2006. The old troubles remain, and the new trials are legion. There are only 10 months to freedom. But every day closer to liberation is another day closer to death. Ok, maybe that sounds too much of a melodrama, but I've never felt so mortal as I have before.
So enter the New Year.
All the people I know have only new hopes, new resolutions, new plans and dreams and ambitions.
All I have are new challenges, new foes, new threats, new burdens.
It's not just about taking on the responsibilities of a Sergeant; they aren't exactly overwhelming and can't really be compared to that of an Officer's, but its more of the fact that a Sergeant's burdens have been yoked on my neck together with all sorts of difficulties.
Like how my dad and pastor having declared all out war on each other, and how I dont know whether I go to church as a member of the family or as a mortal enemy.
Like how a former classmate met with a car accident on Christmas Eve and spent her whole New Year's in a coma.
Like how the leaving of my Hope has left me without hope.
Like how my spiritual walk has deteriorated into a quagmire of pretension and stale ritual.
A Sergeant's lot is pretty tolerable by itself, but when it comes together with a host of other troubles, well, then you're really in trouble. Each problem complicates and compunds the other, so what you have is not a big hangover from that New Year's countdown party but a big headache trying to sort out platoon politics and erratic emotions and spiritual struggles at the same time.
Oh but there are perks to being a Sergeant, dont get me wrong.
Like so-
Sergeant: You will now repeat whatever I tell you!
Recruit: Yes Sergeant!
Sergeant: Move to the third row!
Recruit: Move into the third row!
(Recruit moves into the fourth row)
Sergeant: What row do you think you're in?
Recruit: Third Row Sergeant!
Sergeant: Third Row my ass!
Recruit: Third Row MY ASS!
****stunned empty silence*****
Laughing at brainless dolts seems to be one of them.
But on a more sombre note, being a Sergeant is an excellent study into the question of morality.
Imagine! 30 years ago, our army hired Israeli troops to train its own fledgling soldiers.
Israelis- the very people who have suffered eons of persecution and torture and war, culminating in the Holocaust and continuing in the Arab-Israeli clash in Palestine.
And these people, after years of torment at the bloodied hands of jackbooted Nazis and crazed jabbering Arabs, were then invited here at the behest of an oligarch of egomaniacal technocrats to train their conscripted bunch of peasant soldiers.
Imagine! These people desensitzed to brutality were here on this tropical island laying the foundations for the Army!
So this is the culture we sergeants have inherited- a training culture celebrating inhumanity and brutality, practising every degradation of the spirit conceivable.
And the abuse of power and authority runs deep: everywhere you turn there is the maleficient stench of hypocrisy and exploitation.
The irony is, without such a situation, the troops cannot be trained. Take for instance the sergeant who demands that a particular drill be executed in 30 seconds. He punishes his recruits to the extent of torture when they fail to meet his expected timing. Yet he himself cannot meet the timing he sets for the men- sheer, disgusting hypocrisy.
And yet, if he does not demand the timing from the men, they would be untrained, unfit for war.
What then?
And so we ask ourselves Robert S. McNamara's question that haunted him through that dark decade of the Vietnam War:
How much evil must we do in order to do good?
