Monday, February 26, 2001

By Jan Wesner Childs
Okinawa bureau

Marine Lance Cpl. Patrick Alimbuyao went to his platoon leader on the evening of March 20, 1992, and told him he couldn’t do an obstacle course at the northern training area on Okinawa because he was afraid of the water.

The hard-charging platoon leader, 2nd Lt. Marshall Davidson, thought the Marine was being weak. Davidson told Alimbuyao he had to do the course — and promised him nothing would happen.

The next day, Alimbuyao fell 30 feet into a river and drowned on the obstacle course.

Davidson, now an aspiring director in California, has made a short film about the incident called Game Day.

"It’s crushing," Davidson said in a recent telephone interview from his home in Santa Monica, Calif., remembering Alimbuyao’s death.

Davidson, 33, wrote, produced, edited and directed the 20-minute film as a thesis project for his master’s degree in fine arts and television at the University of Southern California.

Game Day is being screened at several film festivals, and a director who saw the film invited Davidson to work on the set of the TV series NYPD Blue. Davidson has written a full-length movie version of the story and is in the process of hiring an agent.

Although the characters and events are all based on what happened the day Alimbuyao died, Davidson said some of the events were changed to make the story more dramatic. Also, the names in Game Day have been changed. For example, Davidson becomes 2nd Lt. Robert Walker, and Alimbuyao is Lance Cpl. Ali.

A Marine spokeswoman on Okinawa said she was unaware of the project, so she could not comment on it.

Alimbuyao’s brother, Paul Alimbuyao, said in a phone interview from his home in Hawaii that he also didn’t know about the film, but that he would like to see it so he could learn more about what happened to his brother.

Game Day centers on Davidson and is told through flashbacks that occur while he is being interviewed about the incident by Naval Criminal Investigative Service agents.

Davidson was questioned just a few hours after Alimbuyao died. He was not punished.

But he won’t ever forget what happened that day.

"If I had to point to one day in my life where I grew up, that was the day," Davidson said.

Davidson described himself as a "brash, arrogant 23-year-old" when he woke up that morning. At the end of the day, he was a different person.

"I think that certainly there was a humility that I didn’t have going into that day," he said. "There’s also a sense of your own mortality. I felt that at 23 I was immortal.

"I think in those respects, having lost someone and having made a promise to protect [him], you obviously see that the world doesn’t revolve around you and what you promise."

Davidson was assigned to Headquarters Battalion of the 3rd Marine Division at Camp Courtney. He was leading his platoon through a Super Squad competition, where units compete against each other in the obstacle course and other contests.

"We were under the gun," Davidson said. "We were trying to get a good score. We had been running hard all day long."

The obstacle that worried Alimbuyao was a single rope across a river. Some of the officers in the battalion had tried it the day before and failed. Alimbuyao and other Marines in Davidson’s platoon knew this.

The rope was about 30 feet above the water. The Marines had to straddle the top of the rope and inch across. There were no safety lines. It was Alimbuyao’s turn to haul the M-60 machine gun, which added about 23 pounds to the equipment he was carrying as he started across the rope.

Alimbuyao fell to the river below, which had recently flooded its banks and was about 12 feet deep. He became caught in some tree roots underwater.

It was chilly that day, and the two safety swimmers in the river had donned wetsuits but neglected to put on weight belts or masks. They couldn’t swim deep enough to rescue Alimbuyao.

Davidson said no one knew that Alimbuyao had come to him the night before, and that he didn’t take the Marines’ nervousness seriously.

"And as fate would have it, he ended up drowning at the place he was scared of," Davidson said.

Davidson left the Marine Corps in 1994 as a captain and enrolled in film school in 1996.

It cost $90,000 to make Game Day. Most of the money was put up by two of Davidson’s fraternity brothers from his days as an undergrad at USC before he joined the Marines.

The movie was filmed in a state park and former movie set in California. About half the cast members were Marines stationed at Camp Pendleton, Calif. The others were professional actors.

Davidson chose his experience with Alimbuyao’s death as his thesis project because the subject was so personal. He focused the film on his own feelings, and the emotions he went through on the day Alimbuyao died.

"I had said, ‘I will protect you tomorrow if I have to protect you myself.’ I made a promise to him. That’s been difficult to come to terms with.

"The only way to make the film honest and truthful and plausible is to point the finger at my character."

You can read read more about Davidson’s film at www.gamedaymovie.com.

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