Called home, without a choice

Mas Selamat bin Kastari, a high-profile Islamist terrorist in Singapore, had just escaped from a maximum-security prison. The police had been looking for him for 12 hours without success, so the army was alerted. After rushing back to his base and gathering his gear, Sng and his unit were deployed to the city-state’s darkened forests to hunt down the fugitive.

Kastari wasn’t captured until a year later, but the experience was one that would stick with Sng even after he had fulfilled his two years of compulsory military service.

Sng said his date understood why he had to leave. “[It was] in the nation’s service,” he said.

When he arrived at the University in the fall of 2009, Sng joined a small and nearly invisible community of students on campus who are required by their home countries to complete a period of mandatory military service. Coming from such diverse places as Singapore, South Korea, Israel and Colombia, these students must decide whether to fulfill their service before, during or after their undergraduate years.

The nature and duration of compulsory service varies widely from nation to nation. Some consider the service a civic duty rendered essential by international or domestic threats. Others consider their period of service a waste of valuable time and opportunities. But most students interviewed for this story agreed that their service had a lasting impact on their awareness of the problems facing their country and the world.

March, march, march

Compulsory service can come in many forms: combat, training, technical operations, humanitarian relief or even social improvement projects. Those eligible for service — usually male citizens of 18 years or older — join a specific division of the military upon enlistment.

Sng served for about two years in what he called Singapore’s equivalent of the Marine Corps and eventually became a lieutenant and a platoon commander. During that time, he assumed the responsibility of leading 27 soldiers on a series of war games and training exercises that took him across the globe.

“We went to countries like Brunei, Australia, and Thailand and stayed in jungles for month, after month, after month,” Sng said. “All those exercises were meant to mimic what a real war would be like.”

After a year of basic exercises and training at Officer Cadet School, Sng participated in a range of amphibious and land operations, once providing aerial security for an offshore island in Singapore. He was also tasked with disciplining his men when they violated military regulations.

Hyungjune Kang ’12, who left to fulfill his two-year service requirement in South Korea’s military after his sophomore year, also served in a combat-ready capacity. He worked in the Joint Security Area two miles from the official border between South Korea and North Korea, monitoring the zone for provocative actions from the North. Kang also directed soldiers and coordinated fire drills.

For Kang, compulsory service was an introduction to a very different kind lifestyle, with new and sometimes baffling rules of conduct.

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“It’s kind of weird because [South] Korea has a very strict hierarchy, and it just reverses in [the] military,” he said. “Nothing matters — what you did outside, what your social status was, what your age is, is totally irrelevant.”

Some of his comrades struggled to adjust to this strange environment, Kang explained, and he said he was not immune to its novelty either.

“It was a new world to me, too, because we don’t have any freedom. We do whatever they [tell] us to do,” Kang explained. “It’s kind of physically challenging because there is no privacy and freedom. So I think it’s totally different from what usually Americans would think.”

Sometimes it is very likely that compulsory service will lead to combat. In Colombia, Esteban Aguel ’13 explained, those performing compulsory service are often sent to patrol dangerous areas or serve on the frontlines in zones of active fighting between the Colombian military and domestic paramilitary organizations. Because most Colombian males serve their year of compulsory service right after high school, they are popularly known as “Soldados Bachilleres,” or high school soldiers. For these soldiers, death or injury during compulsory service is not uncommon.

After his father forbade him to serve because it was too dangerous, Aguel secured an educational deferment and came to the University to study. By the time he is 25, he will have to define his “military situation” and either perform compulsory service or pay the military for an exemption, which varies depending on one’s financial situation.

After boot camp and some basic intelligence training, Joshua Shulman ’13 fulfilled his compulsory service for Israel between 2003 and 2006. He also served as a commander and instructor for about half a year, taking care of new soldiers during their training and teaching courses in intelligence gathering.

“So it was basically like being an RCA, but much more complex than that,” Shulman, who is a residential college adviser, said.

He suggested that while combat does teach soldiers some skills and compulsory service is an educational experience for everyone, one can probably learn more by serving in more organizational or technical capacities instead. “I learned at least the equivalent of like a college year or two, but not everybody gets to learn that much,” Shulman said.

Not all forms of compulsory service are meant to protect the homeland from external threats. Shu Haur Tang ’12 spent three months in 2006 completing his compulsory service for Malaysia, which had become compulsory through a lottery system only three years before. His time was largely spent marching and doing survival training in the jungle. “In other countries, it’s really like a hardcore military service, where they’re preparing you for battle and war, if they really need you to,” Tang noted, explaining that in Malaysia, compulsory service is essentially a nation-building initiative meant to reduce the ethnic tensions that have plagued the Southeast Asian country for many years.

“So because the fundamental reason is very different from that of Singapore or Israel or Taiwan, what we did is quite different too,” he said.

