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EPILOGUE
333
SIXTEEN
III. IMPACT OF NATIONAL SERVICE
and 1400 hrs. Tragically, a large group of Boyanese villagers accompanied by some Orang
Laut, living in Kampong Bereh on the banks of Sungei Poyan, had gone to Ritz Farm to
collect durians and rambutans, which were in season. Around 1430 hrs, a duty officer from
SAFTI went to the tactical HQ for the exercise to inform the Chief of Artillery, then MAJ
Mancharan Singh Gill that the police had informed SAFTI Operations Centre that there
were reports of casualties among the people of Kampong Bereh. The SAFTI Duty Officer
found himself in the thick of the developments, which included the visit of the Permanent
Secretary, the Director, General Staff, Director, SAFTI and other senior officials from MID
and also a visit to the site which gave him a first hand view of the obscene effects of
Artillery fire. Another First Batch officer was resting in his bunk in SAFTI because he had
taken part in a National Day Parade rehearsal earlier. MAJ Morrice, who may have been the
duty field officer of SAFTI that week, knocked on his door and asked him to help with the
evacuation of the casualties and the officer had the gruesome task of bringing back the
bodies of four dead villagers from Ritz Farm to SAFTI. A delegation was sent down to the
Boyanese village where nine wounded villagers including five women had been evacuated
by Marine Police boat. The villagers were disinclined to provide the full facts of what had
happened on the ground, probably for the unfounded fear of prosecution for trespassing
into a prohibited area. The Coroner’s Inquiry in January 1969 concluded that the villagers
had only themselves to blame as they had a history of deliberately trespassing into the live-
firing area even when live-firing was going on. However, SAFTI decided to eliminate further
temptation by destroying as much of the fruit trees as possible in the live-firing area after
the incident.
With the introduction of National Service, the military environment moved out from behind
the screen of impervious camp fences to centre stage in Singapore. The mystique of military
life rapidly evaporated. The exclusivity of a commission or non-commissioned rank was
diluted by the mass-production of National Service officers and NCOs. Indeed, the early
resistance to universal male conscription was so strong that the very idea of military service
was trashed by many enlistees, especially those with higher education inducted under the
provisions to conscript graduates, or drop-outs of tertiary educational institutions and newly
recruited civil servants. To compound the problem, there was initially a policy for those
who were commissioned to serve three years of full-time service versus two for those who
were not. Many, particularly graduates, exploited this yawning loophole by under-performing
during the recruit and section training phases, to rule themselves out as officer candidates.
National Service brought in a representative cross-section of the male population of
18-year olds. The armed forces thus ceased to be the preserve of the lesser educated
or those with a predisposition for a martial life. Almost immediately, military traditions
came under siege because only enforcement and not endorsement supplied the incentive