cheers!

sometimes when i'm on my 3-6k run (depending on day/mood) along the dirt path to rummelsburg, i get a whiff of some real sour intenzio sewage-like smell.

i can't exactly put my finger on where the smell came. let's see, it could be waste treatment, body odour, wild boar manure... the list goes on.

but this more-than-pungent odour reminded me of army days in tekong, where we used to get up and run at an ungodly 6:15am in the morning. somewhere around bmtc school 1 basketball courts along the ippt route by the channel of where the painful penguins ply, there was always this awful smell.

i used to suspect the sergeants did this on purpose such that you'd have the motivation to run faster. now that i smell it again here in germany, i have to doubt my previous theory.

some smart alec will say it's "german gas". well no, because i smelt it in singapore.

nonetheless, until someone enlightens me, this will remain one of life's mysteries. what is NOT a mystery however, is how dreadfully obsolete army cheers are.

all that running and that familiar tekong smell, led to another sensory assault when the army cheers from years ago started to flood into my mind.

there was this one about not having time to do xxx, but there's always time to do yyy. that song defies all logic i could swear.

soldiers have got to be the most horny people on earth, yet one of the lines go "got no time to meet my girl, but got time to clean rifle".

uwotm8? that has to be the most ridiculous shit i've ever heard. sure, you could be gay, that's a possibility - but you wouldn't then be meeting "your girl"? and of all the things you LIKE to do in the army, i'm pretty damn sure cleaning a rifle is not one of them.

nice things of army include: booking out, canteen breaks, and for those who like a little bit of a challenge, maybe completing SOC. heck, i'd even accept field camp.

cleaning the rifle is one of the most MUNDANE and POINTLESS endeavour, for the next day when you draw arms to go out and fire more blanks, the whole cycle restarts.

please, whoever wrote the lyrics to this song.

there was another one i remembered from OCS Sierra Wing. despite the supposed improvement in one's ability to think when in occifer school, the words to this are just plain laughable.

"we marched last night ah, we marched the night before, now we march like we never march before, ah!"

clearly the writer for this thought about this like he never thought before. god i am so ashamed for you.

firstly, what is the fucking point of this whole marching story? i don't remember the rest of the cheer well, but i vaguely recall it to be along the lines on how we enjoy marching. still doesn't justify the first line.

secondly, it's not well defined on what it means to have never marched before. on the first day i came to BMT, i had no marching experience. so i marched with my left hand and left leg at the same time. is that what you meant, songwriter?

gee i felt like i just insulted all songwriters. anyway this is a rather obscure cheer, other than that time in OCS where some joker brought it up, i've hardly heard it after. we can talk about more mainstream stupidity.

purple light in the valley. apparently where we all want to be.

have never trained in any valley in singapore - the only "valley" i know being river valley. and then there's the purple light - which is a reference to...? none of the colour disks i know make a purple light with the torch.

i paused for a few seconds after the previous paragraph, but no i still do not get where the purple light is coming from. is it to make up the required number of syllables? it could have well been "yellow light", that's closer to torch colour reality.

or "lime green light" from the luminous sticks. heck, any kind of two-syllabic light is more realistic than a "purple light" i've NEVER seen in my army days.

light colour aside, you might also notice that there is a logical flaw in the last line, which goes..

"with my rifle and my buddy and ME"

okay. then who were you referring to in the rest of the song? i assumed that doing IPPT and SOC was all you.

basically, if the ippt/soc bit of purple light were to be summarised into one line, it would read something like "soc, ippt, pt is all sibei jialat but i like doing it with my rifle and my buddy and me."

you like doing it with you, eh.

hahahaha i could go on forever but my brain has run out of RAM. if you have more army songs/cheers please send them to me so i can dissect its stupidity.

cheers. no pun intended.