Having served my mandatory two years of service in the Singapore Armed Forces, I’ve had my fair share of scares when it comes to me or my buddies losing restricted stuff.

During Basic Military Training, my company, Kestrel Coy, was out training on urban ops. After an uncomfortable overnight stay in the field, we did some more room-clearing and then it was off to go back to the company line.

Except of course, during the last equipment check, one guy in my platoon nervously announced that he had lost his charging handle pin — a metal piece tiny enough that you could fit it on a fingernail. It secures the SAR 21’s charging handle and stops it from falling back when not in use. So pretty important.

Needless to say, we were all terrified. This was a restricted item (it’s part of a gun, and Singapore is hyper-aware of guns). To say that our commanders were “annoyed” was an understatement. So after a smoking by our sergeants and a warrant officer (we call them encik here) we set off to search our training zone for the minuscule pin that was probably already long gone.

Under the 12pm Singaporean heat and humidity (made worse by the uniforms and combat gear), our platoon sweated our asses off as we combed dense grass, the latrine, the buildings, all while cursing the bloody fool who had lost this one item.

After two hours of looking, our uniforms were soaked through, we were tired, and worse of all, we still hadn’t found the damn thing. And then, our platoon sergeant calls for us to fall in. We assembled with our kit, pretty certain we were gonna die, when the sergeant simply told us that we were free to get ready to leave, EXCEPT for the guy who had lost the pin.

As it turns out, the rifle he’d drawn from the armskote NEVER had the pin. His assigned weapon was away for servicing, so he’d been issued another SAR 21. One that was missing its pin already, but this was a known issue with this particular weapon. A recruit from a previous batch had broke the pin after dropping the gun by accident, and the armskote simply hadn’t gotten around to replacing the pin. My platoon sergeant had confirmed the issue with the on-duty armskote IC.

Nevertheless, the dude was still smoked for not having paid attention to the weapon he had drawn from the armskote (after drawing your arms you’re supposed to check if all your weapon parts were serviceable, and then report to your commanders if anything was odd).

We never let that guy live it down.

Two batches of recruits later, and I hear that the gun still doesn’t have a replacement pin. Just army things, I suppose.