Sometimes you’ll be given some privileges when you’re given some bad chores, I mean by luck.

I wasn’t supposed to do guard duty before promoting to Corporal rank. The trainees were gone and so, they pulled in anyone to cover up the jobs. Anyway, Raymond aka 狗狗 was dragging in as well most probably because his boss, the big shot LTC wasn’t around for these few weeks. This was how hypocrite whoever could be. Great thing was that CPT Yeo was the complex DC, whereas Sam Toh was the guard commander. Life was good definitely.

The rain didn’t stop and guard mounting was cancelled. I managed to pair up with Raymond to do prowling at the second shift. We were asked to lower down the flags and fetch the night snacks. It wasn’t my first time just that Sam knew me better than the rest, and thus I was more approachable, similarly with the previous time when I was doing duty with Wah Chuan.

Prowling was much simple and faster without following all the tedious instructions; I wasn’t dumb like when I was a trainee anymore. I knew where all the checkpoints were located at, thus made the job fast before we could rest in one of the bunks.

Walking in the gears might be just tiring to anyone, but it had worse effects on me on my problematic body all thanks to the army. My back was tired out even more and my knees gave me pains especially when I was climbing stairs or moving up steep slopes. The most crucial injury was the pain on my feet, that each step seemed to soft the flesh and anything hard to make impact on my nerves or blood vessels directly. Wet socks and cold weather could have made it worse.

I want to accompany Sam to stay up and watch the clips on the laptop but gave up since I didn’t even have enough sleep the night before and that I still had to work on the next day. The downloaded “Guess Guess Guess” clips were entertaining and there were countless Taiwanese babes.

I had less than an hour of sleep before I proceeded on to the second round of prowling with Raymond. This time, after finished our job, we dozed off. The alarm sounded off on my phone but I read it as “Amara” and continued with the napping. Around ten minutes later, I woke up and realised we were late for reporting. Sam was cheeky.

We went to the guard room to sleep immediately as the rain got heavier. By the time it was our turn to set off, the rain hadn’t stopped and I continued my wonderful sleep. Sam couldn’t really wake me up for breakfast.

I tried to help him as much as I could, going back to all the checkpoints to gather back the papers in the rain with Raymond, and checking of the troublesome record book for unsigned blanks. I was quite puzzled why some of them couldn’t take a longer look to do their parts, whereas I was of something better finally.

Sam helped us to get away fast from the guard house. He stayed there himself with another two guys who were more unfortunate. Maybe it was just because of the non-stop rain or the kindness of CPT Yeo that, I was so lucky to have such a peaceful and more relaxing guard duty experience.