Swapping army stories: The cast of Recruit Diaries speak

As a woman, I have never been through Basic Military Training (BMT).

But thanks to watching plays such as Army Daze and Botak Boys, as well as movies like Ah Boys To Men, I’m willing to bet that my rundown of the basic military proceedings, as detailed below, is 100 per cent accurate.

First, straining awkwardly under the weight of your carry-on luggage, you disembark from a little boat and step blinkingly onto Pulau Tekong soil. There is a ceremony, in which you swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. Then, after partaking of a tray of something drowned in curry in the cafeteria, you bid farewell to your tearful parents. “Pa, ma, don’t worry,” you say, in a Singaporean-theatre accent. “I’m sure they won’t serve curry every day.”

Then you get a makeover and check into your bunk, where you meet your new best mates: The Ah Beng, the mummy’s boy and the clean-cut intellectual, all of whom you will immediately butt heads with, but will turn out to be the best men at your wedding and the brothers you never had.

Then, you are incessantly yelled at by grammatically-challenged sergeants for the next three months. You shoot at things and pick up colourful Hokkien swear words. Along the way, your significant other will dump you and you will experience supernatural encounters of the spooky kind. At the end of it all, you get a nice, shiny Certificate of Man-ness, after which Jack Neo appears and yells: “Cut!”

Um, that’s how it goes, right? No?

THE CALL TO ARMS

Okay, so maybe that’s not exactly what happens. But the local military experience as canonised in our entertainment programmes has become such a perennial fixture that it’s familiar ground for most Singaporeans. It has taken on a life of its own, thanks to plays like Own Time Own Target and Tahan, as well as movies like Ah Boys To Men, Where Got Ghost?, The Ghosts Must Be Crazy, 23:59 and the short film Zo Peng.

It looks like National Service, or NS, has come to represent the Singaporean experience — in spite of the fact that roughly 50 per cent of the population hasn’t even been through military training.

What’s more, it’s a theme that has been increasingly popularised. When Michael Chiang’s Army Daze was first staged in 1987, it was seen only by theatre lovers, but in 1996, the movie version made it a mass market experience.

And our perspective of NS has also changed with the times. On television, when the Channel 8 drama, Army Series, was aired in 1983, it was a rather serious affair. But this week, Channel 8 rolls out a half-hour sitcom about recruits commencing their BMT.

The main crew of recruits in The Recruit Diaries is played by Shane Pow, Jeremy Chan, Jeffrey Xu and Xu Bin. And yes, two of them aren’t Singaporean and consequently haven’t served NS — even though they say they’ve always wanted to.

“In secondary school I hoped to be able to go to the army because everyone was saying, ‘The army is fun and once you get out, you become manly and disciplined’,” Fujian-born Xu Bin said. “Back then I was rebellious and skinny. I thought it’d be a good thing to enter the army. I kept hoping to receive an enlistment letter, but I never did.”

Shanghai native Jeffrey Xu thanked the producers for giving him a chance to make his “dream” of serving a military term “come true”. He said: “I feel that in Singapore, going to the army is a cultural experience. I like this country and I was happy to do this show.”

He added: “The guys I know quite like to talk about their army experiences. And I’m interested. I’ll ask them lots of things, like, ‘Were there really ghost stories? What else? What else?’”

Another Recruit Diaries star who went in blind, so to speak, was Paige Chua, who plays the recruits’ platoon commander. Even though she hasn’t had to serve in the army, she said: “I wouldn’t mind going through basic training. I think girls, if given the opportunity to go to BMT or NS, would have such a wonderful experience. I wish that this was a 20-episode drama so that we could have more knowledge of what army life is, and more training.”

ARMY DAZE

NS is a definitive Singaporean experience even for those who have not served, since they invariably come into contact with people who have. And somehow that experience becomes common ground.

Singaporean Shane Pow said: “It’s a very good ice-breaker: Most guys, when we meet for the first time, we’ll talk about the army. I think it’s something that every Singaporean man can relate to.”

However, Pow did warn: “If your boyfriend asks you to join him for dinner with his army friends, don’t go. It’s going to be very boring. We will talk about stuff that we think is funny. But you obviously won’t know what’s happening. Then we will have to explain it to you.”

In contrast, it becomes more accessible when it’s translated into the realm of entertainment, where the stories are fleshed out, analysed and even satirised. Even a parody of the army experience like the one portrayed in The Recruit Diaries helps all of us to make sense of NS, no matter how far removed those shows may be from the real thing.

“Half the things we do in the show — if we do them in the army, we’ll get charged,” Pow said. It’s a good thing we can do them in art, then, since that helps us grapple with the absurdities and ironies of life.

Which probably is why it looks like NS is going to live on as a powerful symbol in local entertainment.

Catch The Recruit Diaries starting July 18, Thursdays at 8.30pm on MediaCorp TV Channel 8.