What would you surrender to become “trainable”? BMT poses that question to you when you first enlist and step off the ferry onto the pier of Pulau Tekong. A rite of passage for Singaporean men, NS is where we serve two years of mandatory conscription in the military as NSFs plus an additional few months spread out over a decade after that as NSmen.

My time came in July 2025. Now, months after July, I’ve seen the light at the end of the tunnel following the POP in December 2025. There’s so much that I’ve gone through and learnt since then, so, I figured, why not write about the time that has since passed?

I can’t deny that I’ve procrastinated on writing this. The idea of trying to condense months of memories was overwhelming; I just really don’t know where to start. Considering that I’ll lose more of my memories in BMT the longer things go on, though, here I am writing this roughly a month after POP.

Struggling with the inevitability of NS

I am by no means a military kind of person. Before enlistment, I had a rather shallow idea of NS. I had believed that it was a hypermasculine space where “just man up”s were barked daily and it was normal to shrug off physical and mental hardship. Before it had even begun, I was already fretting, and all my assumptions about it clouded my perception.

What hurt the most was the inevitability of it all. You don’t have a choice in this, and this is something you’re going to have to face eventually — it wasn’t a matter of if but when.

And with NS, there’s also the inevitability of losing the autonomy I’ve so carelessly taken for granted. Can you imagine suddenly going from the most free you’ve been in years after poly studies to being told where to be by when for six¹ days a week?

The first two weeks, named the adjustment period, has you staying in camp to slowly acclimatise yourself to the military life. It’s meant to make you used to the early morning reveille, cookhouse food, and strict regimentation. You can probably imagine just how tough it had been. I found myself staring at the ceiling (top bunk!) after lights out, teary-eyed, wondering to myself, “so this is my life now, huh?”

I don’t think I’ve truly coped with this inevitability, and I’m facing it in a different way now even in my new vocation (maybe more in a future post!). But realising these few truths helped set my head straight during BMT:

• Yes, the inevitability sucks, and, yes, it hurts to get that autonomy taken away from you. We should let our feelings flow through when we feel overwhelmed to process them.
• Our experiences truly are what we make of them — and perspective really matters.
• If I were to continue antagonising the experience of BMT, it’ll be worse for me anyway.

These aren’t coping mechanisms as much as they are just reactions to the situation. But I decided that I’m not going to enjoy NS any less than I have to, so I tried changing my mindset towards NS: instead of just pure confusion and slight anger at it taking away the autonomy I loved, I focused more instead on tolerating the idea that I’ll be here for the next two years — and then, the light at the longer end of the tunnel showed.

My relationship with the weekends

After the adjustment period, we were free to book out on Fridays and return on Sundays, getting back at least a little bit of free time over the weekends. How I treated the weekends surprised me, and in retrospect my behaviour and perspective of the weekends were things worth looking into.

For one: I’d have the tendency to overeat over the weekends. The irony isn’t lost on me that I’m already in a programme for people with obesity², but, in the heat of the moment, it felt like it was all I could or wanted to do. I realised that I managed to convince myself to treat food as a reward after going through so much during the week (perhaps you could call that a form of self-initiated delayed gratification)?

I ultimately realised that this behaviour is a form of “regaining” autonomy in the face of helplessness; it’s rebounding from reward deprivation. In the face of full control for five days a week, the civilian weekend became this one pocket of autonomy where I’m again free to choose what I want, how much I want, and when I want. And that’s exactly what I did, but with food.

Food became my greatest access to autonomy over the weekends, and it became such a big thing that my weekends mostly revolved around it — in camp, thinking about nice food to eat over the weekends, then binge-eating everything I wanted, then suddenly having to book back in again.

This wasn’t really a healthy mindset to have about the weekends. Over time, as I grew more accustomed to life in BMT, I noticed my relationship with my weekends evolving. Instead of just thinking about food and all that I could eat, I started thinking about what other small, self-contained things to do to fill my time. This felt like the right next step for how to spend my time during weekends.

For example, I started touching code again and took up mini “weekend projects” to keep my mind nimble (army brain is a real thing). That really helped a lot in segregating my time over the weekends and decoupling rewarding myself by eating and the weekends themselves.

