4 commandos have been officially charged for the dunking death of Sgt Hu. Readers will remember that incident at Tekong where they conducted the now infamous “capture, escape and survive” course. Sgt Hu drowned while a few others escaped death but not without injury. After the public and media firestorm, Mindef vowed to make training more transparent and get to the bottom of the matter.
While this particular charging seems reminiscent of the Navy incident (Navy ship crashes into private one, 4 sergeants die, 3 on board charged), to my mind it’s a totally different boat.
In the Navy incident, those in charge were on the boat and hence any mistakes made or orders passed were from the boat. Hence the accountable ones were also on the boat. IMO, there was complete accountability.
In this dunking incident, the incident occurred in a training camp, where the “tekan” sessions were routine and regimented. Yet, what do we have? 4 junior officers charged and one big shot steps down gracefully. Sure, some might argue that these 4 were rogue officers drunk with power, but it was also believed that the upper echelons were of full knowledge of the training going on under their command. Previous batches of this infamous course reported similar treatments from different officers. If such torture sessions were so regular and similar in treatment, where is the root of it? Of course no specific instructions will be written down in some training manual but one can bet that it was either a unique interpretation of vague training instructions or an informal (yet celebrated) culture passed down from batch to batch.
If either were true and even if the upper echelon didn’t know what was happening on the ground, by dint of those two reasons, upper echelon is guilty of dereliction of duty and is therefore guilty and liable and must be held accountable.
To my mind, if you want to present accountability, make everyone involved accountable. To kill a hydra, cut off its head, so to speak.
