“With 40-pound packs on their backs, LSU ROTC cadets march 323 miles to support veterans' charities”

Context

The Advocate told the story of Colin Raby's 323-mile ruck march in a Feb. 1, 2020, feature by staff writer George Morris. In January, Raby and four fellow cadets of LSU's Air Force ROTC Detachment 310, joined by a Marine and a National Guardsman, had carried 40-pound rucksacks from the LSU campus in Baton Rouge to Eglin Air Force Base near Pensacola, Florida, raising money for K9s for Warriors and the National League of POW/MIA Families.

"The whole goal was to do something both for the charities and a little bit to test ourselves at something really hard, overcome it and be stronger as a result," said Raby, then a freshman cadet from Baton Rouge.

The idea came from cadet Austin Firmin, who had marched 165 miles alone from his hometown of Covington to Vicksburg, Mississippi, after high school.The Advocate spells his name Firman; LSU and WLOX spell it Firmin. Raby, Zach Toups, Dylan Cone and Ben Flickinger signed on, and Firmin recruited Marine Cameron Richards and National Guardsman Jake Engle. His two-team rotation, eight hours marching while the other team rested, kept them moving around the clock.

For Raby, the cold, rainy first day was the worst. The best moments came from strangers who kept turning up with supplies; he compared it to "Field of Dreams": "build it and they will come." One, a man in a suit, stopped on U.S. 190 in Louisiana and crossed the highway on foot holding two beers and two waters. "Y'all pick. Which do you want?" he asked. They took the water.

By the time the story ran, the group had raised about half of its $8,000 goal, and the GoFundMe was still open.How the march ended, with Raby's photos from the road, is on the record with “The Greatest Salute,” LSU Engineering's profile of him.