Those who’ve served in the army will know that holding a rifle for the first time is terrifying. You’re suddenly handed a real gun when your only experience so far was shooting weird, deformed creatures in Fallout 4.
But it’s also frightening because of the tight discipline around that SAR21. Lost a bullet? You’ll go to DB. Fired the wrong time? You’ll go to DB.
What if you kept 50 blank rounds and concealed it from the Military Police for over six months? You’d probably have to spend a long, long time in the Detention Barracks (DB), right?
Nope, just two weeks, actually.
Concealed 50 blank rounds
In 2017, following a military exercise, Master Sergeant Chia Shu Sheng took unexpended blank rounds from his fellow servicemen and kept it in a metal cabinet in his office at Keat Hong Camp.
He did this despite knowing they were supposed to be returned to the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF).
Blank rounds, commonly called “blanks”, are “bullets” that merely make the loud “bang” sound to simulate the discharge of firearms during training. Just like real bullets, the empty rounds would be discharged from the weapon after firing.
Later that year, in November, Chia was informed that military policemen were going to conduct a raid, so he concealed the rounds in a false ceiling to avoid getting caught.
If you’ve no idea what a false ceiling is, here’s a picture that speaks a million words:
Unlike Lord Varys, however, his little birds failed him in February 2018 when the military policemen discovered his rounds in another raid.
But why did he do it?
Wanted to protect his men
According to Chia, he kept and concealed the blank rounds because his men were at fault and he wanted to protect them.
After the military exercise in 2017, soldiers were instructed to search their belongings and vehicles thoroughly to ensure they didn’t have any ammunition in their possession.
However, four days later, Third Sergeant (3SG) Choo Wei Xiong discovered a storage box containing 49 unexpended metal blank rounds while he was performing maintenance work on an armoured vehicle.
The Sergeant realized he had failed to check contents of the storage box for ammunition after the military exercise. He informed Chia and surrendered the blank rounds to him.
After chiding 3SG Choo for his negligence, Chia said he would “settle the matter”, and kept the storage box in his office.
Later that month, another soldier approached Chia and informed him that he had an expended plastic blank round. Chia kept that in his office too.
The Master Sergeant said that he had decided to keep the blank rounds to prevent his men from being punished for failing to declare them.
He had intended to keep the rounds, which could only be used on a general purpose machine gun (GPMG), until the next GPMG training exercise.
Two weeks enough?
Chia was eventually sentenced to two weeks detention after admitting to two charges of misappropriating SAF property.
But is two weeks enough?
On Thursday (Aug 22), military prosecutors appealed the sentence and asked for four months’ detention instead, arguing that Chia was a high-ranking serviceman who had taken “deliberate and active” steps to conceal the rounds.
Military prosecutor Hee Mee Lin said Chia’s actions had “undermined public confidence” in SAF’s ammunition control measures. She also called his two-week sentence “manifestly inadequate” because it had failed to accord a “strong need” for deterrence.
Moreover, in the three precedent cases that involved misappropriating blank rounds, the offenders were given detention ranging from four to six weeks. However, in those cases, the offenders had purposely brought back the rounds as “souvenirs”.
A five-member Military Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal for a longer sentence, however.
Regarding the appeal, Chia’s lawyer Suresh Divyanathan said “There is no bigger deterrent sentence to any regular than being discharged from the Army,” he said. “So, what further deterrent sentence do we need?”
If it were that easy for NSFs to be discharged from the army, blank rounds would start disappearing like farts in a fan factory.
Here’s a simplified summary of the South Korea martial law that even a 5-year-old would understand:
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