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my throat's pretty fucked up.

been quite sometime since an actual update on my life. so here it is.

3 weeks ago I went on AOAC Full Troop support. If you were an outsider looking in, you could think of this as a few trainees using a batalion as real live practice on the ground. Chess pieces if you will. If you were an actual soldier on the ground, you could call this

a normal batalion exercise with a shitload more old guys with heavy ranks looking down on you and tsking loudly. they also tend to talk loudly, at us.

I can't remember much about it, except that my vehicle was down for the first half of the day and then being the enemy forces for the rest of the exercise. my troopers were pretty irritated with the fact that they have to be enemies, again.

then came 2 weeks of rest/prepping for the next exercise. that passed pretty quickly, because on one of those weeks i had to fly back to Penang for a funeral. oh i forgot to mention, my grandma died.

It was quite surreal for me, because she cared about me more than all my other related by blood grandparents. She lived with my family once and she would always asked if i ate my lunch or what i did that day. and yet i didn't feel sad that she left. i didn't cry, id didn't even whimper. i'm not sure if its' because i've went to too many funerals, or that i'm actually genuinely relieved that she left in peace. Still, there are a few problems in the family area that my mum and her family is trying to resolve and she won't tell me about any of it.

So i came back, and it was exercise time. this time, it's a pre-assessment exercise to see how deep in the shit hole your batalion is. and boy is my hole deep. that didn't come out right.

to cut it short, we had an umpire who pretty much has no clue on how artillery works, and pretty friggin stringent on what armor is supposed to do, which we had no training on whatsoever. So, in reality we were being tested on what we didn't know and what we actually knew was not being tested.

and my pc is pretty much dying from all the extra work he has to do, which is i don't know what exactly.

anyway, our performance is bad enough to warrant a re-shuffling of the commanders. in other words, we need to switch around the roles and responsibilities of some of us, because it's simply not working.

So i became the new detachment commander of Det 6. my pc and ps refuses to call it upgrading or demoting, but whatever. Don't make this into any problem, my ps says. thanks for the pre-warning.

anyway, i heard from him that, the initial reaction from the announcement was quite big from my det, so of course i got worried. and then the vehicle ic and my other spec junrong also told me that the driver remains very stubborn to "accepting" me as a commander, because he, along with pretty much everyone else likes to pull up my old first time impressions. which if you've been anywhere close to me in the past 15 years would know, that it sucks.

so i had to get my det down and explain a few things and find out a bit about their SOP (standard operating procedure). i also needed to in a sense bring down their expectations of me, not only as a detachment commander but also as their leader. because our platoon functions in such a way that during component training we seldomly interact with others, so we have very limited ideas on how others work, which i personally find a bit disappointing. so i needed to tell them 2 things, which was that at times they may see me as a bit of "trainee mode" which is because i'm trying to catch up with the det comd things and also managing people from another point of view. I also needed to explain my working style and my (especially important) tone of voice. i needed to tell them i was straight forward and i said things that were on my mind without beating around the bush, which was different from the way they worked in the past. i also told them that because i have this problem of being a lot louder and harsher than i actually think i sound, so i always come off sounding very fierce. So they needed to focus on what i said as opposed to how i said it. which is what i honestly believed.

then one of my guys, Mahesh, says this, "sergeant ar, i think that you cannot say that it's because you can't change, like i mean your tone of voice this kind of thing, because they say ar that what you say is only 30% of the conversation and then the other 70% is body language."

and that struck me a little. i wanted to explain that, in the field, we don't have time for niceties and pleasantries, but it felt like i was making excuses. all i could say was that i am actually trying to not be so fierce especially in the admin time, but again out in the field i can't make this kind of promises and if they hear me talk like an asshole, it is to be expected and don't take it personally.

i think about what he said, that this kind of thing that can be changed. i guess i've been trying to change this behaviour of mine for the last five years, its an estimate but its' roughly when girls started becoming interesting, which was in sec 2 i believe. but yeah, what you see of me now, is actually 5 years in the making and there is still a hell of a long way to go, so if anyone ever tells you otherwise. Yes, Women have made a difference in the world.