If the BBC's Little Britain has Daffyd Thomas, Hendon Camp had moi.
Being the only Mat in the village, cookhouse food was “catered" - not from the nearby Changi Village Hawker Centre, but catered from another unit down Hendon hill across the road. This was when cookhouse food was still prepared by full time National Servicemen NSF, so it was very much a hit-or-miss affair. The Commando Formation didn’t have a Muslim kitchen then.
Occasionally when there was early lunch or dinner at the company, I had to wait 10-15mins while the cooks fetch the Muslim meals. In NSF Commando universe, 10-15 minutes was forever.
The rest of the guys would be done eating and already falling in, while I was still sitting alone in my special Muslim corner, staring at my tray. And yes, there were a handful of times the NSF cooks simply forgot (!) to pick up my indented food.
Some nights before a jump or an overnight outfield, the company would have very early dinner. But the cooks across the road either hadn't have indented dinner in their records or hadn’t even started cooking. My commanders would get the CQ to buy mee goreng from the mamak at Changi Village.
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| A Mamak mee goreng. (The Halal Food Blog) |
Five hours later, I’d be running on air, the oily noodles still swirling in my gut while nausea crept up my throat. And we still had another seven hours before breakfast. (That explains my lifelong aversion to mamak mee goreng.) Sometimes I just had bread.
On long-stay outfields, lunch sometimes arrived piping hot - chicken curry or tomato sambal chicken. Imagine being wrecked from the morning’s activities, sitting under a sad little bush while the midday sun roasted you, and a pot of curry appears. See what it does to your appetite.
Sometimes the meal was supposed to come with nasi briyani, but the cooks assumed I’d be fine to have the curry chicken or meat with white rice like the rest. So they just brought over the curry or tomato sambal dishes and took the rice from the commando cookhouse.
I remember at one point, one of my non-Muslim mate declared something (I can't recall what) and so had Muslim meals for a very short while before being posted to another unit. I also remember my Indian friends would see the lovely curries and bryanis and try their luck to test the powers that be to try and sneak into my meal.
Things got better during in-camp reservist. By then the unit had proper commercial caterers with separate meals for Muslims and non-Muslims. Every time I sat down to eat, I’d look back with this strange mix of envy and bittersweet pride.
But despite all these meal time yo-yo adventures - the missed meals, the wrong meals, the long awkward waits in my special “Muslim corner" - a soldier still needs fuel. They always say a hungry man is an angry man, and trust me, I had my fair share of both.
Yet something else kept me going.
In between the frustrations were the quiet moments that mattered. Those times when my batch mates slipped over to give a quick pat on the back after a couple of trainers behaved like they never had Malay friends in their life. Or that split second when the section realised, “Eh, his Muslim meal not here…" and you could see the guilt crawl across their faces. That gentle empathy. That sense of responsibility. Their own learning curve on how to look out for a brother whose welfare fell through the cracks.
And honestly, that part warmed me more than the actual food.
Because years later, in every gathering - every meet-up, every post-trail run session, they would instinctively say, “eh, make sure got food for him" or “the hawker place got Muslim food or not?".
“Don't worry, got Muslim food catered. Please come!"
And every Hari Raya, without fail, the entire company remembered who to wish.
For all the makan chaos, the heart was always there.
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