I refer to the story “Family of Dead National Serviceman Sues SAF and Army Officers” that you wrote yesterday.
I want to say that the death of a young man in his prime is very sad and unfortunate and it is something that nobody wants to see, but accidents can happen and will happen. To blame the SAF for everything that goes wrong is to me quite unrealistic. There are so thousands of young men who do their national service every year and can you imagine what a big load is going through the gates of all the army camps each time?
You can take many precautionary measures to try and protect everybody, but sometimes there will be people who fall through the cracks. I would make noise if there were hundreds of NSmen dying every year but this is not happening, rather the incidences are few. Or like you RWT always use the line, I will also “cow-beh-cow-bu” if the SAF was found to have mistreated or tortured our NSmen, but this was an accident. No one could predict that Private Dominique was allergic to the chemical in the smoke bombs, and when everyone found it, it was sadly too late.
I feel sad for Private Dominique’s family, but I also think it’s time to move on past the unfortunate incident since the SAF has apologised and offered compensation. I wish that the SAF will continue to step up measures to protect our NSmen so that the number of misfortunes will drop further in the next years.
This letter was written by Sheng Li.
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