Thailand praises its army conscripts

Via The Bangkok Post: On duty to lend a hand. Excerpt:

Tsunami, flash flood, mudslide, bird flu, plane crash. Name a disaster and army conscripts will be right there to help, rescue and do whatever they can to bring the situation back to normal as soon as possible.

These men are trained mainly for warfare, but since the global security scenario has changed while the number of natural disasters are on the rise, army conscripts have become more involved in emergency response work.

A good example of this is what has happened in the wake of China's earthquake. This is similar to what are happening in the cyclone-devastated Burma and the quake-hit China, where China's soldiers are working around the clock in the affected areas, doing search and rescue operations, collecting the tens of thousands of corpses, removing tonnes of debris and delivering food and other items to the survivors.

The scenes remind us in Thailand of our own young army conscripts, who have also worked bravely after disasters.

When the country was struck by the bird flu outbreak in early 2004, hundreds of army conscripts were sent to cull poultry to contain the flare-up.

At that time fear of the H5N1 virus being transmitted from poultry to humans gripped the country and people were told not to have direct contact with fowls, but the army conscripts had to work at poultry farms and complete their culling mission to save the country from the deadly outbreak.