SINGAPORE: Anxiety gripped him as the roaring racket of waves echoed throughout the vessel. It was, after all, the first time Kee Jie En was in the closed confines of a submarine diving deep into the sea.
“You don’t normally hear water crashing above you,” said the 23-year-old Military Expert (ME1) in the Singapore navy. “So the sounds that you hear in the beginning can be a little more frightening.”
But his instincts honed through training kicked in and soon he was going about his duties as a platform systems operator. What also helped was valuable advice from close to home: His own father Kee Kian Peng is a 35-year navy veteran who retired from uniformed service in 2023 as a senior lieutenant-colonel.
The 54-year-old is currently deputy director of the crew training wing at the submarine training school; before that, he commanded Singapore’s first- and second-generation submarines.
The father-son duo’s naval journeys mirror Singapore’s growth in the submarine domain, from the pioneer batch trained overseas in the 1990s to the self-sustaining force today.
Still, the submarine community remains somewhat enigmatic, for reasons of operational security. Little is known about the duration of their operations, the areas where they operate and, for that matter, what they actually do.
Public appearances have also been rare. The one time Singaporeans caught a glimpse was during a National Day maritime review in 2000, when RSS Conqueror participated in a sailpast.
