Gathering of the old cocks....

Just a few nights ago, to be precise, on Tue night, I met up with a bunch of old cocks from my Air Force days. We met up for dinner.

Come to think about it, it was somewhere in 1989/90 that our lives cross path with each other... So our friendship is about 20 years now....

Daniel, aka 'slang'; Trevor, aka Soh-sang; Andy, aka 'skong or ong-ji-kee', and our high flying boss Doug F, chief of a local sushi chain and many more...

Though I was a little reluctant to go that night cos I was really dead tired, I dragged myself there. I was happy we met up after such a long time...
The last time the 4 of us met up was easily 4-5yrs ago, in one of Doug's high-end Japanese restaurants.

Though I was not exactly sure the restaurant we were in that night belongs to who, I suspected it was a joint investment between Doug and Andy...

After a couple bottles of red, it was only natural we started to talk about our lives during army days, it was really nostalgic and entertaining. Trevor as usual, provided most of the entertainment with the comical narration of our army days events....

We spoke about our Junior Term days in SOCC, though we were not all from the same platoon, we all have our stories to share...
Then when we talked about our Senior Term in our ADA Units, and it got even more funny and crazy !!...
Stories of miss-fires, heat stroke, battalion exercise, live firing exercise, chin-ups, chicken pox, turn-outs and our days in PLA, Passing Out Parade, etc ..... it was so funny !!!...

Seated there, listening to all the stories from the past, at some moment, I felt a little lost.....

Believe it or, I could not recall some of the events that happened on me and with the guys during those fun times....

For example that 'glorious moment' when we had to do SOC in the wee hours of the morning and made a final assault up Elephant Hill to receive our rank as Senior Term Cadets..... I was the only one that has totally forgotten that super highly charged experience.... They tried to help me piece together my memory...

After that, we drifted to the fact that we are all in our 40s now...with me being the oldest at 42 next birthday, while the others were either just past 40 or 41....

Time waits for no man and we all agree that once we past the magic 40, like it or not, things start to degenerate. From eye sight to memory, and I was one example.

Somewhere somehow, we drifted our attention to Doug.

We were all teasing him if he would be invited to be a NMP ?....
Our friend is already sitting on some many gov or quasi gov Boards either as a chair person or acting as an Adviser.... He is so in demand and involved in some many non-business 'ECAs'.
On any given week, he said he could be in 3 different countries for businesses and meetings.....
We all wondered how he managed his time and his family.

But he just smile and brush it off..... Neither did he admit or deny that possibility of being invited to be an NMP.... We'll have to wait and see...

After dinner that night, we adjourned for drinks in CQ before we parted.... If not for our families and work, we could have stayed later....

I wonder when we will all meet again in the same fashion ...