The social life

NS brings together men from all walks of life. From my own BMT experience, I’ve met company mates from practically every pre-university education background and observed for myself how one’s upbringing — their education, family situations, and more — can influence the person I interacted with in camp. I’m lucky to have a pretty chill bunk without much drama, and I’ve grown deeply appreciative of the diversity of skills and perspectives from just one section alone.

I only felt like I vibed well with one genre of people — nerdy people interested in tech who were like me — but being in BMT meant that I got to widen that scope massively. Everybody, from our company mates to commanders, all talked and thought differently, and that opened up chances to see how you fit in the entire picture.

I realised just how rule-abiding and risk-averse I am only because I’ve seen others who are more daring to do it. I realised how much more systematically I approach things, because others may have a go-with-the-flow vibe towards challenges. The way I did and thought things felt quite tame compared to the rest, and that made me somewhat uncomfortable: it felt like there had been this dissonance between who I am and trying to socially fit in, and, as abstract as that idea may be, it tugged on the back of my head for the longest time while in BMT.

A good example to examine this is low-risk actions. Y’know, things like sneakily buying things from the vending machine downstairs and not getting caught (…totally hypothetical situation) — something that, if you got caught, the consequences of which are annoying, but not world-ending (like signing on extra).

I realised just how afraid I was about the consequence, to the point where I’d just not think about doing it at all. What was confusing, though, was that some part of me yearned to be more of a “risk taker”. If you ask me now, that was a lot of brain cells spent just on deciding whether I want to sneak downstairs and commit to the bit. There was a disconnect between me hiding in that shell of risk aversion and wanting to just try a little bit and see what happens.

And this ties in socially because a lot of things are about following what others are doing. It’s easier to just go with the flow and follow along, and I think that inner conflict within me was me wanting to do that, but knowing that the consequences exist and being unable to convince myself that the consequence of punishment was better than the consequence of missing out socially.

As a result, there were moments where I felt like an outsider when all I wanted was to feel in. The institution told us to respect people by the rank they carry, but socially, when our sergeants come up to our bunks to chill and have fun, I grew rigid when I should’ve listened in to the conversations and made myself more present in the moment. Even when punishment wasn’t a consequence, I’d choose safety and miss out socially — a core theme that I now realise also reflected my life before NS as well.

As I rewrite and proofread this section, it dawned on me that my social interactions with others could have also partially been a me-vs-me thing, where I had been mentally beating myself up for not being “chill enough” when everyone else might’ve thought I was fine. In other words, there had also been a dissonance between me and my perception of what the social environment demanded. There’s so much more to think about for this moving forward, but, for now, I’m spelling it out here because I think it’s something worth noting.

So in more ways than one, BMT had really challenged me to think about who I want to be as a person. It really asks, “who are you, really?” and has you deciding on your tolerance for things — ultimately, what kinds of values shape the actions you take.

Your relationship with fitness

Depending on how active you already were before BMT, keeping fit through regular exercise can be either a reckoning (like it was for me) or a walk in the park.

In retrospect, I realise that BMT hasn’t revolutionised the relationship I already have with healthy living (like eating balanced diets or exercising well). I knew that it was important to eat and exercise well, but never had anything to push me into actually taking action.

After BMT started, the overhead and gap between me thinking about wanting to exercise and actually doing it had reduced. It might’ve been because of the fact that I was surrounded by people who were like me who remained committed to giving things their all. It could’ve been that I was made more aware of where my physical limitations lie with fitness. Or it could’ve also been that we all created Strava accounts, followed each other, and encouraged each other to log our runs over the weekends. Either way, I grew more inspired to actually act because the barriers that once stood didn’t seem that big anymore.

Because of those moments, I’ve actually dragged myself out of my house and discovered a nice jogging route to do over the weekends. I’ve realised that I can now tell when I’m starting to become full when eating, and to actually stop momentarily when I’ve felt like I’ve hit a limit.

Ultimately, BMT didn’t give me a sudden wave of motivation to “just do it.” Rather, it made me reframe the challenges I faced with fitness: all the “I can’t do this, right?” and “but I’ll be tired after this” faded away because I proved to myself that I could do them in camp.

Expectations vs. reality

Before NS, I’ve only known what it was like from people who’ve gone through it before. I can assure you that reading about BMT from the outside looking in like this really feels like one of those comedic jump cuts where the main character goes, “what could possibly go wrong?” before the scene changes to everything going wrong.

