Bob Foos
Completing the grueling Bataan Memorial Death March last year wasn’t enough for three local lifetime friends – they’re going to do it again but this time to raise money for Honor Flight of the Ozarks.
The three friends, Jonathan Dawson, David Pyle and Steven Taylor, actually first did the memorial march in 2019. They learned about it from Pyle, who had a relative who had previously participated.
Then they decided to accept the challenge again last year. They chose the option of going 26.2 miles across the White Sands Missle Range in Las Cruces, N.M. – with a 35-pound rucksack on their back. It took them about nine hours to complete the course.
In 2019, Dawson said they got to hear from two U.S. soldiers who had survived the march and three years as prisoners of war. It was so meaningful “you could hear a pin drop,” he said. Then in 2024, he said a Filipino survivor, believed to be the last living survivor, appeared in person.
Dawson, Pyle and Taylor are now in training to complete the 36th annual Bataan Memorial Death March, which will be held on March 22, 2025.
So far, Dawson said they have raised $35,000 for the Honor Flight of the Ozarks. That’s a mission dear to him and Taylor, he said, because they serve on those flights as guardians to assist the veterans.
Donations are being accepted through a Go Fund Me page.
There are still ways to help out, either by sponsoring a mile marker or buying service-branch ribbons honoring individual veterans, which will be worn on packs throughout the march.
The Bataan Death March occurred in the Philippines during World War II. It began after 75,000 U.S. and Fillipono troops defending the Bataan peninsula surrendered on April 9, 1942, to Japenese forces.
The captured soldiers were forced to march 65 miles through scorching jungles to the camps, where they would be prisoners until they were rescued at the end of the war in 1945.
Deprived of food, water and medical attention, it is estimated that 10,000 soldiers (1,000 American and 9,000 Filipino) died during the march.
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