Blank Doll sits still.

It is a common phenomena, I think, that you forget what you want to write about when you finally can. Our dear Louis XVI, after all, famously wrote 'rien' in his diary on the day the Bastille was stormed.

I am at home again. I am clean and the place is silent. I have control over my own time and actions once more. Certainly, there exists an element of surrealism to my civilian life now for I am now also part of another world.

The army is a peculiar place. I cannot say that I have no enjoyed my brief stay in the army and I hope that I will continue to do so. Nonetheless, I cannot say that it has not been frustrating, that it has not been tiring, that it has not been nerve-wrecking, that it has not been hard.

I am who I am. I am proud and pampered with a certain knowledge of what makes life worth living. Above all, I have dignity. The army has taken it from me. My hair shorn, my vestment changed and homogenised with a thousand other people, my neck enchained with that thing they aptly call a dog tag. I am shouted at and made to obey people whom I would scarce look at along the street, whose dispositions I scorn. All measures of station beyond the barbed-wire confines of the military stand for naught and I find myself at the very bottom of the hierarchy.

At the same time, the army has also allowed me to befriend people whom I would otherwise have overlooked on the street. I confess to being something of a snob at times and perhaps it is folly on my part though it remains my conviction that it is this which preserves my pride. I have come to know people whom I can trust, people whom I can work with and there is no sense of rivalry, no backstabbing. The commensal spirit is so strong that it takes all of one's strength to fight for one's individuality.

Then there is the system. One of the most mundanely inefficient and stupidly dull systems that Man has in his misguided ingenuity created must be the military system. Everything has to be standardized but all wrongs make a right. We spend pointless hours waiting for decisions to be made only to go through a minute of panic and chaos. We are forbidden to do so many things for the sake of Order and Neatness even if it means forsaking pragmatism. Were it a civilian organisation, I would have sent a letter of complaint to the manager already but as it were, the system is also closed.

Not just closed, but insular. I begin to understand why so many coups began in the military. There is a faint air of distaste for civilians, a sense that civilians remain ignorant and that the burden of a military's responsibility to safeguard the sovereignty of a country imbues them with some special precedence. Nobody is allowed to enter and the publicity generated for the public is merely that, publicity. In the end, I am glad that the Singaporean military is placed under the jurisdiction of MINDEF and that is placed directly in the hands of civilians.

Yet one remembers that individuality is also chaotic and chaos can translate to vulnerability. What a remarkable structure the military is, that it may gather so many disparate elements and enforce order on them. One sometimes forgets when one is in the military that it is itself a paradox that lies at the heart of human nature. The dichotomy that exists between order and chaos, the organisation and the individual, conformity and originality- all these are reconciled by sheer effort. One comes to understand the screaming, the punishment, the callousness, the occasional brutality, the brusque dismissal of civilian comforts, the regimental silence of rank and file, the determined ruggedness for all these serve to introduce order where order should not be found. A band of people who fight, without discipline, is but a mob. It is regimentation and the subordination of the entity to the interests of the state and the nation that makes it an army.

Having said all this, I have to see it also from the perspective of an individual. I love Singapore, I really do. I go through all the hardships of National Service, endure the humiliation of being subjugated to people who would otherwise be beneath me by measures of education, background and merit but at the end of the day, the sight of the Singapore flag being raised is enough. These two years will be my parting gift to the motherland that I have grown to love so fervently and truly, I do believe I would fight for her. Though I have chosen my dreams over my country, I will say this- National Service is worth the pain, the sweat, the despair, the drudgery, the panic, the fear solely because I love our country.

C'est tout.