Twitface

 Dear Junior,

Congratulations on making it into OCS! Perhaps you have never ever thought about coming into OCS at all, but regardless of your preference whatsoever, since you are here, I strongly urge you to make full use of your time here to learn as much as you can. Probably some of the emotions you are experiencing now are fear, worrying about the unknown and ambiguity. Let me reassure you, it’s very natural. 38 weeks seem like a long time, but trust me, it will fly past without you noticing it. Your journey begins now.

You are here for a reason. Believe it or not, you are the cream of the crop! Count it a privilege and honour to be entrusted with the responsibility of enhancing your skills set and steepening your learning curve so that you can lead men in future. I don’t know about you, but for me, it’s my utmost honour to be given a chance to lead and to serve the citizens in our motherland- Singapore. There will be times you feel like quitting and throwing in the towel, there will be times you feel disconnected and isolated from your family and friends and there will be times you even wonder whether being in OCS was the right thing to do in life. My advice? Stay rooted in the SAF’s 7 core values. Yes, talk is cheap; perhaps you will even sneer at what I am saying. Sounds corny, but when tough times arise, you will find that the qualities of leadership, discipline and fighting spirit will see you through in your term in OCS. In whatever that you do, stick to your beliefs and values in life. Yes, people may detest you, people may criticize you and even chide you, but one thing remains: as long as you did the morally correct thing and you did your best, you can hold your head high.

Here in this place, you will also discover and unearth some things about yourself that you have never ever known. You are about to embark on an adrenaline-filled ride that will show a tough and resilient side of you. At the end of your course, you would not have imagined that you have navigated and walked approximately 40km in Pulau Tekong over 2 days with only a packet of biscuits. You would never imagine that you would be able to go through JCC in Brunei and earn that coveted badge on your left chest. You would never even dream of getting through that dreadful night in which you had to dig a fire trench. All these sounds physically and mentally impossible at present, but my stand is that as long as you are willing to go all the way, trust me, you will do just fine. And when you stand on the parade square on your commissioning parade, you can hold your head high in front of all your family members and friends and say that you earned this rank with your blood, sweat and tears.

In conclusion, let me paint you a picture. Your life is currently in a mess- you are experiencing relationship problems with your girlfriend, you feel that you are totally disconnected from your social circle from friends, you feel that you do not have enough to spend with the monthly $800 and your weekends are either spent in camp or spent at home doing homework. Sounds terrible, not exactly an ideal situation that you would envision yourself to be in. However, the brutal fact is that you may have to cope with such problems here in OCS. And what better way to learn through the hard way in army and mature now so that we can deal with more challenging problems such as marriage, kids and finance in future as adults? You may think this is a whole chunk of ‘crap’ from a newly commissioned officer, but I do believe that this is the stage in which we young men get initiated into a phase of true manhood. This is the stage in which we learn to discover our strengths and harnessing our strengths to catapult us to success in future.

I believe I have said enough. To whoever is reading this note, stay positive. I say this with my heart, be of good courage and do not fear. I wish you the best in your OCS adventure. To lead, to excel, to overcome!

Yours sincerely,

2LT Nicholas Zheng

Yes, I kinda miss the times in Brunei. To most people, they loathe it. A country that is 70% jungle and greenery with just a small urbanised town with 1 Macdonalds and a shopping centre in the entire country- how pathetic! But the 21 days’ experience in Brunei was a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

Everyday having an average of 4 hours of sleep then go chiong sua, yes it’s tough, but God’s grace has never ever been so real and relevant to me before. There were times I would be so drained out by everything till I would sit at one corner and just stone and stare into blank space. I could hardly take time to really have a breather. But really, without His grace, that’s it man. I still find it hard to believe that I managed to get through the 21 days altogether. The worst experiences like how all of us got stuck in mud waist-level for 45 minutes at night, how we scaled Mount Biang when it was raining heavily, how we emo-ed when it rained every night during survival phase, how we destroyed the live quail and devoured it like beasts, how we would always think about food constantly and freedom back in Singapore; all these were invaluable! I love the mornings in Brunei especially- it gets bright as early as 6.15am. And I tell you, wah, I can just stare at the sky and admire God’s creation. It’s super beautiful because the camp is on a hill and you can see everything from above. The bluish-orange morning sky and how the clouds drift- a sight to behold. Now I know what it means when the song ‘Amazed’ speaks about how God paints the morning sky. A picteresque sight:)

Yes, we got the coveted JCC badge in the end, and everything kinda ended on a high. I always look back on this recent experience and marvel at how I got through it solely by His grace and favour. Not that it’s sooooo hard, but because I wasn’t confident at all at the start of Brunei and there was a certain degree of fear and ambiguity of how things would turn out in the end. I reckon this would be one experience I would hold dearly to my heart man. Now, I just miss the mornings in which I could see the bluish-orange sky back in Brunei.