The Toughest Race in America Is the Bataan Memorial Death March

By | October 2, 2019

FIT AND ARMY FIT are not the same. Fit is a man in matchy-matchy running clothes that “breathe” and neon shoes that have great arch support. Fit is barely sweating as he reaches the top of a six-mile hill.

Army fit is still a few minutes behind that guy. Army fit is in uniform, wearing tactical boots, and carrying a 35-pound pack on his back. He’s maintaining a steady pace up the hill—chugging, in the most machinelike sense of the word. His fists are clenched, but there’s no sign of struggle on his face. He’s staring straight ahead up the hill. “What the fuck,” an onlooker says as the man runs by. You shouldn’t be able to move that fast, for that long, with that pack on your back.

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His name is Marc Beaudoin. He’s a 31-year-old Army captain and attorney with the Judge Advocate General Corps, and he’s trying to win the military heavy division of the Bataan Memorial Death March, a marathon-length race through the high desert of White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Beaudoin was fairly competitive as a distance runner when he was younger, and he’s still fast—he recently ran two miles in 11:22 during a physical-training test. Beaudoin is six-one, and his build doesn’t hint at his speed. “In a pure running event, I’m a little bit heavy to compete against guys that are 125 pounds,” he says. When he’s rucking, he’s unrivaled. He has the size to carry the pack’s weight without much difficulty and the grit to do it without complaint. Today, his miles are closer to ten minutes, which is like a four-minute mile by Bataan standards.

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Marc Beaudoin, Army, Fort Hood, Texas (individual military male heavy, winner).

Matt Nager

The annual race draws thousands of military personnel and civilians, who compete in separate divisions according to how much weight they’re carrying: civilian light, military light, civilian heavy, and military heavy, with a separate team category in each division. The march is a celebration of the survivors of one of America’s grisliest military defeats and a memorial to those soldiers who didn’t make it, but it’s also an homage to something else: the thing that separates Army fitness from “Just Do It!” civilian fitness. The march makes Tough Mudder and Rugged Maniac races look like empty, commercialized spectacles—like something you do to get a picture for your Tinder that makes girls think you’re hardcore. It also makes those races look really easy.

Nowhere else on the course is the difference between the civilian and military divisions starker than on this hill. The marchers are approaching mile 12. Beyond them, the vista is like a desktop background image. A morning haze is rising from the desert, the sky is a dry, cloudless blue, and the hillside is covered in yellow wildflowers and photogenic cacti. In the foreground, a man—civilian light—walks a few paces, hunching a bit with each step. He looks like one of those diagrams that show the evolution of man, but in reverse. He stops walking and crouches by the side of the road. “I’ve thrown up twice,” he says when I offer him the remnants of a bottle of water. “I think I woke up with the stomach flu.” He offers the bottle back to me and I tell him to keep it. He straightens and begins to walk again, slowly climbing the hill to the next water station.

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NOT A SPECTATOR SPORT: Most of the course is inaccessible to onlookers, denying marchers the adrenaline of an audience, but some spectators do find spots from which to takin in the suffering.

Matt Nager

The Bataan Death March followed the surrender of 76,000 Filipino and American troops on April 9, 1942, after the Battle of Bataan. For more than three months, those troops had been holding out against the Japanese on the Bataan Peninsula, in the Philippines. They were dramatically outnumbered and under-rationed, exposed to assault from above, and weakened from within by a suite of unpleasant diseases. Back in the U. S., The New York Times spun their defeat as a symbol of American perseverance. “Bataan is lost; but generations from now the word will be remembered,” the paper reported on April 10, 1942. “It will stand then, as it stands now, for high courage in the face of hopeless odds. It will stand for the finest kind of self-discipline.”

In the following days, the odds would become even more hopeless, the self-discipline even finer. After the Allied troops surrendered, Japanese soldiers marched them, already depleted, for 66 miles in brutal heat. They gave them very little food and water, and they beat and executed stragglers. The survivors were sent to prison camps.

