During my army, there is one story about my section mate Bed 7, the siao on “want to sign on” guy. Bed 7 was a religious guy and often prayed, and was a typical good guy.

We were halfway through our BSLC and for the benefit of those who didn’t read my previous stories. Each bunk/section in SISPEC only had 10 beds instead of the 12 beds in BMTC. I was assigned Bed 6. Imagine you are standing at the entrance of the bunk, there are 5 beds on your left and 5 beds on your right, with Bed 1 nearest to you on your left and Bed 5 furthest away on your left. Similarly, Bed 6 is the bed furthest away on your right. This meant that my bed was right beside the window and right opposite the forest.

As mentioned earlier, my coy commanders liked to tekan us trainees whenever they had a chance. There was this morning when Bed 7 was one of the last guys to wake up. As we were good friends, I asked him to quickly go brush his teeth while I would help him to fold his blankets and arrange his pillow. As I folded his blanket, I noticed a long strand of black “thread” on his pillow and I picked it up.

Holy mama! It didn’t feel like a thread and I tried to pull it a little and it was a little elastic and it felt like… a hair! My mind went blank for a moment. I literally woke Bed 7 up and saw his head leaving his pillow. After I was quite sure that it was a hair, I asked a few of our bunk mates to come take a look to confirm if it was a black “thread” or something else. Everyone agreed that it’s something else. I then put it back on his pillow and continued folding his blanket. He came back shortly and I told him that I found a black strand of “thread” on his pillow and asked him to check it out. He took it and then pulled it a little to determine if it’s a thread or a hair.

He then looked at me for a good 5 seconds without speaking. Then he proceeded to walk over to the window beside my bed and threw the black “thread” out of the window and said to me “later tell you something”.

It was during lunch when we finally had time to talk more. He told me and the rest who were sitting around him that he actually woke up around 3+am that morning to go to the toilet to pee. Immediately after leaving our bunk, he could hear slipper footsteps behind him so he turned around and expected to see one of our platoon or section mates behind him. Once he turned around, the slipper footsteps stopped immediately. He didn’t think too much, went to pee and went back to our bunk to sleep.

When he reached his bed and laid down, he immediately lost control of his body. Bear in mind that he was wide awake and just reached his bed. Suddenly, his right leg was pushed up to form a 90 degrees to his body. There was no way our section mates were playing a prank on him as his leg was against the wall and was beside the big metal cabinet. Most of us sleep the opposite way, i.e. our heads were where our legs were supposed to be and this meant that our face was facing the walls of our bunks. This was because the ceiling fans were in the centre of our bunk.

He told me he was looking at me and tried to shout for me but I continued sleeping. He then prayed damn hard and after some time (not immediately), he suddenly regained control and his right leg dropped onto the bed instantaneously. He was damn scared and continued praying till around 4+am before he fell asleep (due to shag-ness from the tekan sessions).

Our coys were at the far end of SISPEC and the cookhouse was at the other end. We didn’t have any contractors/cleaners coming to our coy and there were no reasons for cookhouse aunties to come to our coy which was so far from the cookhouse, let alone the chances of putting a long strand of hair on Bed 7’s pillow as he slept.

We didn’t have any answers and didn’t really talked about it from then on.