Tuesday, July 7, 2009 @7:09 PM
at exactly 7.19am this morning, SQ 8991 touched-down and the singapore changi airport. so what significance does this have? well it marks the beginning of hte well anticipated BLOCK LEAVE! :D feels great to be back. i'm free as a bird, for a week at least..
brunei wasnt as bad as i thought. most of the first day was spent travelling to our accomodation in brunei. a 2 hour flight, followed by a 3 hour boat ride, then finally a 20 min bus ride, we were transported right to the very doorsteps of Resort Lakiun, our home for the next 10 days.
had our guided navigation exercise nomad on day 2 which was pretty slack cos the instructor thought we were good enough after 2 check points so we ended up being the very first group to get back to bunk, while the rest had to conmplete all 6 check points. day three marked the beginnining of platoon training. platoon battle course to be exact. we were thought how to go about doing ridgeline fighting as well as trench clearing. the terrain was indeed an obstacle. steep slippery slopes and torny plants provided us with the additional natural enemy to overcome. had 2 or 3 runs in total.
the navigation exercise began full flow on the fourth day. it was a 2 day 1 night mission where we had to locate 2 checkpoints, a passage point and finally an end point. being part of the second wave, my detail, tango 19, consisting of nicholas, zixuan, jiawei augie, melvin, chunyang, billy lang, staff tanu, benedict, colin and some other annoying guy, left 2hours later then the rest. we found our first 2 checkpoints rather quickly before it started raining. we were moving ahead of time. by the end of the first day, we were in between cp2 and pp1. an encouraging achievement as most groups only manage to get to the second checkpoint at the end of the first day. built a decent shelter for myself and chunyang , which kept us dry and warm for the night.at first light, we set off for the remaining 2 check points. to the disbelief of many, at 7.30am, we arrived at our end point, setting a new unofficial armour record for being the earliest team to arrive. we got back to camp at about 9.30am and were rewarded with a 2 hour canteen break.
had another 2 battle courses the next 2 days which i wouldnt like to elaborate any further