2006 Lebanon War<\/a> against Hezbollah.<\/p>\nThis guy who grew up in Australia was volunteering to serve in the IDF in Israel, a country that’s pretty much fighting a low-intensity war 365 days a year and was in fact fighting Hamas militants at the time of his enlistment. He was not gungho about it, and in fact he came across as a thoughtful individual with his own hopes and aspirations that were put on hold for this undertaking. If I were in his shoes, I’d be contented with just an Australian citizenship. I don’t know if that makes me more practical or less human.<\/p>\n
As much as I hate the ethnic tensions, nationalism and violence that drive the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I can’t help but feel that there is something admirable in his decision. There is a sense of honour in there that has nothing to do with mongered fear, vengeance or hatred. I certainly find it difficult to imagine many people doing the same thing for Singapore if the shit ever hits the fan.<\/p>\n
It’s quite sad that I forgot to ask the guy for his contact information. I gave him my name card, but he never did drop me an email. My friends and I took the Shinkansen to Tokyo the next day and I never saw him again after that night. Hopefully he is doing fine in the IDF.<\/p>\n
On a side note, Singapore should extend its national service to girls too. D;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Image shameless stolen from Rachel Papo’s gallery Sometimes diving around in the polluted ocean of Digg nets you a rare surviving coral or two. The frequency of this rare occurrence is inversely proportional to Digg’s user base. And so the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[821],"tags":[823,824,822,770,535],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.darkmirage.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1373"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.darkmirage.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.darkmirage.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.darkmirage.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.darkmirage.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.darkmirage.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1373\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.darkmirage.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.darkmirage.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.darkmirage.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}