Oceans and Seas

Hodgepodge

Kenis and Sprig leave to go back to work. Kenis appears to be mature and very responsible. Later, I see her manning one of the machine guns on the bridge wing. Spring’s duty station is at the radar repeater on the bridge, where she continually examines and evaluates the complex hodgepodge of light pips in front of her, representing ships, islands, reefs, and small boats in the nearby waters. On an almost minute-by-minute basis she updates the officer of the watch.

The three women of the Unity’s crew take a break for a cup of tea.

Sergeant Suganthi still has a few minutes before she has to return to her duty station in the engine room, so I ask her about herself. She is one of perhaps a half-dozen sailors of Indian extraction onboard the Unity.

“The crew likes to call me Su,” She says. Then, with a laugh, “Or they have given me a Chinese name; they call me Ah Su.”

Su appears reserved and demure. “Why did you decide to go into the navy.” I ask her. “You seem so quiet.”

Rejected

“It’s not the first time someone is telling me that,” she replies. “People are usually taken aback, even my relatives and my primary school friends, when I tell them that I have joined the navy. And I am very happy about it. I needed a job to support myself and my family. So that’s why I did it. I was like trying for the air force, actually. But somehow I got rejected. So my second choice was the navy.”

“Are you married?”

“No, no, no,” she answers quickly.

“And did you grow up and spend your childhood in Singapore?”

“Yeah, my whole life. I grew up and was brought up here all along, yeah.”

“What is the tradition with Indian families, say with girls, in terms of profession? Are there limits on what you can choose, or is that very old-fashioned?”

“There was. In fact, there still is. But I wouldn’t say in Singapore— in India, maybe. If you take Singapore’s culture… Like, for example, my mum. My mum wanted to join the army when she was my age.”

“Really?”

Surprised

“And my uncle’s—my mum’s brothers—they restricted her. They said no, no way you are going to go in the army, because they know how life is there. Because my uncle is in the army also. So they said, no, no, no, a girl shouldn’t go in there, like what you will be going through and what you will need to know. Then when I wanted to join, none of my uncle’s objected. In fact, they were like, I’m so proud of you that you are making this decision—the same uncle’s. It was like times have changed, and everything, even the army, has changed. And people are more open-minded. For one thing, last time [in earlier times] when the girl works in this kind of place, when she’s, like, about to get married, or anything like that, it’s very difficult. Usually last time [there used to be] all arranged marriage. It’s not like love, you know, like our culture. People [then] would usually think twice when they ask a girl [for her] hand. They will [think], like, this girl, she wouldn’t be the good kind—that sort of thinking. Now things have changed. But you will be surprised, people still do think twice, yeah.”

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Engine Room

We are barely moving through the water and suddenly an alarm goes off on the bridge. Major Wong speaks with Sergeant Koh, the chief engineer, explains that enough bypass gas and some from hot, oily surfaces have collected to set off an engine room alarm. According to Koh, when we are idling and the wind is blowing a certain direction, or maybe not blowing at all, the engine room ventilation system doesn’t totally rid the space of smoke. After an auxiliary blower is turned on, the alarm stops.

Fishin’

Having found nothing suspicious in the sampans, we head off, leaving the little boats rocking in our wake. It seems incredible that fishing is allowed in the shipping lanes, but it is. Even more incredible to me is that anyone would want to fish in the shipping lanes while dodging supertankers.

Gossip

The three women of the Unity’s crew take a break for a cup of tea.

Passing the crew’s multipurpose room, I come across the ship’s three female crew members. This is too good an opportunity to pass up. They are sitting and drinking tea while they chat about a girl they know. Of course they stop when I come in, but I urge them—plead with them, actually—to continue. Knowing that I don’t know and will never meet the subject of their conversation, they do.

Spring Dai, a sprightly twenty-two year old radar tech, tells me, “I’ve a friend of mine, her name is Gina. She has a boyfriend. Recently we met her outside. And the boy was really treating her badly. I take her out to make her feel better, and she’s crying to me every day.”

Sergent Kenis Tan seems somewhat older and more experienced. “How come, ah?” she asks.

Sprig; “Don’t know, lah.* Also don’t know how [to help her].

Kenis: “You mean she want to be with him but he don’t want?”

