Leave

(Cont'd.)

"I know how you come up with the number of 50 or 55-hour. But that doesn't work in the battlefield." The army general pointed out calmly.

"Why not? We put up the same rule for all civil servants and that worked well. In fact, we have a similar arrangement with the Air Force and they are OK." The Cabinet Secretary was insistent.

The Commander wished to say they are not clerks or secretaries, but he didn't - there might be some truth in it after all. Instead, he replied in a humble voice, "The Army is different from the Air Force. You know, when you are the pilot of a bomber, you can always say the time is up, let's call it a day, and off you go. There is no responsibility as a result of direct contact. However, when you are an army soldier, you could not simply tell your enemy that you are about to off work for dinner - when you are seeing them on face and they are trying to shoot you. By adjusting the duty list, are we going to tell our enemy that we are about to off work and is not responsible for the fighting this hour - please shoot the colleague who is going to cover my duty?"

The cabinet secretary tried to say something, but words failed him. Although he was also in the army in the past, he left it for another planet decades ago.

The senior soldier continued, "You see, our soldiers do not want more money - at least that's not their primary objective - but they wish to have a reasonable quality of life and career prospect. Exactly for that reason, it is meaningless to define what a reasonable working hour is - they know it well and, by the nature of human, they would have worked out a way so that they could work not that long if there is a simple solution at hand. It still boils down to the basic problem of too many enemy or too few soldiers as the root of the problem; only by solving this problem of manpower - rather than defining a standard working hour - could we reduce their duration of work."

"As Albert Einstein said, in human problem, the shortest distance between two points is always not a straight line." The civil servant was forced to agree.