Ong Ye Kung finds his NS buddy nearly 40 years after they leant on each other to survive BMT

Ong Ye Kung finds his NS buddy nearly 40 years after they leant on each other to survive BMT Paired because they shared the same birthday, the two “chill” recruits lost touch after three months together. Their reunion in On The Red Dot brings back memories of hardship, friendship and opportunities they wished they had seized. SINGAPORE: When Health Minister Ong Ye Kung was a scrawny 18-year-old in 1987, he was not looking forward to National Service (NS) enlistment. For one thing, his brother who was three years older than him “didn’t quite enjoy” NS after being “punished a lot”, which gave him the impression that NS was very “siong” (tough). Not that the younger Ong was unfit. “I was an athlete back in school,” he said, “so I could do most of the exercises.” But he did have a “slight” medical condition: eczema. So he struggled with some aspects of training, especially the field camp during Basic Military Training (BMT). “That wasn’t very comfortable,” he said, citing having to shower with “only three or four mugs full of water” and the powder baths in lieu of a shower. What he “really couldn’t get used to”, however, was the swearing. “The Hokkien swear words always involve your family — your mother, your father,” he said. “Psychologically, I couldn’t adapt to it that well (and) probably took it too (personally).” Still, it was not all hardship for him as a recruit preparing for military life and learning essential soldiering skills. There were parts of BMT he enjoyed, such as assembling and stripping his rifle and cleaning its components. “I was quite good at that. … My weapons tended to be quite clean,” he recalled. “I never told my wife that actually I’ve got two wives: My NS weapon and her. And we take good care of our weapons.” There is an NS saying, “Your rifle is your wife”, which he cited along with another adage, “Your best friend is your buddy.” The buddy system ensures that servicemen are paired up to watch out for each other. And buddies in his platoon were assigned in order of their birthdays, he recalled. He and his BMT buddy, Eric Sim, shared the same birthday: Nov 15, 1969. Ong slept in the top bunk, while his buddy — a “scrawny guy like me”, he described — slept below. His first impression was that the two of them were “not going to carry a lot of heavy stuff”. “But he looked like a nice guy, unassuming, quiet. We both looked very unambitious,” said Ong. While they had platoon mates who wanted to be selected for Officer Cadet School (OCS), to train to become leaders within the Singapore Armed Forces, the pair “were both just chill” as recruits. “We tended to take a step back, watch others assert their leadership qualities, while we … just played our part as team members,” said Ong, who would have found BMT “more difficult” with a buddy dying to go to OCS. We were just there … sharing an experience together, trying to go through something together.” As he sees it, fate brought them together. But after three months of navigating and surviving BMT, they went their separate ways and lost touch. So it was a long overdue reunion for them in On The Red Dot’s latest series, Finding, featuring Singaporeans hoping to reconnect with someone they had bonded with, from army mates and mentors to domestic helpers and teachers. WATCH: “We survived BMT together” — Ong Ye Kung finds his army buddy (24:47) The passage of four decades got the minister feeling “a little bit nervous” before the big moment. “What’s he been up to?” Ong wondered. “We assume he’ll be surprised. But I don’t know. … Maybe I’ll end up being (more) surprised.” THE BUDDY WHO BECAME A CAREER COACH Sim the laid-back buddy is now a career coach and a speaker who gives guest lectures at several universities. He is also an author whose business psychology book, Small Actions: Leading Your Career To Big Success, was published in 2021. That was why he thought On The Red Dot wanted to interview and film him, supposedly for a series on career coaches and their lives. As he looked back on his younger days, he too remembered feeling a sense of pre-enlistment dread. But unlike Ong, he “wasn’t athletic at all”, which was a reason the Anderson Secondary alumnus “didn’t really enjoy” his schooldays. “My mother refused to let me play … any sports, because I suffered from childhood asthma,” he recounted. “At age 16, I was only 40kg. And that was two years away from (NS). I was worried … I (couldn’t) carry the (army) backpack and rifle. They probably weighed (more) than me.” Academically, he “didn’t do well” either. He said: “The only subject that I really enjoyed was woodwork.” When he began NS, he was not the only one worried about whether he could “survive the army”. He remembers his father visiting him on Pulau Tekong during the three-week confinement for recruits and seeing tears in his father’s eyes. “I’d never seen him cry before,” said Sim. “He thought that I (was suffering) a lot.” BMT