Honoring Bataan in Kuwait

It turns out that on March 21 as I and 5,000 military and civilian folks participated in the 21st Annual Bataan Memorial Death March at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., we had some company at the Army's Camp Arifjan in Kuwait.

Lt. Col. Jonathan Allen, a spokesman for the Third Army in Kuwait, told me that the event at Camp Arifjan attracted 255 marchers, including Navy Cmdr. Sherri Santos, a niece of a Bataan Death March survivor and a nurse at the Expeditionary Medical Facility in Kuwait.

Sherri Santos, a nurse at the Expeditionary Medical Facility in Kuwait.

Santos' uncle, Sgt. First-Class Isaias Ladia was captured by the Japanese Army in the spring of 1942 in the Bataan jungle, starving and without ammunition. After surrendering, he and 75,000 Filipinos and Americans marched some 60 miles to POW camps, with about 18,000 killed or having died of other causes such as exhaustion or disease along the way.

After the war, Ladia returned to his home town of Cagayan, Philippines, and then moved to the United States in 1982 -- free of the bitterness he had carried since Bataan -- and died in 1994.

Santos sported a Philippine flag on her 35-pound pack along with an inscription honoring her uncle, whose spirit, for a few hours, lived on almost 5,000 miles from Bataan.

Due to the lack of space at Camp Arifjan, the memorial march was only 12.5 miles, but unlike the 26.2- or 15.5-mile White Sands event, all marchers had to carry a 35 pound pack instead of choosing to go without one.

Capt. Katey Schrumm, the Third Army dietician, came in first overall in the Kuwait March, with her time of 1:32:50. She said she focused on the suffering of the soldiers on the death march to get past her pain threshold and then for added motivation, she said she focused on the fact that this is Women's History Month. Finally, true to her occupation, Schrumm also drew inspiration from the fact that this is also National Nutrition Month.

Capt. Katey Schrumm