CHAPTER TWO: The National Guard
Life is a boat upon which one sails. While you can use its helm to turn left or right, you cannot swim against the current. Indeed, the right path has been preordained.
It was when I joined the government sector in the 1990s that I began to realize that life experiences and lessons are expressions of a man’s destiny, guiding him towards compassion and drawing the broader strokes of identity. Then Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud gave me the honor of joining the National Guard, which he commanded at the time, granting me the official start of my service to the country and its people. I concentrated wholeheartedly on training the personnel of the National Guard, the Kingdom’s external and internal defense force and one of the three major military forces. However, after visiting its training facility for the first time, I could not help but feel that the apparatus personnel deserved better. It was what led to the launch of our first project: building a state-of-the-art training center to en hance the skills of the National Guard’s personnel. The new center featured a modern design and was equipped to effectively provide recruits with the necessary training to carry out both their military and humanitarian roles.
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The center was inaugurated by the then Crown Prince Abdullah, in the presence of the Governor of the Makkah region Prince Abdul Majeed bin Abdulaziz and other state officials. The inauguration ceremony provided a glimpse into the tactics that would define the National Guard, such as riot control, mounted patrol, and utilizing helicopters to expedite transport and benefit from their operational capabilities. [19] The training center also offered quality instruction through its military vocational program, which we had launched in the National Guard’s Western Sector. Coordinated and led by Major General Mohammed Abu Saq, the program was designed after the recommendations of Western Sector personnel, as well as ‘the South Korean model’. When Korean companies began operating in the Kingdom in the 1980s in droves, most of their workers were also active military men – as part of their two-year service, Korean military personnel received combat training and had been given the choice to either continue this training by working for a Korean company in Saudi Arabia for a supplementary salary, or stay in their country. As a result, Korean recruits stationed in Saudi Arabia learned new skills in construction and craftsmanship, with their performance and aptitude evaluated, before they returned to Korea to complete their university studies. When we visited South Korea with the then Crown Prince Abdullah during his world tour in 1998, our hosts mentioned that their citizens’ work in the Kingdom had been valuable and g reatly beneficial to them, as they brought back with them the experience, industriousness, and workmanship that they gained to develop in their respective fields and subsequently further their studies. Saudi Arabia had, the South Korean officials said, functioned as a training space for their citizens and given their youth serious opportunities.
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