My Grandfather's army

I got totally screwd by a warrant officer on Thursday night for a rule I broke although I was given authorisation from my own superior, and for a reason I deemed to be valid for one of my men might have had his safety breached. When I tried to reason with a Guard commander (a sergeant) to tell his guard prowlers to look out for the person, the warrant officer, in his presence, used certain expletives on me, raised his voice to max and told me to get lost in the most humiliating way. His reasoning: they were not my guards and I should not tell them what to do.

Later on in my imagination, I had a chat with the sympathetic sergeant guard com.

Sergeant: That was a really terrible incident. I didn't mean for it to happen. Indeed I know your position and was ready to tell my prowlers to open their eyes for your man, because we understand that someone's safety is on the line and in the army we help each other out.

Private: Is this what the army has become, respector of rigidity and intolerance to flexibility? If a man were to be lying, dying on the road now, had my actions although perhaps wrong by one rule book, been considered imperative by the heart and head? Have we become cowards to doctrine, and stooges to written authority? I believe what I did to be right and have a clear conscience.

Sergeant: Yet, I feel sorry for you. He treated you as if he were saying "Is this your grandfather's army"*.

Private, with a chuckle: He wants to know about MY grandfather's army?

Some silence prevails, as the air suddenly gets filled with a sense of heroism with what is about to follow.

Private: My grandfather has commanded tens of thousands of men. He has had the burden of keeping everyone of their lives intact, while trying to save a country. My grandfather has met and evaded death on many counts, the finality being when he had a limb blown off. He had many men under his count, but the very people who loved him suffered as well. Yet he lived like a general does, and he does have an army.

The sergeant sits straight and listens intently.

Private: There are some men who are respected because they ARE. There are some men who slap it in your face like a fish that doesn't belong to them. My grandfather has shouted at thousands of men to save their lives and to save their country. Let one man shout at a puny private if it gives him joy and the power he needs to feel for a moment. That kind of respect is just an illusion he can enjoy for that fleeting moment. It is inconsequential. But I'd rather be shouted at by my grandfather than him, because I know my grandfather knows best, but the man who 'disciplined' me just finds a way to vilify me to glorify himself.



*'Is this your grandfather's army' I believe is a common saying by superiors when they taunt you for being sloppy. I think it's been used on me once and I was extremely amused.

In Pursuit of Happyness

I just watched the movie starring Will Smith and his son. While it seems like he's taken a break from his crude comedic style and solitary drama as the last man standing on Earth, the role he plays in this movie is amazingly well captured and played out. I was brought to the edge of tears throughout the movie all the time because it is mind-blowing how a man who's so bright gets his life all wrong, and instead of giving up, he perseveres to make sure his life and those he holds dear get right again. When you see how life deals him blow after blow, it is mind-blowing how putting a smile on his son's face, a simple thing, can become his single goal, and the most difficult thing. Yet it is this selfless attitude that gives him the impetus to struggle.

It touched me because of the fact that he had his son become the most important reason to live. In his position I would have given serious thought to just ending up living my life in prison, or just ending life altogether, when it seemed that there was no use in going on. Now if you look at yourselves and our society, we cannot deny the degree of comfort most of us live in, yet our focus in life seems so wrong. It is sad when people tell me that ultimately money is the most important focus because indeed, having a stable source of income is a responsibility to yourself and the family, but the sensing I get is that the money is just there to get life rolling on, and not specifically for the sustenance of the family. I get this feeling that those I've talked to know that they need the money for the family, but why then would the family be in such a lukewarm state, as if they were just people living under one roof and nothing more?

Students of today have increasingly greater affluence and intelligence, and with the opportunities available to them, the 'dream' life is easily available to them. While lofty ambitions abound none of them would ever consider the amount of suffering a person would actually have to go through to be in their shoes. And though they need not concern themselves about having a future plagued with menial issues like not having enough money to live (because such issues evade their attention or just seem to be an impossibility in this country), we forget the stories of students who come up from nothing to bright scholars in other nations. We're just too sheltered, unaware and diffident about the suffering that people go through. What's worse is that we are unappreciative of what we don't have to go through.

As for me, I consider my current suffering trivial, and although I am probably going through a comparably tougher time than most people, I still cringe in fear as to what might really be in store for me, because I've always had this feeling about me for a really long time that I'm destined to go through a period of immense suffering that I must emerge from. I don't think this is it, so something greater (or worse) is coming soon. But like what I learnt in BMT, what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. The most wrong thing any person who's going through suffering can do is to take away their own life. It's like ending any hope of coming out a greater person. It's like abortion of their 'new-person'.

Not many people in this country know the meaning of suffering anymore, save for some unfortunate people. But a person who's never suffered before is at a loss. Sadly we are too indulgent in a hedonistic existence to ever prepare ourselves for the onslaught and ultimate purification that suffering exists, what with our party-going tendencies and easy shirking off of duties. The problem is that we find it too easy to run away from difficulties instead of allowing them to test us. For people who don't have that temptation, they inspire me and I hope that I will not take the easy way out as I have always planned to do since I was young. Because I know now that missing out that step is taking a step backward in life, and I need to know suffering so that I know what in life is important to me, and what in life is a sham.