{"id":76,"date":"2006-08-01T07:23:53","date_gmt":"2006-07-31T23:23:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/taiwanairpower.org\/blog\/?p=76"},"modified":"2006-08-01T07:47:44","modified_gmt":"2006-07-31T23:47:44","slug":"highway-armor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/taiwanairpower.org\/blog\/?p=76","title":{"rendered":"Highway Armor"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"AAV7<\/div>\n

While driving on Taiwan’s Highway No. 1 in early July, I spotted something different from ordinary vehicles and so I stepped on the pedal to get closer to it.\u00a0 Then I realized it was an ROC Marines AAV7 on a flatbed truck and asked my wife on the passenger seat to snap this picture.\u00a0 This is the first time in my life to see an ROC Marines armored vehicle, especially at such a peculiar place.<\/p>\n

To see an armored vehicle on a public road nowadays takes luck.\u00a0 When you see it, often it is being transported by a flatbed.\u00a0 You are really lucky if you get to see it travel on its own power and tracks.<\/p>\n

I remember when I was in middle school, there was a month-long island-wide military exercise.\u00a0 At night, I could hear armored vehicles transit through my hometown.\u00a0 I knew they were not ordinary vehicles because they had a distinctive noise.\u00a0 Besides, their tracks left clear marks on the road.\u00a0 One tank, I thought was an M41, broke down and got stuck in the town for about a week.\u00a0 Because the soldiers\u00a0were separated from their unit, local residents provided food for them.<\/p>\n

During the same period, about ten M42 self-propelled AAA sped into the center of the small town in an evening.\u00a0 I could immediately tell they were going the wrong way because the road led to nowhere.\u00a0 Finally they realized so and started to back up.\u00a0 You can imagine how difficult to back up ten “tanks” in a row.\u00a0 In the process, one M42 stopped right before the grocery store next to my home.\u00a0 I was excited that I could take a very good look at it.\u00a0 There were no base openhouses during that era.\u00a0 Everything about the military was labeled “Secret”.<\/p>\n

The next time I saw armored vehicles on public roads was when I was a high school student.\u00a0 When I was waiting for the bus in early evening, more than ten V150 drove past me at high speed.\u00a0 Actually I was not sure they were V150 at that time because I was an airplane guy, not an armor guy.\u00a0 It was when I saw reports that Taiwan had V150 that I realized what I saw that day.\u00a0 But somehow I thought the vehicles I saw that morning had six wheels, although V150 had only four…<\/p>\n

Also during my high school years, a jeep mounted with an M60 machine gun stopped next to me when I was walking past my elemtary school on a weekend morning.\u00a0 The officer onboard asked me for the direction of a highway bridge.\u00a0 Then, hours later, I saw the same jeep again.\u00a0 But this time it was the lead vehicle of a convoy of various military vehicles, including an M24 tank!\u00a0 At that moment, I had the weird thought that I should have given the officer a wrong direction…<\/p>\n

When I went to an ROC Army openhouse last year, also for the first time in my life, I could not believe that things had changed so much over the years.\u00a0 Not only could I take unlimited pictures of the armored vehicles but my kids could also get into them and play with the gadget.\u00a0 For the school boy standing before the M42 at that cold night, it could only be in his dreams…<\/p>\n

\"My<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While driving on Taiwan’s Highway No. 1 in early July, I spotted something different from ordinary vehicles and so I stepped on the pedal to get closer to it.\u00a0 Then I realized…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/taiwanairpower.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/taiwanairpower.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/taiwanairpower.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taiwanairpower.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taiwanairpower.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=76"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/taiwanairpower.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/taiwanairpower.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=76"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taiwanairpower.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=76"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taiwanairpower.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=76"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}