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Christopher “Aggie” Agullera, Air Force (ret.), Las Vegas (individual civilian male heavy).

Matt Nager

A trial commemorative march, in 1987, was the project of a New Mexico State University Army ROTC cadet from Las Cruces, Ray Pickering. (The event did not officially memorialize the Bataan Death March until 1988.) The race was not situated in New Mexico to approximate the terrain in the Philippines: Whereas the original Bataan marchers slogged through steamy jungle, the area surrounding White Sands Missile Range is parched and scrubby, though still hostile in its own right. Rather, because many soldiers in New Mexico’s 200th Coast Artillery died in the Battle of Bataan and the march, it seemed fitting to honor them.

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For many in the Army, the original Bataan Death March serves as a reference point for “the suck.” Daniel Huddleston, a 33-year-old Air Defense NCO who raced for the first time this year, is the first person to introduce me to the Army mantra “Embrace the suck,” which he likes to shout at recent Army initiates when they’re struggling. In his book Embrace the Suck: A Pocket Guide to Milspeak, Colonel Austin Bay translates the term: “The situation is bad, but deal with it.”

When I ask Huddleston where the line is, fitness-wise, between civilian and soldier, he says he sees people transform about a year into their first unit. Until then, they’ve been training and gaining the tools to do their jobs, but they haven’t really experienced the suck. “It’s not just your build and muscle groups,” he explains. “It’s the fortitude you have. If you have a good leader who pushes you into the suck and really kills you, when you get into those situations when most people are quitting, you can say, ‘You know what? I’ve been through worse.’ ”

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Huddleston calls the memorial march “the worst ever,” citing the gravel, dirt, sand, and six-mile-long “ungodly” hill. But he points out that marching 26.2 miles with support along the way pales in comparison to marching 66 miles with no water stations. The Bataan marchers were sleep-deprived, sick, and demoralized, and many of them had been tortured. “It was a victory as far as what we’re taught in the military: You never give up, you never stop, you always try to win. To be able to do that in that state of captivity, with no training, no nutrients, no nothing—they were just about dead before they even started—is a huge victory in the life of a soldier,” says Huddleston. “I don’t know why the civilians are doing it.”

Why indeed. Given the difficult terrain, a personal record in the race is unlikely even for those in the civilian light division. Most of the course is inaccessible to spectators. White Sands Missile Range is a schlep. Still, thousands of civilians join the march every year. Some have a connection to the military, but many are just here to experience the suck.

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Caden Cooper, a 17-year-old aspiring marine, Chicago (individual ROTC male light). “On my pac, I carry the names of fallen soldiers from the 2nd Reconnaissance Battalion. Some were family friends.”

Matt Nager

MARCHERS WHO SEEK to maximize the suck are welcome to arrive at the designated campsite at White Sands Missile Range several days beforehand. When I arrive, the campsite is already filling up. I pop my tent near a dark green one that looks retrofitted for the apocalypse. It’s tethered to the ground by at least 30 guy cables, and two heavy-duty extension cords run from its base to the only outdoor outlet. The tent’s owner, tall and weathered and as doomsday-ready as his shelter, strolls over to say hello. He gestures to a tent nearby, so tall and broad it looks like a moon bounce. “Whole bunch of young people in there with their dad. I’ve had to pound their stakes in a few times already,” he says, raising his eyebrows at me as if to say, “Civilians—psh.“Psh,” I say.

The next morning, I unzip my tent and a sheet of wet snow falls in on me. The base’s beige buildings have disappeared behind a beige snowy fog, and I look out across a brutalist hellscape. All I can see through the snow is jagged, miserable terrain. More for warmth than reportorial duty, I set out for the Las Cruces Convention Center, where participants have gathered to pick up their packets and Death March–branded swag. Depending on their high school curriculum, most Americans know that the word Bataan carries some gravity, and it’s strange to see it printed on the typical marathon goodies for sale. (Almost as strange as when a woman asks me cheerfully, “Are you here for the death march?”) One man walks by in a STRAIGHT OUTTA BATTAN shirt.