In BMT, though the routine of PTs mostly remain the same with the same sets of exercises, the experience you get per session greatly varies based on the conducting commanders. My enciks are the real G.O.A.T.s; they push you where it matters, then let go during downtimes. They push everyone to do the best they can do.

One of the worst PTs in memory had us doing six sets of “four for the core” exercises. These exercises were enough to knock us out mentally for a single set, so imagine what it was like when we had to do five more on top of that. The PT truly mentally worn me out that morning — so much so that I ended up going mostly non-verbal for the rest of it until I recharged during lunch.

It goes without saying that BMT will truly test where your limits lie. For some, they’ll realise they hit their limits early on. While I’ll always falter and whine here and there when I’m being pressured physically, I can’t help but admit that I was surprised at how much persistence I had within me — when about to mentally break, I’d throw all kinds of motivation to push myself through.

The mantras that get you by

I’ve circled around the idea that mindset matters in BMT, and the one glaring example of this is by the mantras and motivations that got me by. Sorry to be explicit, but here are a few that really got into my head and genuinely changed my mood for the better as I internalised them:

• “F— this s—” somehow feels like an intense evolution of the “screw it, why not?” mindset. I found myself thinking this when I’m on the verge of giving up — almost like a final rallying cry to gather everything I have left to push through something deeply mentally or physically exhausting.
• “This, too, shall pass” comes next for challenges that are here to stay for a while. I found myself saying this in harsh PT sessions and during outfield, and the idea that everything will come to an end is deeply encouraging, often even lifting me high enough to continue till the end.
• “When one falls, we continue” is the ever recognisable mantra from Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and I’ve somehow adapted this phrase to mean no matter how many times you fall, you still give things a try no matter what. Weirdly meaningful for a quote from a game.
• “1x good one (then we pang kang³)” — a classic phrase that says, just do this one bit well and you can stop after that. It really helped us to lock in, give this one try our all, and do it good enough so that we won’t have to do it multiple times again.

The little things really do add up

And I’m saying this about discipline. Discipline isn’t necessarily always about giving everything your 100%. I’ve found that it also lies in the little things that stack up.

Anything from committing to keep your bed looking nice, refolding anything that looks like they’d look better off refolding, to deciding to make the journey to booking in instead of just playing the RSO⁴ card adds up.

And when you do show discipline to do just a bit more than the bare minimum, your actions tend to come around in a good way. A good example that I’ve brought up is keeping your area and bed neat and tidy: the psychological relief that a clean bed gives you at the end of a tiring day is beyond many things I’ve experienced that’s brought me joy.

Goodbye for now, Pulau Tekong

Writing this a month after POP, I’m probably looking at the entirety of my life in BMT with rose-tinted glasses. Though I must admit, even with the punishing, gruelling life I’ve lived through there, there had been many wonderful things to cherish too — most importantly my bunkmates who were there for me the entire 19 weeks.

In retrospect, I cannot say that the experience of undergoing BMT itself has necessarily turned me from “I dread the entirety of NS” to “this isn’t so bad” alone. It’s the reflections that come after, once you’ve settled down from the pain of undergoing through it, that you realise that you’ve come out a better person in the end. It’s also the nostalgia effect kicking in: when you look back after you’ve done something and wonder to yourself how you did all that at all.

I can wholeheartedly agree that BMT changes you in some shape or form — and that’s always been the point of it. BMT was always about training “boys to become men” — so much so that that has become the name of a popular franchise here — but to define that is difficult, exactly because what you make of BMT is mostly in your head. I acknowledge that that definition exists within the cultural sphere, and that the things I’ve learnt about myself thus far have coincided with how the institution defines “becoming a man”, but I’d frame it a bit differently: that NS exposes your limits and gives you the space to emotionally, mentally, and physically develop for the better.

To me, I’ll always look back at my months in BMT with a sense of bittersweetness. I wouldn’t choose to go through all of it again, but I cherish the memories I’ve gained from it because I’ve gone through so much, endured so much, and learned so much by the end of all of them. And even now, going through a course for my new vocation, I can’t help but find references back to the people and memories in BMT — like, “hey, this guy reminds me of one encik back in Eagle” or “where’s my 90-45?!” when marching (thank you to a very particular Eagle sergeant for this).

The past 19 weeks have been a hell of a time. From the Eagles of the 04/25 batch, race against the wind! 🦅🦅