T.C. Brown’s “Made in Taiwan: A Naïve American’s Chaotic Journey to Manhood in an Exotic Culture During Radical Times” is a Vietnam-era memoir set mostly in the bars, back alleys, and barracks of Taiwan. Brown, a church-going kid from Columbus, Ohio, joined the Air Force in 1968 at age 18, hoping to play in the Air Force Band, and instead found himself shipped to Ching Chuan Kang Air Base in Taichung. From 1968 to 1973, he served as a military policeman in Taiwan and Vietnam.
Made in Taiwan Reveals Harsh Reality
Now, years later, he mines his experience with a reporter’s eye for detail, along with a veteran’s unease about what those experiences did to him.
Brown was the embodiment of small-town Midwestern innocence: devout, inexperienced, and “fresh-faced.” Upon joining the military, he stepped into what felt like an off-brand Las Vegas dropped into central Taiwan.
Within 24 hours of arrival, he’s riding the “CCK Smoker” bus into Taichung and discovering the “Dirty Dozen,” a strip of neon-lit GI bars on Wuquan Road that becomes both his playground and his beat. As Brown moves from flight-line guard duty to Town Patrol, he’s suddenly responsible for policing the same establishments where he and his fellow airmen drink, fight, fall in love, and get into trouble.
Made in Taiwan Follows Love and War
Along the way, he survives bar brawls, race riots, typhoons, and the constant low-level chaos of an overworked, under-supervised military town.
Midway through his tour, Brown complicated his own life by falling in love with a young Taiwanese woman and, in part to stay in the Pacific and eventually marry her, volunteered for service in Vietnam. At Bien Hoa Air Base, he endured rockets, risky helicopter resupply trips, and the surreal “Twilight Zone” feeling of being flown into a war that might be a one-way trip.
Yet even in-country, his story remains mostly at ground level: guard posts, barracks humor, and the nervous camaraderie of men trying to act normal while the sky occasionally exploded. After he finally returned to Taiwan and then home, he ultimately traced a full rite of passage: from naïve teenager to someone older, damaged, and not entirely sure what to do with what he’s seen and done.
Made in Taiwan Exposes Base Life
One of the memoir’s strongest elements is its unflinching treatment of drugs, alcohol, and the sex trade around U.S. bases. Brown describes how marijuana became ubiquitous at CCK, often smuggled in on C-130s from Vietnam and Thailand, and how a crackdown using drug-sniffing dogs pushed some users toward heroin, with predictably grim results.
He’s equally blunt about his own slide from straight-arrow Catholic kid to heavy user, laying out those choices without self-pity but also without glamour. His combination of candor and restraint is a big part of why reviewers in Taiwan and veteran circles have praised the book as a rare, unusually honest record of how enlisted men in Taiwan really lived and partied during the war years.
Brown paints scenes that are vivid and specific: street names, bar signs, the texture of a cracker-thin mattress in a Taichung brothel, all without tipping into purple prose. His reconstructed dialogue and interior monologue feel plausible, and he’s good at balancing dark material with dark humor, which keeps the narrative moving even as he describes race riots on base or the casual racism and misogyny baked into the GI culture of the era.
Made in Taiwan Captures Memory More Than Military History
At its best, the book operates on three levels at once: as a coming-of-age story amid Vietnam-era military history, and as a Taiwan time capsule, capturing a version of Taichung and interactions with locals that have rarely been written about in English.
There are limits. Brown is not trying to write a big-picture political or strategic history, and readers looking for a deep analysis of U.S.–Taiwan relations or Vietnam War policy will find only hints. Much of the book is episodic, like the bar fights, love affairs, and patrols, and some details have clearly been smoothed by time and memory. But that ground-level focus is also a strength: the memoir’s power comes from its immediacy and its willingness to sit with the moral gray zones of being a young cop, soldier, and sinner in a place designed to keep a war machine rolling on all cylinders.
Overall, “Made in Taiwan: is a compelling memoir that fills a surprising gap in both Vietnam War and Taiwan cultural literature. For readers interested in military culture, military policing, or the social history of U.S. bases overseas, it’s not just entertaining and informative.
“Made in Taiwan: A Naïve American’s Chaotic Journey to Manhood in an Exotic Culture During Radical Times” by T.C. Brown can be found on Amazon and Barnes and Noble starting at $16.99.
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