Sentry Duty

The following story is made possible from the team behind Breaking Brainwashed. In this essay, a former soldier gives advice to resistance fighters on the need to protect their bases, referencing his past experience.

“There were cases of people getting beheaded and put into the fried rice pot because of the carelessness of the sentinels.”

Recently, people asked me to explain some details about my time during sentry duty. The first thing we learn is: “Sentry, Trench, Food”. I will talk about sentry duty as much as I know.

The first that there are certain rules. The first is to not doze off or sleep during duty. The lives of one’s comrades lie in the sentinel’s hand and they must be extra cautious about their duty. In cold weather especially, they mustn’t overdo anything like staying by the fireside extra-long. People tend to doze off if they are warm and comfy.

So, there must be an inspection team to prevent that. It is dangerous that other people don’t know what the sentinels are doing. There should be surprised checks on the sentry team by senior officers to make sure.

Depending on the importance of the mission, there should be two to three men in sentry teams. In real emergencies, half of the base sleep and the other half need to be on watch duty. And if necessary, everyone should be on standby. It is convenient to set two hours as guard duty.

Appropriate disciplinary actions should be taken for those who break the rules. They also need to be educated on how dangerous their actions were.

On watch duty, it is necessary to remember everything in front of you. It is best if you can memorize the place, size, and distance of trees, hills and bushes. And also the markings on the fences. If you remember those, you will know instantly if something is out of place and you can take necessary actions. It is important to report immediately on anything out of usual.

When using a flashlight, you should straighten out your both arms outward so that enemies will miss when they shoot at your light. Set up tin cans with strings as alarms on the possible path of enemies for early warning. Or you can also plant mines on those routes. You should notify your people about the mines and put the mine locations on the map.

During the lookout, you must avoid smoking, lighting candles, talking, reading books, and using your phone. It is best practice to keep dark and quiet as possible as if there were no one. If enemies can see your light and hear your sounds, they will know you are there and will shoot first.

I have experienced a bad scenario because of light. In one of our frontline bases, there were 30 people including a battalion commander. I was the youngest. There was also a personal assistant of our commander. He himself was a captain, just four years older than us. He was the most important person after the commander.

He messed around a lot. Once, he called his mother during a battle and said, “Hello mom. You can hear the gunshots right? They are shooting at us. I am in danger, you know. Send me more pocket money.” Our commander always gave him a beating for that! But he still messed around. He didn’t hold any concepts of seniors and juniors, as we are trained to do in the military. He always treated us as his brothers, no matter who we were. I ate and even slept in his tent a lot because of this.

One night, we are playing cards with him behind the commander. We had to play with candlelight and do so quietly so that the commander won’t know. Around 1:30 AM, we were shot with AM-10 (RPG) into the bamboo forest near the tent. Thank God the bamboo plants were there!

We jumped out immediately, shouting “We are under attack.” I didn’t even know what we were doing anymore. I ran to my tent because I didn’t have my gun with me. But he grabbed me and said, “Why are you running in plain sight? Duck! I answered, ” “I didn’t know. I ran to avoid more shots.” My friend was waiting in the trench for a chance to run. He also told him not to run.

He was looking after us because we were doing dangerous things in a panic. We were good juniors, leaving the senior behind. I remembered the saying, “We will follow our senior to death, and leave him there.”

The whole base had to jump into the trenches and we began to fire back. Only three of us were without guns. The battle died out but the commander ordered us to stay in the trenches till morning. We were cold because we were wearing only tank tops.

In the morning, the commander inspected the whole base. When he get to where we were shot, he saw cards and a mess because we ran out immediately. He instantly knew we were the culprits.

He said, “Those who played cards last night, take the cards and come to me.” When we knew the whole story, he scolded us, “You are officers and you don’t even follow the rules. The senior don’t teach his juniors. The juniors don’t learn. Because of you, we all could die.” We could only say yes.

Then he told us to eat the cards. We had to because we were guilty. We could hardly chew because the cards were paper. We should be thankful he didn’t slap us. Then, he ordered us to cook pork for the whole base. Our juniors enjoyed the food heartily and wished us to get caught again! This was my true story.

The point is, that the role of the sentinels is of utmost importance. The lives of those sleeping depend on them. There were cases of people in the whole base getting beheaded and put into the fried rice pot because of the carelessness of the sentinels.

So I want to warn you about such cases. There are other important points I haven’t talked about here. Sentry duty is the most important duty. I hoped the people’s defence forces can learn a thing or two from this post. And thank you for reading the whole post.

Htet Myat