50 years on, S'pore's National Service is now a shared legacy

EXACTLY 50 years ago, on Aug 17, 1967, Singapore's pioneer batch of 900 full-time National Servicemen (NSmen) enlisted in the Singapore Armed Forces' (SAF) 3rd and 4th Battalions of the Singapore Infantry Regiment. Barely six months earlier, in March 1967, Parliament had passed the National Service (Amendment) Bill.

In moving the Bill, then-defence minister Goh Keng Swee had posed Members of Parliament the rhetorical question of "why bother about defending Singapore at all?". Singapore had no military that it could call its own; in fact, Malaysia still had its troops stationed in Singapore.

At independent Singapore's ceremonial opening of the first Parliament on Dec 8, 1965, Malaysia's top-ranking military officer in Singapore had insisted that Malaysian army outriders "escort" then-prime minister Lee Kuan Yew from his City Hall office to Parliament Ho…