I just had an epiphany. I want to run 60 miles, in the Philippines, in re-enactment of an epic event in my country's History, the Bataan Death March.

The march, involving the forcible transfer of 75,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war[1] captured by the Japanese in the Philippines from the Bataan peninsula to prison camps, was characterized by wide-ranging physical abuse and murder, and resulted in very high fatalities inflicted upon the prisoners and civilians along the route by the armed forces of the Empire of Japan. Beheadings, cutting of throats and casual shootings were the more common actions—compared to instances of bayonet stabbing, rape, disembowelment, rifle butt beating and a deliberate refusal to allow the prisoners food or water while keeping them continually marching for nearly a week in tropical heat. Falling down or inability to continue moving was tantamount to a death sentence, as was any degree of protest.

Prisoners were attacked for assisting someone falling due to weakness, or for no reason whatsoever. Strings of Japanese trucks were known to drive over anyone who fell. Riders in vehicles would casually stick out a rifle bayonet and cut a string of throats in the lines of men marching alongside the road. Accounts of being forcibly marched for five to six days with no food and a single sip of water are in postwar archives including filmed reports.

The exact death count is impossible to determine, but some historians have placed the minimum death toll between six and eleven thousand men; other postwar Allied reports have tabulated that only 54,000 of the 72,000 prisoners reached their destination—taken together, the figures document a rate of death from one in four up to two in seven of those on the death march. The number of deaths that took place in the internment camps from the delayed effects of the march is considerably more.

Learn more about the Bataan Death March from wikipedia.

When I was a kid, my mom would tell me my "lolo" (grandfather in filipino), a colonel for the Philippine Army, was supporting a soldier similar to what the statues are doing in this picture.