For most Taiwanese men, military service is a common experience and one of the most popular topics in conversations when meeting new acquaintances or getting together with old friends.
It is not something that most foreign men in Taiwan would be able or willing to talk about -- unless that foreigner happens to be an American called T. C. Locke.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Locke, whose Chinese name is Lin Dao-ming (
PHOTO: COURTESY OF T.C. LOCKE
Despite his obvious distinctness, Locke's experience -- as told in his recently published book, Counting Mantou: An American in the Taiwanese Army -- was much the same as that of other conscripts. In his retelling of those common experiences, Locke manages to transcend the cultural and ethnic differences, making him, in Taiwanese eyes, "one of us."
Locke was not the first naturalized foreigner to serve in the Taiwan military. What makes him different from his predecessors is that he is willing to share his experiences with the public.
In a recent interview, Locke said that he considers Taiwan as his home and that his military service here could have been "the most important part of my life."
Locke's experiences in the military are not so different from those of other conscripts who went before him. After all, life in the military does not really change that much over the years.
As a draftee, Locke first had to receive several months' basic training at a boot camp in Hsinchu. Days at the boot camp are vividly remembered by most conscripts because of constant yelling from drill sergeants who have a reputation for dishing out a steady diet of verbal abuse
At the boot camp, Locke had his first experienced with political education -- military style. The curriculum included a watching a weekly TV program and writing a short essay that would be read by his commanding officers.
Watching the weekly political education program is compulsory for service members of all ranks and is a practice which has been enforced for several decades.
The program, essentially military propaganda, runs each Thursday morning on television station CTS, which is owned and controlled by the Ministry of National Defense.
For most conscripts, including Locke, the program is very boring but still welcome because it provides a 90-minute escape from daily chores.
Writing a short essay each week is another part of the political education. The job did not seem to be difficult for Locke, since he was able to write in Chinese.
One of the essays Locke wrote at the camp was called How to Prevent Escapes from Happening. In the essay, Locke wrote that there were, of course, service members who wanted to escape. However, he wrote, if all the rules were fair and reasonable, no one would feel a compelling need to attempt an illicit escape.
The political education Locke received at the boot camp stayed with him for the rest of his service. But what he experienced after the boot camp is the part most conscripts talk about among themselves, even many years after they have been discharged.
After the boot camp, Locke was assigned to an army division in Miaoli and thus began his life as a regular soldier.
Like any other rookie soldier who reported to his unit, Locke experienced that first night what most new soldiers feared: "the shock and awe education."
This initiation ritual visited upon the newcomers by the senior soldiers has been around for many years and is almost the same from one unit to another across the three services.
On the night the rookie soldiers arrive at their posts, the senior soldiers would ask these recruits to unpack all their personal belongings for inspection and to do as many push-ups as possible.
Such practices, though technically not allowed, has been tolerated in the military since commanding officers are few in number and have to rely on senior soldiers to help keep things going.
Locke does not complain about the practice, which seems to him to be only part of the process of becoming accepted in the military.
"Military service helped me learn how to deal with things. I met both bad guys and good guys in the military," Locke said.
"I learned from the military the spirit of comradeship and cooperation," he said. "This spirit seems to be missing from people outside the military."
Another observation that Locke makes is that the Taiwan military has copied a lot from the US military, but only superficially.
"The Taiwan military is in essence still a Confucian hierarchy," he said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater