Exercise Centurion

The worst-feared exercise awaited all of us...Exercise Centurion!! (Pronounced sen-choo-rea-urn. Alot of ppl were pronouncing it as Centaurian e.g. Scott. HAHAHA!!)

Me, Han Hui & Scott :D

Ok, putting the linguistic issues aside, it was a 8 day, 7 night field camp!! -.-" I just recovered from my heat cramp and here comes the most xiong exercise -_-" Check out my yellow band on my left hand...haha! Doesn't excuse me from anything sadly...haha...It just tells the commanders that I'm weaker than the rest, so watch out for me! Haha :D

That's our bunk by the way, our beds were merely sponges (the yellow thing behind me) with a plastic covering. On top of that they gave us bedsheets to cover the sponges...Haha. I tell you, the bunk is so hot that just being inside will make you perspire. At night, only around 1130pm++ then the bunk temperature starts to be more cool

I remember the 1st or 2nd day when we all took an afternoon nap. When we woke up, the bedsheet was all wet! Not with our wet dreams but with our PERSPIRATION!! HAHA! That's why we never wear shirts in bunk.

Ok, back to exercise centurion...haha...I was the section commander on the first two day of the exercise. Holding that appointment made me unable to powder bath nor change for 2 whole days of the exercise. Because the platoon sergeant might pass down an instruction to us for us to do anytime...
On the second day of the field camp in the afternoon there was a lizard measuring the length of my 2 hands put together loitering around my shellscrape. Tired of being spied by it, I took a stick and went to kill it. After killing it, I saw something scrambling toward me in the leaf litter. I kicked open the leaves and to my horror it was a SCORPION!! A pretty small one though.

So I shouted "Scorpion!!" and went stamping all over it. Haha. A few of my section mates came over and heaved a sigh of relief upon seeing the smashed up body of the baby scorpion. Haha. Thank God!

Anyway, this exercise had a lot of casualties. At least 12 people were injured, sick or bitten in my platoon. Not listed in order of occurrence...

Firdaus was stung by a scorpion. It landed on his helmet and when he took his helmet off to see what was on his helmet, the scorpion stung his hand.

My good friend, Mr. Kang Xue Ming was stung by a scorpion twice. The first time he was stung on the left or right index finger, he was admitted to the sick bay. Upon returning to his shellscrape area, his other index finger was stung -_-" Haha! Talk about spiderman, he'd have become Scorpionman...HAHA!

Two of my section mates Naufal & Han Hui were down with diahorrea.

Another two of my section mates Irwan & Kenneth were down with fever.

My platoon mate Jun Rong was also down with fever.

In the middle of the night, my section mate Hafiz felt a relatively big insect crawling on his head. Upon swiping it off, it left two scars on his head.

My platoon mate, Jian Jie cui-ed his knee when he high kneel on a rock. This teared or weakened his ligament or tendon which made him hospitalised for 2 days+

THREE of my section mates, Irwan, Iswardi & Kenneth were down with heat injuries.

All these occured before our 5km road march back to camp. The worst thing that happened to me while harbouring is...one morning when I woke up. My IBA had a uber big spider web weaved across it...A spider had made my vest its home!! So I swept away all the web and out came the spider, slightly smaller than the size of my palm...It ran away. Haha.

The thing about the Thailand forest is, the knolls are not that steep. But the vegetation there is heinously thorny. The thorns there can entangle you and totally stop you in your tracks. And it rained twice while we were harbouring. So we had to hastily put up our basha shelter.

Here comes the highlight of Exercise Centurion. The 5km+ road march back with casualty evacuation.

It was noon. We were marching back in the hottest time of the day. It was around 42-44 degree celsius. We were all marching back to camp!! Our PC kept pushing us and didn't give us much rest time because the lesser we rest, the faster we'll reach back camp!

This ended up with at least 4-5 heat cramp cases. And once again, I was part of the statistic. HAHA! Leading the heat cramp contingent was once again SCT Jonavan Lee! -.-" HAHA! I was first to be down...followed by Dun Fu, Halifi and a few others whom I couldn't identify. Haha. We had only about 3km more to go by the way...Haha.

This left me with another MC...this time, my MC wasn't coveted because it was already the end of all our exercises...HAHA!

MC!! :D

So yup, what a nice ending to Exercise Centurion. Haha.