USTDC

Photo of USTDC courtesy of Les Duffin

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Footsteps in Taiwan Videos

Kent Mathieu, owner of the Taipei Air Station blog, has posted two ten-minute videos of his walk-through at the American Footsteps in Taiwan exhibition in Taipei.  You can view them HERE.

3 comments:

George said...

Don,

What was that red box with pins/medals/ribbons in the video presented to you for? Real nice looking.

Thanks,
George

Don said...

George, I'm not sure what it was called, but most of us who served at USTDC received them prior to our departure. There was a Chinese inscription on the lid of the case that probably gave the official name. I always called it the GEMO medal (for Generalissimo Chiang Kai-chek). It may have been called the Chinese-American Friendship Medal or something like that.

The two small pins that were placed in the corners of the presentation case weren't part of the set. I think Scott probably placed them there for the display. The round badge next to the presentation case was the one that all of us in USTDC wore on our uniforms.

Anonymous said...

The location was the front gate of the Police Headquarter in Taipei, which was adjacent to the Executive Yuan and still is.

The person in uniform was Mr. Cheng Wei-Yuen(鄭衛元). His rank at that time was Captain, indicated by the one-bar four-star badge on his chest. Mr. Cheng graduated from the Military (Army) Academy (陸軍軍官學校), 15th class (15期). He was transferred to the police force, which was common during that period of time.

At that time, Capt. Cheng was the company commander within the Police Division of Transportation and Roadway Management, and served as the liaison coordinator in charge of the communication protocols between the police command and the motorcades.

It should be noted that the color of the S-belt was white, instead of the standard khaki color for the typical police uniform. The use of white color was arranged to be consistent with the belt color of the military police, which also matched to their white-color Harley-Davidsons.

In addition to the sidearm, Ray Ban sunglasses was part of the standard issue, which was quite rare in other groups at that time, except the fighter pilots.

He also wore the rank badge at the wrong side. The normal setup should be at the opposite side above the right pocket. We could also note the small badge on his left pocket, below the rank badge. That was the ID tag for the secret service staff.

Regarding the cap, the decoration system in fact came later. During the earlier years, there were no decorations on the caps for either the police or military. It came later when the US style uniforms were adopted.