Near the entrance to the Convention Center, three scales hang from the horizontal beam of an ominous-looking white wooden trestle. A hook hangs from each scale. Marchers add weight to their rucksacks with steel plates from GORUCK and with rice and other food that they can donate at the end of the race. To march in the heavy divisions, your pack must weigh a minimum of 35 pounds—packs are weighed at the finish line, and any marchers whose packs weigh under 35 pounds are disqualified. That weight cannot include water, rocks, logs, or anything else that marchers might pick up from the trail toward the end of the march. A young man with a tight crew cut kneels to rearrange his pack. “I want to get as close to 35 as I can,” he explains. “I’m trying to get under six hours.”

Several elderly survivors hold court at a table next to a handwritten sign that reads survivors. James Bollich, 98, eats a brisket sandwich with a heaping side of chips, and marchers drift by the table, stopping to shake his hand, take photos, and make reverent small talk. His daughter, Sally Bru, stands by with several uniformed men and women who have been tasked with assisting the attending survivors but who now find themselves redundant in the face of Bollich’s extreme spryness. “He lives alone. He drives. He grocery shops. He goes to the store,” Bru says. When I ask how I, too, might arrive at 98 with her father’s energy and clarity, she tells me that every day he uses a manual treadmill with an incline for 15 minutes while he watches the Weather Channel, and he does hundreds of reps with two 5-pound weights. I look over at Bollich, who is devastating the last bite of his sandwich. This is the third year Bollich has attended the race. “He really looks forward to this,” Bru says. “When he was at the finish line, it was funny because he’d say, ‘How’re you doing?’ And they’re all just dying, of course, but they can’t tell him that.” She cackles.

A man with calves the width of my torso walks by in uniform, and I feel unsettled, wondering what kind of marathon would make that guy just die.

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The medical tents along the course see steady traffic all day, mostly from blister sufferers.

Matt Nager

EARLY THE NEXT morning, marchers slowly trickle into the starting corrals. Some of the military teams sit on the ground, leaning on their packs. Behind them, the civilians try to keep warm—in spots there is still snow on the ground. Huddleston and his five team members look relaxed and awake, even though they woke up at 2:30 a.m. to arrive in time for the opening ceremony. Members of teams, Huddleston explains, must finish the race within 20 seconds of one another. If they don’t, they’re disqualified. I ask who the weak link is. “Me,” says an extremely tall man carrying a flag. “We’re just trying to finish,” Huddleston says jovially. Rather than starting at a run, they’re planning to march at a consistent pace, remaining no farther than 15 feet apart.

By the time most of the marchers have made their way out of the endless traffic jam leading to the missile range and into the corrals, it’s past 6:00 a.m. and the sky is glowing. Speakers are blasting Sean Householder’s “The Warrior Song” (“Feel no fear, know my pride / For God and country I’ll end your life”). Parachutists leap from a plane and spiral through the air. A real cannon fires. At any other event, these things would seem pandering—mood-setting touches for people playacting toughness for a morning. But in a military context, with a giant flag waving overhead in the sunrise and veterans with prosthetic limbs preparing to march, the scene is movingly hardcore.

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FIELD HOSPITAL: Marchers use the medical tents along the course for shade as much as for first aid. The most prevelant condition among marchers: blisters.

Matt Nager

The start itself feels almost anticlimactic—most things feel anticlimactic after cannons and parachutists. Instead of the adrenaline-fueled crush forward that usually accompanies the starting gun at a marathon, most people just walk.

Beaudoin bursts forward. His goal is to run at least the first 18 miles. He cycles through the strategies that have carried him through other races. He counts every hundred steps, looks up, then counts the next hundred steps. He picks out different landmarks—a car, a tree, a bridge—and thinks to himself, I’m going to get to that point, then we’ll reassess the situation. I’ll run there, and then if I’m tired at that point, I’ll walk.

