- I spent 9 days in the Jungle and this is what happened
When I was 18 years old, I enlisted into the army and got into Officer Cadet School. As part of survival training, me and a group of 6 other guys spent 9 days in the jungle of brunei and here’s how it went.
This was part of our Jungle Confidence Course training. Over the 9 days, we had different tasks to do. For example, navigation, building a shelter, skinning a bird, carving forks, making fire and creating a lizard trap.
What made things worse was that we only had 2 days worth of food to last us over the 9 days. The food was our standard army ration packs and 1 accessories pack which had candies and crackers.
We took many days preparing for the course. We were taught how to make fire, demonstrated how to skin a quail, twice, and spent one entire day packing and repacking our field packs.
We weren’t allowed to bring anything extra, or even remove anything on the list. We lined up at the parking lot, in rank and file for our items to be inspected. Then, our packs weren’t allowed to be touched until the next day.
I remember waking up around 3:55am because I had to draw rifles for the whole wing. We supposed to carry 6 blank rounds in our rifle and never use it at all. They will check if the 6 rounds are still intact after the 9 days.
4:45am and we were on 5 ton trucks being transported to the start point. Once we dropped off by the side of the road, our instructors wished us good luck and we were on our own. A team of 7 ready to conquer the Jungle ahead of us.
Our first phase was called Exercise Nomad. A 3 day 2 night navigation exercise and we were required to find at least 2 out of the 4 checkpoints. We found the first 2 checkpoints before lunch but took the whole of day 2 to find the 3rd checkpoint. We climbed knolls and went down ravines and wasted too much energy which we needed for the rest of the days. Remember we were still carrying our 20kg field packs and our rifles as well. We would be happy covering just 1km in 1 hour.
We decided the 4th checkpoint was too far and that would drain all our energy as well so we chose to forgo the last checkpoint, like most other teams.
Day 4 started with the 2nd phase, Exercise Explorer. Which is a longer distance navigation taking us up the infamous mount biang and across the batu apoi river.
Our team refilled our water from a small stream and ascended biang with in our wet boots. We went up quite fast, ticked off a checkpoint and spent the night there. Thankfully that night I decided to sleep with socks off because one team member who didn’t got bad foot rot the next day. If you don’t know, foot rot smells like dead fish.
We were done with Exercise Explorer by day 6 and we were inserted into our survival sites to start our next phase, Exercise Forager. Within the last 4 hours of daylight, I had managed to build my basic A frame structure and a small square of leaves as a roof over my head. It drizzled that night so I was so thankful for that. My friend curled up in a trash bag and slept in it that night. I remember that night I sang I set fire to the rain in my head on replay. I don’t know why but it boosted my morale a lot.
The morning of day 7 was the quail skinning day. I didn’t think too much about taking the life of another creature, I just wanted to pass this survival course. So I did what I had to do and got the job done swiftly. It was an interesting experience nonetheless.
That night, a team member’s A frame collapsed and since I was mostly done with my frame, I had to help him for the whole morning before the 12pm assessment. We redid the whole thing, the frame, fireplace, roof all from scratch. Amazingly we all passed.
After that, we tore down our structures and were ready for the final phase of the course. Exercise Trekker.
Day 9 and it was the last day of the grueling course. We were all insect bitten, smelly and worst of all, hungry. The only thing between us and civilization was a few more hours of navigation. We were excited. Unfortunately, due to our team member’s foot rot, we limped to the finish point and our team was the second last to reach home.
The first drink we drank was 100 plus and immediately went to eat food. Not actual food, but the extra rations we had lying around.
This was another point in my life where I couldn’t believe I actually did it. We earned our Jungle Confidence Course badge which all infantry officers wear on their uniform proudly.
Hope you had enjoyed a little glimpse of my 9 days in the Jungle. And if you want to know how much weight I lost, I’d be honest and say I can’t remember. All I can see is all the insect bites which stayed on my body for a couple of weeks.
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