Emails from fellow tankees

Couple of days ago, I received an email from Edwin, my fellow tank driver in the 42SAR Lion Company Tank Platoon. A chemical engr by profession (trained in Imperial College UK), he is currently with Shell which had sent him all over places, from Holland, Malaysia and now States, based at Houston. His elder daughter is supposed to enrol to P1 in Singapore this year, but I guess this has been put on hold.

Because of his email, it started a series of mails from others. Two of them, Tiong Keng and Ignatius are doctors based in UK. Both are singles still, but seem happy. In fact, they were travelling together in Italy (In case you are wondering, both are straight). Ignatius was saying that life was too good in Europe that he wanted to come back. Lucky him! (for the record, two of my platoon mates are lawyers, others engr, all professionals in their own fields)

In fact, the whole group met up last CNY, i.e. 2006, at Solomon's place. Apart from the yearly ICT, which most did not go because they were either o/s or downgraded, it had been a long time since we last gathered. Just imagine, we left Army on 1993, so it was 13 yrs that all sat down and had a drink/chat! Even our platoon sergeant, who is a regular, came on that occasion. He is an interesting character. During NS, he was rather slacked, hardly ran except for IPPT, but now he is an active in biathalon and distance-running. Whereas, pple like myself who started the running bug in NS, taking part in Marathons ... had seen slowed down or stopped altogether. Perhaps we need the kind of discipline, regime, and time which only serving in the Army would allow us to do so.

Well, those emails did bring back nice memories. Some time back, the daughter saw the Army advert and the Wallaby feature, and I told her that daddy was like that while serving in the Army, so she was curious and asked if i "painted" my faces like those chaps (what she meant was camouflaging). So I took out my antique albums and flipped together with her. To he disappointment (and my astonishment) none was that! So I gave an excuse that daddy had washed them away before taking the photo. But I do believe there were some with green paints on my face. Perhaps need to dig up the drawers when i have time.