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He doesn’t walk until he’s halfway up that six-mile hill, a little more than ten miles into the race. My calves are already hurting just from spectating. Beaudoin is march-jogging up the hill. The sun is beating down now, and he’s drenched in sweat. It’s too depressing to look up to see how much hill he has left, so he keeps his eyes on the road. He knows that with a heavy ruck, tiring himself out too early in the race will doom him later. He reaches a particularly steep portion and slows his pace for a few strides, taking deep breaths, then starts running again. Finally, he reaches the infamous “sand pit.”

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Stretches of the sand pit are the consistency of a dirt road, but others are like beach dunes. “You have to kind of walk with your hips, so you don’t bend your legs all that much,” Huddleston explains. “If you do, you’re going to burn every single muscle group in your legs.” In the sand pit, Huddleston and his team keep their lizardlike strides in step, following some shared inner metronome. They’ll finish fifth in the military coed team division. Beaudoin, ignoring the pain, takes the sand pit at a run.

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Kenwoo Kim, from Lewisville, Texas, after finishing the 2019 Bataan Memorial Death March at the White Sands Missile Range in White Sands, New Mexico, Sunday, March 17, 2019.

Matt Nager

Beaudoin stops at every water station and drinks as much as he can, but he still feels his muscles cramping. When he reaches the sand pit, each calf is knotted in a baseball of pain. He can feel his muscles tightening even more, so he backs off from his charging pace. Then he worries that someone might pass him and lengthens his strides again. He’s four miles away from the finish, and he thinks of the out-and-back eight-mile runs he does every Monday. Four miles left, so I’m at the turnaround, he thinks. All I have to do is run back home. Four miles. That’s too easy.

He doesn’t stop running until he crosses the finish line and sees his wife and kids. He collapses on the grass, taking deep breaths. “Give him some air,” his wife, Morghan, tells their older two children as they cautiously approach him. She bounces their baby on one hip, unconcerned as Beaudoin writhes on the ground. “He wins everything,” she says simply. Beaudoin is as close to horizontal as the rucksack allows. He unstraps himself. He’s had the pack cinched tightly for the last four hours to keep it from bouncing while he runs, and as the blood rushes back into his limbs, the real pain arrives.

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IN THE COMING days, the legend of Marc Beaudoin grows and grows. The day after the march, the gate for my flight from El Paso to Dallas is so packed with marchers that when the airline staff announces advance boarding for military, at least a quarter of the passengers get up to board. “The guy who won it is an Army dude. He trained for this carrying a pack in a bunch of marathons,” one man says to another, who responds, “He did it in like 4:37. Ran the whole time.” Beaudoin’s actual time was 4:35.

The opportunity to witness real toughness is a big reason civilians participate. The race is the antidote to the glitzy endurance scene. The march’s commercial side—STRAIGHT OUTTA BATAAN—is somewhat defused by the memorial nature of the event, and by its difficulty.

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From left, Frank Delatour and Alex Haug take a rest while waiting for their running mates near the finish line.

Matt Nager

Civilians fetishize Army fitness in part for its aesthetics. Sure, we covet the warrior bod the Army ads promise us. But there’s something else that we’re drawn to. We want to be in one of those camo tents at the campground, parked in close circles. We don’t want to suffer alone; we want to suffer with a team, like Huddleston and his co-marchers. Today, fitness is often marketed to us as something to be slotted in around work—in 45 minutes you can zap every muscle group!—and it’s easy to forget that there are other reasons to work out besides shapely biceps.

“My friends who were athletic as kids, they’ve gotten older, they’ve got their job, they’re fulfilled in their lives, but there’s just this one element that they’re missing,” Beaudoin says. “It’s the camaraderie and the togetherness that you get being in the Army. I think that a race like this gives those people a glimpse into that. Just being a part of something greater than themselves.”

For however long it takes them to finish the march, civilians can imagine themselves part of the fraternity of the suck.

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