And they all Lived Happily Ever After….

We’ll call this entry part 2 of the investigative journalism I conducted last week looking for Singaporeans. Last weekend, I had some success, because I went to a place where very few foreigners tread: the Singapore Army Museum.

The Army Museum is located in Jurong, just across the lagoon from the Singapore Discovery Centre. It’s a stunning building, with sharp angles on its exterior and a unique walkway that leads up to the top floor entrance. In terms of a museum, it’s well designed and interactive, with movies and video games playing as prominent a role as captioned photographs. The interior of the museum left me with mixed feelings, though.

It is not a particularly honest museum, in that it makes everything the army does seem valuable and beneficial. It feels like it’s trying to prop up the general societal belief that the Army is good. But if everyone already believes their army is good, do we need a museum to talk about it? Shouldn’t the intention of a museum to be to bring to life information about its topic previously unknown by its audience? In this regard, the museum succeeds. I suspect most Singaporeans do not know about the humanitarian work the Army engaged in while serving in Jordan, or the assistance they provided to earthquake victims in the Philippines. How fantastic these commitments are. I suppose they’re not the most exciting (since they lack conflict), but a lack of excitement doesn’t diminish the importance of humanitarian work.

The most popular exhibit at the museum is a motion picture simulator which creates the excitement of going into battle complete with lasers, jets of smelly water, and bullets blowing holes in the wall. It was certainly stimulating, as exciting as anything in a Hollywood movie, and it was obviously expensive to create. My problem with it: no one dies. You don’t blow things up to scare soldiers. You blow them up to hurt soldiers, and children who watch this show will think only about how exhilerating life in the Army must be. It’s like a video game. Only they forget to mention there’s no reset button after you die.

 The only part that mentions death in the museum is from a PAP minister, who honors those who gave up their lives for Singapore. Who were those people? What about their families? Is that sad information to share with the public? Absolutely, but it’s as much a part of the Army as jumping out of airplanes or blowing things up.

Before moving to Singapore, I lived in Washington, DC, and each week I would visit the Vietnam War Memorial, and it never failed to move me. On it are inscribed the names of every soldier who died or went missing during the war. Soldier’s families leave notes of prayers at the foot of the memorial, and platoon mates come daily to spend time with their deceased friends. It’s a tragic part of my country’s past.

An army, whether in Singapore or the US, is an unfortunate necessity. Perhaps we need to look at why both of those words are true before we build a museum.