of crying in this film, and although at times the emo-ness seemed necessary to the plot, I wish it didn't have to end on such an emo note.  It almost leaves you with the thought that in spite of all her achievements, in the end Mulan ends up back to being just a normal girl who loses the man she loves.  Also, in the middle of the film, I felt that they could have cut down on the emo bits where Mulan thinks Wentai has died and spent that time on more character development in the parts that they fast forwarded through.

Oh yes, and I totally didn't understand the need for that Vitas Russian fellow in the cast at all!!  Like, his character was so insignificant and could easily have been replaced with a Chinese actor.  The only contribution I felt he provided was comic relief at his ang moh-accented Mandarin.


I think Zhao Wei especially was very well cast and believable as Mulan, even if it's quite surprising that nobody guessed she was a girl (I mean, since when have you seen someone look so hot in battle armour, and even if she's not smiling?)  In fact, she looks better in the armour than in those scenes when she's dressed as a woman!  I particularly thought she looked really good in the scenes where she was riding into battle on her horse, in full armour and a stern, determined expression.  In spite of that, Zhao Wei is not too fragile that she can't pull off the character properly.  I read that the original choice for Mulan was Stefanie Sun and I'm so glad that Zhao Wei got it in the end.  Honestly, I think Stefanie Sun looks too delicate to pull off the character of a legendary female warrior, and while Zhao Wei's hoarse voice was already barely believable as a man, I don't think Stefanie's voice would suit a woman masquerading as a man at all.  In fact, the voice is very important to the character portrayal.  As the film makers state: "Zhao Wei’s voice sounds full of power, it’s in accordance with the character who is a girl poses as a boy.  Because Mulan has fought in battlefields for many years, and she always dressed like a man, her voice can’t be so gentle, it's necessary to sound baryphonious."

One theme I liked very much in the story of Mulan is that of female empowerment; in the scene where Mulan convinces the Rouren princess to help kill the bad guy, where she revealed to the princess that the Mulan who was responsible for so many brave deeds and who was so feared by the Rouren army was actually a woman.  In the beginning of the film it started off on the premise that women were useful only for domestic tasks, even something shameful or disgraceful to be hidden away and not to be seen, and it ends with Mulan being recognised as a woman that the entire nation can be proud of.

I also empathised with Mulan when she realised that there is nothing glorious about war on the battlefield, and that she never intended to have to shoulder the responsibility of being a great general, when all she intended to do was to save her father from having to go to war.  It's another example of Zhao Wei's great acting skills.


All in all, one of the better films that I have watched this year.

Next Chinese movie: The Treasure Hunter.  With Lin Chi Ling, mmmmm....

§ Technorati tags: reviews