Word: moros
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Meanwhile the Japanese opened up a new sector last week, swinging far to the south in an enveloping action. Off Davao, 600 miles south of Manila on the Moro-inhabited island of Mindanao, the enemy appeared one day with four transports, naval and air support...
Usually it is a lot of trouble to kill a juramentado. The Moros are fierce fellows whose teeth are stained black and their lips red from chewing betel nut. A juramentado has the strength of a man slashing his way, with a wicked, wavy-edged kris, to a Moro heaven filled with sloe-eyed houris. When the U.S. Army first occupied the Philippines, many a soldier was killed after emptying his .38 into a Moro who kept on coming. So the Army switched to .455, which nearly kick a man's arm off but are no respecters of frenzy...
...past two months, juramentado murders in Sulu have averaged one every other day. In Jolo, the biggest city (pop. 6,000), Moro Aharaji went juramentado after being conscripted, chopped off the head of a Chinese baker, killed one Filipino soldier and slashed another before he was stopped by a policeman's shotgun blast. He fell dead on exactly the spot where the same policeman had killed another juramentado ten days earlier. Townspeople shivered, waited for the next attack...
...constabulary rounded up Moro outlaws who seized on the panic for raids on unprotected villages. But against the real juramentados there was nothing to do except keep trigger fingers limber. No one could say which Moro might suddenly run amuck, or where...
...could anyone explain the wave of fanaticism. Since going juramentado has lost some of its religious significance and is now sometimes sheer homicidal mania, it could have been just the excitement of the Moro harvest festivals. Or the out breaks might reflect Moro resentment against conscription or against the despised, diminutive, Christian Filipinos' (with whom the Moros have fought for centuries) settling and trying to govern in Moro territory...