Army Honor Guard

After completing my bachelor degree, I joined the military for one and half years. Since military service in Taiwan is mandatory and I don't think there would be any war during my service period or even in the next 10 years, I would not like to spend this one and half years for nothing; thus, I choose Honor Guard which is one of the toughest troops in Taiwan army. The main duty of Army Honor Guard are providing escort for heads of state on departure and arrival, performing on national events, guarding major military installations, and etc...One of the most important performances is the National Day performance, such as the Independence Day in U.S. Here are the videos on YouTube: 2006 NATIONAL DAY PERFORMANCE PART1 NATIONAL DAY PERFORMANCE PART2 It's the performance of the Honor Guard assembled of Army, Navy and Airforce, which required a huge amount of collaboration because basically these three troops are totally independent and located separately. Usually, the training time can last for almost three months trying to make this 270 man performance near perfection.


These two photos were taken when we finished our fundamental training. Normally, it takes rookies 3~4 months to go through the basic training, such as basic physical training(one of them is 200 push up every day), how to stand still and straight for 2 hours without any movement (sounds easy, but not easy to do), practice to force yourself not to blink as long as you could (when on duty, no blink is allowed when there's anyone looking at you), and of course how to play M1 grand rifle, which is used by U.S. troops during WWII and weight around 7 kg with full equipped. During the training, it was extremely torturing and exhausting physically and mentally, which I believe it well built me up and in some kind of way to help me deal with the challenges ahead of me in the future. Nevertheless, at the end of our military service, we all had a consensus that neither one of us would like to go through this again nor gave up this experience for anything!


After all the brothers in our echelon had passed final test, we had a special performance for our families and friends only in order to show the results of the rigorous training. It was not only for your families and friends to know what sort of life you had been going through as an Army Honor Guard, but also a kind of moment to make them be proud of you and being showing off a bit! I could never forget the feeling that we had once the performance was done. While performing, I was so concentrated that although all my families and friends were shouting out my name, I couldn't hear a thing; however, you can clearly feel all their eyes are on you because they are here for you. All my best friends were there for me, however after almost three years, now I realized that the thing I should be grateful the most was my grand mom was still healthy enough to be there to see his grandson executing the performance like a trained soldier, like a real man! I am so glad that I chose to join Army Honor Guard impulsively at that time. It is a life-time treasure for me without a doubt! Btw, here is another cool video of our small team special performance! I was not in there, but that was what we did!
Check it out...