Chickenpox
Of all times, I had to get chickenpox for the past 2 weeks. Sigh. 2 weeks Attend C. The first few days I had headaches and boils cropping up all over my body, face, and scalp. Strangely there was no itching, but more of slight inflammation I think. Thank goodness the doctor gave me antivirals, otherwise I’d die of itching.
Well, before I had chickenpox, we had just finished an exercise. During the exercise we had NSmen taking over us for 2 days before we went back to take over them. Before the hand over to the NSmen however, everyone had the general feeling that the NSmen have a certain “style” of going outfield. This is witnessed first-hand by me when I was on the 3 tonner going downhill to fetch them up the steep hill, and also to collect rations for the entire platoon. I got off the tonner and limped (because I was the recce party, I had slightly injured my ankle, and since then I’ve been limping about for the past day and a half.) to the pass office to change my 11B for a camp pass, but I left it up on the hill in my field pack, so I had to sit outside the camp with the NSmen while my seargent took the tonner into the camp. During this event however, there was an NSmen officer who saw me limping and came up to say “Soldier! You shack (tired) is it?” Sigh. That’s only a small matter. For us active NSFs, we brought our standard stuff (i.e, fieldpack, no. 4, etc) when we go outfield, but the NSmen are “smarter” than us - they brought a Coleman tub, 2 cartons x 24 cans of Coke and 100 Plus respectively and 6 x 1.5 litre bottles of distilled water. Now that’s “style”. When we took over them, the 6 guys who stayed behind (to ensure “safety”) told us stories of huddling in a big group, smoking out in the open at first and last light during our “high alert” drills (it was heard that all 6 NSFs were on high alert while all the NSmen were smoking/talking cock) and not doing sentry duty properly (rumours of being absent from sentry in the middle of the night, and not wearing helmets and just standing there when you’re supposed to sit, or sleeping on duty). Nsmen - Gotta respect them. This exercise was one of the funniest ones also, because one of my platoonmates thought he saw an aircraft, and directed us to shoot it (it was a split second decision), when in fact it was an eagle.
Ah well, time to book in now. See ya!