This one.

You could say that I'm flogging a dead horse, but let me just toss in my dua sen while people are still talking about this kid.

Let me just get this point straight: I'm ashamed of this guy. Period. I don't care what his excuse is, but it simply does not explain why he has to get his maid to carry his fieldpack for him while he happily walks on, presumably typing a message on his handphone.

I reject all suggestions that he might be injured. If he had a leg injury, he wouldn't be wearing his boots. A back injury might be possible, but it can't be all that serious if he can still walk. Certainly a fieldpack carried on both shoulders would not be too heavy, especially since the smaller-sized maid could nonchalantly carry it on one shoulder. The bottom line is that if he had been injured enough to get someone else to carry his backpack, then he really should either be on crutches or on a wheelchair.

I also reject all suggestions that his training was tough, so give him a break, etc. Well, I did my time in the Army too. My training was tough too. And guess what, I always carried my own luggage.

One would wonder why we all get so worked up over incidents like this involving one single weakling. And let's be clear: one weakling does not an army make. For every guniang like that kid in the photo, there are many more good soldiers who put in their best effort and do not skive and slack at every opportunity.

The problem is, though, is the issue of guilt by association. Like it or not, we humans have a tendency to look at a small sample reading and assume it to be representative of the whole batch. In this case, the public at large has a tendency to look at one guniang soldier and make the conclusion that the entire SAF is made up of guniangs.

That's just the way it is, that's just the way it has been, and that's just the way it will always be. And before any of you start pointing fingers, I'm willing to bet that you have been guilty of this at some point in your life. Come on, the last time the postman misdelivered your mail, did you say 'The postman messed up!' or 'SingPost messed up?' Dollars to donuts say that you said the latter, in which case, you associated the guilt of one postman to the entirety of SingPost.

I'll admit to doing that as well. A few months ago, five DBS employees messed up a relatively simple transaction that I was making with them. The end result was that I was delayed from making chequeing transactions for three weeks and I had to send an apologising email to one of my suppliers for issuing him a bounced cheque. in my eyes, the trustworthiness of DBS was in the gutter thanks to the actions of those five. DBS did their best to play down the fiasco by saying that it was an ‘isolated incident’. True, it might well be possible that I was simply unlucky to have to face the five worst employees on the payroll of DBS, but it didn’t change the fact that they were working for DBS, and they were the face of DBS as far as I was concerned.

Frontline service managers know of this human factor and do their very best to account for it. After my freshman year in NUS, I spent my three-month vacation working as a bellboy at Pan Pacific Hotel. On my very first day at work, my manager took me aside and told me something I would never forget:

‘Remember that although you are a casual labourer, you are Pan Pacific. When you deal with a guest, they do not see some boy named ‘Fadzli’. Instead, they will see the face of Pan Pacific’.

And just to make the point clear, the name badge of every employee had a line that said ‘I am Pan Pacific’ under the name. I suppose the meaning of the line was twofold; (1) that I belonged to a great big family working towards the goal of giving visitors a pleasant stay, and (2) that as far as the guests are concerned, I am Pan Pacific. If I did well, I would give the hotel a good name, and if I screwed up, I would be tarnishing the name of the hotel.

They don't see 3SG Darth Fudgester, for that matter.

Instead, people will see 'Our Army', and your actions will reflect on the entire Singapore Armed Forces.

So how you guniangs want to treat your maid Amy is not up to me, but damnit, I'll kick you in the nuts for spoiling the image of the rest of us men in the Army.