An army special forces officer became the 13th Taiwanese soldier to receive the US Army’s Ranger tab, after he completed a grueling training program, a defense official said.
Lieutenant Hsu Ching (徐靖), assistant company commander of a unit under the Special Operations and Aviation Command, completed the Ranger School last month, a defense official told the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) on Thursday, on the condition of anonymity.
Certification for the Ranger tab is a prerequisite for US Army officers to be inducted into the elite 75 Ranger Regiment. They must also complete a separate assessment and selection program.
Photo courtesy of a reader
The Ranger School is designed to train the leadership cadre of the Rangers and other infantry units in the US Army, the official said.
Ranger School offers a steep challenge for the trainees and military officers from elite foreign units were no exception, they said, adding that only 40 percent of participants complete the course.
The training course is divided into three stages and hones infantry skills in military bases and the wildernesses of Georgia and Florida, they said.
Photo courtesy of Kuo Li-sheng
The Moore Phase is focused on fitness, tactics and combat proficiency, the Mountain Phase is for mountain warfare and high-altitude survival, and the Florida Phase emphasizes amphibious, jungle and swamp warfare, they said.
The school produces officers who are well-trained in leadership, command, tactics and weapons-handling, the official said.
Hsu graduated from Norwich University and began training in the Ranger School in October last year, they said.
A little more than 90 soldiers out of 300 participants completed the training to qualify for the tab, the official said.
Retired major general Kuo Li-sheng (郭力升), who wears the Ranger tab, said that during his training at Ranger School, they drilled trainees ceaselessly in parachuting, air assault, small unit tactics, navigation, wilderness survival and tradecraft.
During jungle training, candidates survived on one meal per day and ready-to-eat rations via air drops, leaving Guo “nearly delirious” from hunger and fatigue, he said.
Trainees had “no rank, hair or off-days” while attending Ranger School, he added.
Trainees were careful to wear their berets inside-out so the AC-130 gunships raining live rounds on targets in the training zone could see the sewn-in reflective infrared panels during night exercises, Kuo said.
A tradition among Ranger tab-qualified soldiers was to show their memorial coin to one another, and the person caught without the token must buy the other a beer, he said, adding that retired US army general Colin Powell — former US joint chiefs of staff chairman and US secretary of state — owed him a beer from a 1997 meeting.
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