was tough for Sim, but there was something he “enjoyed the most”: Live firing. “I was quite good at shooting,” he said. “I was a marksman.” He also remembers quite a few of his BMT mates. “Some have gone on to manage big companies. Some have joined the government and now (have) big responsibilities,” he said. “Sometimes you can’t tell, when you look at somebody who’s 18 years old, that they’ll go on to do something so huge.” But when asked whom his buddy was, he hemmed and hawed. “It’s, uh, I don’t feel comfortable,” he replied. “I prefer not to say.” REGRETS, LIFE LESSONS AND CHICKEN BONES It was at the Central Manpower Base — which manages the NS enlistment and administrative processes and is now located in Hillview — where both buddies were reunited as Ong snuck up behind Sim to surprise him. “I don’t get surprised easily,” Sim said later, “but today I was totally caught off guard.” As he told Ong, who is also the coordinating minister for social policies: “I know you’re such a busy person. And I’d think you’ve got many other things to do than to (come here to) say that you’re my buddy.” Their catch-up included a spot of chin-ups — they did two each — and pitching a tent, which Sim had “no recollection” of doing during BMT. Despite some of their hazy memories, he recalled that his attitude towards BMT was shaped in large part by his lack of physical strength and social skills. “I wasn’t the kind who was very talkative. I’d do my job, but I also didn’t want to attract too much attention,” he said. For Ong’s part, with the difficulty he had “adjusting to the culture”, turned off by the swearing, he said: “I also did what I had to do and didn’t try to impress.” But now that both men are successful in their fields, Ong wondered when his buddy decided to “be busy and not be laid-back”. It turned out that Sim had always believed that “you need to transform yourself”. After receiving his engineering degree from the National University of Singapore, Sim joined investment banking, mixing with Ivy League graduates, and then asked his boss to send him to cities such as Shanghai and Hong Kong. “My objective is to live many lives in one lifetime,” he said. So he somewhat regrets “not being more ambitious” during BMT. In fact, at the back of his mind, he had hoped to go to OCS. But at the same time, because he lacked the physical attributes, he “didn’t put in the effort”, he said. “Sometimes life is like that: You reject the opportunity before the opportunity rejects you.” Ong found himself nodding in agreement, reflecting on how he too “could’ve seized those opportunities” then. “If I were to go back to BMT now, I’d try to do my best and take a different attitude,” he said. “In the past, when something ‘siong’ happened, when you went out to the field, you just dreaded it and (asked) yourself, when will this be over? … You should be focusing (on) what (you can) learn from this experience.” He summed it up as “an essential passage of life” where they learnt not to reject opportunities. “Luckily, all this happened when we were younger,” he said. There was one final insight Ong gleaned from their reunion. He remembered an incident where their platoon was about to book out after cleaning their area when an instructor found chicken bones in a toilet bowl — a “major offence”. Instead of booking out, they were punished with push-ups followed by leg lifts until someone owned up. “Finally,” Ong recalled with a chuckle, “Eric said, ‘It was me.’” All along he has thought his buddy had got the platoon into trouble. But when he recounted the story to Sim, it appeared to be otherwise. “I don’t remember that episode. But if I know myself, there’s no reason (I’d) throw chicken wing bones into a toilet bowl,” Sim said, “because it’s not something that I’d eat.” That meant he gave a false confession to “save the platoon”, pointed out Ong. In response, Sim said: “That’s a more likely scenario.” They did book out in the end, and Ong called his buddy’s action “a brave thing to do”. He was also “touched” by Sim’s refusal to disclose that they were BMT buddies. “He’s really considerate,” said the minister. Their reunion underlined the importance of the buddy system for Ong. “This is somebody you develop a trust and a bond with, and that may carry you through the rest of your life,” he said. “We forgot a lot about BMT, both of us, but we both remember each other.” What Sim remembered about an 18-year-old Ong was that he was “somebody reliable, somebody with integrity, somebody supportive”. “I’m grateful for that, and he’s still that same person,” said Sim, who had wanted to reach out to him previously but — thinking that Ong was a busy man — decided to only “engage with his social media posts quietly”. “It’s a huge surprise that he initiated this, and … it also shows that our relationship didn’t just end after BMT … so today was a fantastic reunion.” Watch this story in the Finding series here. The programme, On The Red Dot, airs on Channel 5 every Friday at 9.30pm.