Should I stay or should I go?

For those who have a choice, deciding when to perform compulsory service can be difficult. South Korean students, for example, can choose to do their service before, during or after college, though most do it either after their sophomore year of college or upon graduation.

Eeh Pyoung Rhee ’13, who was granted a temporary educational deferment in light of his plans to attend college overseas, said he had a hard time choosing when to do his service because each choice was problematic in its own way.

On the one hand, doing his service after junior year meant that Rhee would have to return to an academic environment from which he had been absent for more than two years, making it difficult to resume his studies and write his senior thesis. On the other hand, serving right after college would put him at a disadvantage in the job market because his computer science skills could become outdated while in the military. According to Rhee, it is also more difficult to obtain a job in the U.S. as a regular international applicant to a firm than it is when one is fresh out of college.

However, Rhee ultimately decided to avoid these problems by applying to graduate school in the U.S., deferring his entrance there and then completing his service before returning to continue his studies.

Yongmin Cho ’14 also carefully weighed the costs and benefits of doing his service before or after college. He had originally planned to go back to Korea after his sophomore year, since that would have improved his chances of finding a job after college as an international student in the U.S.

He noted that a compelling reason for completing service before graduation is financial: If he spends two years of his postgraduate life in the military, Cho will miss out on the internships and other educational opportunities that would make it easier for him to compete for spots at American business schools or firms. He said that immigration and work permit-related difficulties could also arise if he tried to return to the U.S. after service.

“Most for-profit corporations that will bring you in good money — they’re not going to want to hire someone that’s spent the last two years of their life in the military,” Cho explained. “So that’s the cost, you know, you’re not marketable anymore, so what are you going to do?”

But considering the social experiences he might lose if he left Princeton to perform service after sophomore year caused Cho to change his mind during Intersession.

“What about the intangible costs? What about my academic motivation? What about my friends? What about the people that depend on me?” Cho asked. “You know, those less quantifiable … things. You have a six figure salary on the one hand, and you have all these, you know, kind of things you’re never going to enjoy again if you jump on the gravy train.”

Lessons learned

Though the performance of compulsory service can represent a nuisance or a serious disruption of one’s life plans, many people return home with new skills or perspectives that influence the way they approach life at Princeton.

Sng said that his time in the Singaporean military has given him valuable perspective on his academic commitments here.

“A lot of the troubles that students get caught up in really don’t compare to what you go through in an actual military career,” he said. “I can imagine those soldiers who have been through missions, rotations, in Afghanistan and Iraq — they have seen death. I have had to face death before.”

As a platoon commander, Sng also had the unpleasant task of disciplining his soldiers for infractions of military code. Faced with the moral dilemma of turning a blind eye to the infractions or sending the offenders to prison, he chose the latter. The experience, Sng said, taught him a lot about making moral choices and the importance of leadership.

Shulman said that he learned many technological skills during his service for Israel that helped him get jobs before college and during the summers in between semesters at the University. But the social maturity he developed as a result of his service also better prepared him for Princeton.

“Because it’s a compulsory service, you meet people from all socioeconomic classes, ethnicities, etc. It’s sort of a leveling experience,” Shulman said. “You gain a certain ability for tolerance, and more importantly you just make friends for life.”

National necessity or waste of time?

Most students interviewed said they thought compulsory service was on the whole a good thing.

In Colombia, Aguel said, most people are opposed to compulsory service because of the dangers involved in serving and associated social inequality. Because those who are wealthy or well-connected can often find a way to defer service by seeking education outside of the country or even legally pay their way out of serving, the requirement primarily affects the poor and disadvantaged segments of Columbian society.

But Aguel himself said that he thought compulsory service deepened citizens’ investment in their country, though the system could be strengthened by closing many of the privilege-related loopholes that exempt the rich from service.

“Personally, I believe that we should have compulsory service for everyone,” he said. “That’s the only way that everyone in the population can have a stake in the conflict.”

Cho acknowledged that the threat of aggression from North Korea made compulsory service for South Koreans necessary from a security standpoint, but he also said he considered compulsory service a civil duty that every citizen should perform.

Kang and Shulman shared the perspective that compulsory service makes everyone aware of the costs of conflict in principle, but Kang said he thought that in South Korea compulsory service cheapened the importance of the task and produced a distasteful civilian disregard for the nation’s soldiers.

“Compulsory service is not ideal because in [South] Korea, unlike in the U.S., it’s compulsory and there’s very little respect for soldiers,” Kang said.

It would be better to switch to voluntary service, he explained, but this transition would involve raising pay and benefits for soldiers, which might not be economically feasible from the government’s point of view.

“You just kind of get it over with,” Rhee said of compulsory service. “But if you didn’t have to do it, most people probably wouldn’t.”