Spring: “You know, lah. It’s just love, lah. Sometimes love…you know…cannot see.”

Kenis: “How long has that? How long have they been together?”

Spring: “They’ve been together for one year plus already.”

Sergeant Suganthi, a bright engineer, now enters the conversation. “Does she confide everything, you know?”

Spring: “She told me what they went through. Actually because they’re…”

Kenis, sipping her tea: “It’s not courtship already, what? Timing shouldn’t be a problem, not an issue anymore.”

Spring: “I’m also not sure. Maybe the guy, you know, find someone new, someone different to love, that’s why he wants to get rid of her, whatever. Also don’t know why.”

Su: “They’re planning to ROM** this year?”

Kenis: “Is it? They wanted to ROM?”

Spring, a little bitterly: “They went to ROM already.”

Kenis: “Oh my god.”

Spring: “Imagine so hurting, you know. If me, I will cry.”

Kenis: “No wonder she didn’t look very happy that day, at the chalet.”

Spring: “Yeah, that’s why.”

Su: “She didn’t play with us long.”

Spring: “She always never look happy, also.”

Su: “Yeah. I cannot understand her at all. She…. Maybe that’s why.” They laugh with a bit of guilt.

Spring: “Maybe the guy want to find a new one.”

Kenis: “Okay, lah, she’s overall a quite nice girl, lah.”

The three women simultaneously: “Yeah, yeah.”

Mike: “And you know what guys are like.”

All of us laugh.

*The expression “lah” is peppered throughout Singaporean’s conversation to emphasize whatever they are saying.

**ROM is the abbreviation for Registry of Marriage. It also means the act of registering to marry, which is essentially a proposal of marriage.

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Heart Goes Out

P.J. met his wife, Elaine, an associate engineer working for a semiconductor manufacturer, in an internet chat room. They have been married only a short time and as yet have no children. Both are computer buffs, and its possible P.J. may leave the navy to go into the computer field. My heart goes out to the P.J.’s of the world, the underdogs who continually have to prove themselves. Some of them have far more grit and desire to succeed than many of the natural leaders.

P.J. tells me about some of the pirates’ methods of attack. “Around Bintan,” he says, of the island directly south of our position, “there are a lot of areas without much development. They are not well lit and (at night) when the sampans come, they are darkened, no lights on them. So you can’t easily see that, for instance, here are two sampans coming toward you.”

Limited Assets

His accounts suggests why most attacks take place at night. “Does the Indonesian navy patrol these areas?” I ask. “They do, but if you look at the Indonesian archipelago, it’s pretty big, and their navy has limited assets. So when they deploy them, sometimes they may not be at the right place at the right time. Then, they (the pirates) have lookouts for patrols and watch and wait for them to go by.”

“Do some of the pirates now have cellphones and other means of communication?” I ask. “Yes, the pirates’ and the terrorists’ tactics are evolving. The security agencies’ tactics are evolving too. So, what we need to do is to think a few steps ahead of them.”

After having lived in Singapore (though long ago) and after have seen this culture’s emphasis on intellectual ability, I have no doubt that the Singapore military will be able to counter its adversaries’ tactics. In fact, I am told they have already planned for every type of seaborne attack that might be launched against them.

Looking for a Job

Besides the navy, Singapore also has the Police Coast Guard. Well-armed police boats guard every vulnerable area around Singapore, including the huge refinery we passed on Bukum Island. P.J. says that in 1999 he was transferred to this coast guard for a ten-month tour of duty. One night he was on a police boat patrolling inshore near Sebarok Island, just inside Singapore’s territorial boundary at the narrowest point in the channel, where the eastbound and westbound shipping lanes together are less than a mile and a half wide. They got a call from a security guard who had just captured an Indonesian who had swum across the channel. “We went in and got this guy. He was hoping to come here to look for a job, for some way to make some money. These illegal immigrants know that even if they are captured and jailed, at least they have food and shelter.”

“What happens to people like that?” I ask him.

“They are thrown in jail and given maybe five strokes of the cane, then they are repatriated. And after that many of them try and come back again.”

Desperate Act

Swimming a mile and a half across a shipping lane where every few minutes passes a 500,000-ton, 900 ft. long tanker with ten ft. high propellers that in an instant can chop you into fish chum seems like a desperate act indeed.

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