2008 Woodie Awards
URI ROTC braves 26.2 miles in desert heat during memorial march in New Mexico
Jeff Sullivan
Issue date: 4/8/08 Section: News
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"People come from all over the world; soldiers from Germany, Holland, England and Canada participated this year," said ROTC cadet Adam Robitaille. "[Through this memorial we] remember all the soldiers that came before us and what they struggled through and never forget that."
The march is a memorial to soldiers who trudged through more than 70 miles of the Philippines on April 9, 1942 without consistent rations of food or water, before finally stopping at a Japanese prison camp. Japanese soldiers executed soldiers who fell behind and many others died from disease, dehydration and malnutrition. Of the 77,000 U.S., Filipino and Chinese-Filipino soldiers forced to march, an estimated 14,000 died during the march and many never made it out of the POW camps alive.
ROTC members paid their own way with the only university funding coming from a modest $2,000 grant from the College of Arts and Sciences Hope and Heritage Fund.
Robert A. Ferrara, Army 1st class sergeant and a university affiliate in military science, took the students to the march, but claimed no credit for the trip.
"It was all them, I only went along for the ride," he said, while his subordinates staunchly rejected his modesty. "Well, I did go on the march I guess."
The 18th annual event has two routes. The harder of the two was 26.2 miles and the other was 15.1 miles. URI's ROTC chose the first to march.
Robitaille said that one of the most challenging aspects of the march was the unfamiliar elevation combined with the dry desert landscape. This was one of the reasons the site was chosen, according to the memorial's Web site, because heat exposure was a significant torture device used on the prisoners.
"It was 26.2 miles through the desert at an elevation of four or five thousand feet from sea level and we all trained at sea level," Robitaille said. "But the hardest part was the temperature difference from training all winter and adjusting to the heat."