National Service

A couple of days ago, I read a letter in the Singapore newspapers (which I still read once in a while despite having little to do with that country). This letter seemed to be from a lady whose son was likely to undergo National Service (NS), the two years of compulsory military training which all male permanent residents and citizens must undergo from the age of 18. In it, she said that it was "two years of non-educational experience".

I actually underwent 30 months of it when I was a part-time Singapore citizen. And this letter irritated me a lot, since I learnt a lot while I was going through it. It is possibly one of the most educational experiences a Singaporean can go through. Looking at the situation from the outside in, as it were, I know that NS cannot be non-educational.

Why?

Apart from learning how to swear in your real mother tongue and to use weapons of individual and small-group destruction, you actually do learn a lot about human organisations and behaviour, especially if you were either a jock or a geek, a bum or a nerd, when you were in high school.

You learn when to keep your big mouth shut and when to clench your various body parts and bear it. You learn who is boss, and that 'boss' isn't always the one nominally at the top of the heap. You learn about absolute and situational ethics, and the complications thereof. You learn that brave and subtle is a good combination, because brave and brash gets people killed unnecessarily – and not even on the battlefield.

You learn that you sometimes have to abase yourself before people who are not as good as you, but also that to be humble in the presence of those who are better than you is no shame. You might even learn that it is possible, as you look around, that everyone has something in them that is better than the equivalent in you. And you learn to appreciate that strength in diversity and the power of having a broad talent-base.

You learn that 'regardless of race, language or religion' can actually work when the task is extreme and there is no time to be pondering the imponderable. In fact, you might even learn that none of those three things can be defined exactly, and that to try it is to destroy whatever meaning they might hold. You learn that justice and equality aren't the same thing, and may even oppose each other; but the synthesis of the two can work.

And best of all, you learn how to persevere under both the deliberately stressful and the accidentally stressful, under both the pressure exerted by idiocy and the pressure exerted by professionalism. You learn to be an adult, if you haven't already done so.

But there is a caveat here. It is indeed possible to learn very little from NS. This will happen if you refuse to learn. It's just like spending two years in a peculiar kind of university. You might learn, or not. The choice is yours.