A local veterans motorcycle club spent a sunny Saturday morning riding to honor the men who died in the Bataan Death March and listened to the stories of a survivor.
"Thank you for shaking the dust off (of your motorcycles) for a very good cause," said Ken White, president of Rolling Thunder Chapter 5.
White said 35 motorcycles and 40 participants departed from Uniontown at noon Saturday to ride through Fayette County, placing wreaths on memorials in the county.
The approximately 90-mile ride symbolized the death march of soldiers who were responsible for the defense of the island of Luzon, Corregidor and the harbor defense forts of the Philippines at the beginning of World War II.
The soldiers fought in a malaria-infested region, surviving on half- or quarter-rations with little or no medical help.
On April 9, 1942, tens of thousands of American and Filipino soldiers surrendered to Japanese forces, and they were marched for days in the scorching heat through the jungles.
Thousands died during the march. Those who survived faced the hardships of a prisoner of war camp. Others were wounded or killed when unmarked enemy ships transporting prisoners of war to Japan were sunk by U.S. air and naval forces.
Upon their return home after the war, the survivors of the march were treated poorly and made to feel ashamed about the surrender, even though they were following orders.
"We're here today to honor the memory and the men of the Bataan Death March," said Chuck Thomas, who has been involved with the Bataan Death March re-enactment in New Mexico for the past six years.
"Those are some kind of stories to hear," Thomas said. "It had to come from the heart to take one step in front of the other."
Abie Abraham, of Renfrew, spoke for the second year at the ceremony following Saturday's memorial ride.
Abraham, 93, wrote "Ghost of Bataan Speaks" in 1971 and "Oh God Where Are You?" in 1997.
"They wanted us to move fast," Abraham said. "We couldn't break formation or we'd be killed."
In the miles of the march, not only did Abraham suffer like the rest of his comrades, but he also saw many of them killed by their Japanese captors.
Abraham saw men die from dysentery after drinking out of a pond filled with dead animals, men too tired to walk either shot or stabbed with bayonets, men giving in to extreme thirst and getting shot for trying to drink out of a water well, a man shot in the head for crying, and men run over as Japanese trucks and tanks drove through the columns of marchers.
"They were lunatics," Abraham said. "They didn't need no excuses."
Abraham said the men endured an extremely hot train ride to a prison camp at Cabanatuan in the Philippines, where, in 1945, a daring raid by U.S. Army Rangers and Filipino guerrillas freed the prisoners.
When returning home, Abraham said he got into a taxi and the cab driver noticed his uniform and said he "must have had a good time in the service."
"I called him an S-O-B," Abraham said. "A priest said, 'You're going to hell for saying that,' and I said I already know what hell is."
