Fieldcamp @ Simpang (Part 1)

24 Jan 2005

Woke up at 0300 hours and could not sleep for quite a while last night. Packed the remainder of the fieldpack items into the fieldpack. Drew the M-16 and waited for breakfast (which was supposed to start at 0330 hours) but due to miscommunication, had breakfast at 0430 hours instead! Our 106 trainer, Warrant Law briefed us on what was expected and what is to be expected of us when we are in the field.

Once we have loaded everything up onto the 4 jeeps, we moved to the parade square where we waited for the men from Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta and HQ to load up the 3 or 5 tonners. Once everything has been done, we left Clementi Camp at 0500 hours to head towards Simpang. The journey to Simpang was a long and cold one as it was quite freezing in the early morning. After a long and dusty passage inwards, we finally reached our location.

Once there, Chiang, our driver, moved the jeep into position. Attached to Charlie Company were the guys from Jeep 1:

Section 1: Lt. Jeremy, Cpl Wong, Lcp Yusman, Lcp Sufian and Pte Azib
Section 2: 3Sg Nizam, 3Sg Zackaria, Lcp Chiang, Lcp Ramlee and Lcp Shaun

The 106 jeep upon first reaching Simpang

As soon as we could see first light, we started to unload the stores. The first thing that we started to do was the filling of the sandbags with sand and with the cool breeze coming our way, we started from 0 to about 200 sandbags. At around 1030 hours, we started to see other units coming in. These units were not part of the battalion exercise and had planned to carry out their exercise on the area where our prow is!

A little while after most of the equipment have been setup

Our unfilled prow at 1st location

Our M-16 rifles clustered together while we put sand into the sandbags

It was then discovered that these units were the Combat Engineers. Our new Commanding Officer or CO, Major (NS) Lim came personally to us to tell us both the good as well as the bad news. The good news was that the engineers would help us with the movement of our stores to our new location and the bad news was that we had to pack all our stores and rebuild them up at our new location.

Our new location!

After the setting up of the prow, in the hot morning and afternoon sun, the engineers started to bring the sand and filling up our prows ¾ full with the other ¼ to be filled with sandbags. Now was the prow was being filled with sand, we were CONCURRENTLY (this term being very familiar to us given by our very own, Lt. Ben-na-den) filling up the sandbags with sand.

The Sand

The Filled Sandbags

This process of filling up the sandbags and dropping them into the prow started at around 1100 hours – 24 Jan and ended on 0300 hours – 25 Jan. I was very pleased and happy that we had completed the task. What made us feel even better was that we broke the 668 SIR 106mm record of which they completed the prow at 0400 hours. We had a special supper to keep us going – roti prata and kopi ‘o’ from Warrant Law….