Word: igorot
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...battalion commander, Lieut. Colonel Powell A. Fraser, had his jeeps dismantled, called for native bearers. Scores of volunteers-sturdy, brown-bodied Igorot women -eagerly picked up wheels, engines and other parts, carried them along paths which at one point soared 2,000 feet above the road. On the other side of the chasm the jeeps were reassembled, and Fraser's men sped after the Japs. The Igorot women stayed behind to help the engineers rebuild the road...
...Japanese rout grew, U.S. planes searched the roads and trails for the retreating enemy. One observation plane called for fire on a column in shiny American cars, stolen in Manila, and bamboo-hooded carabao carts, snatched from Igorot farmers. Wrote TIME Correspondent William Gray: "When I saw the area two days later, burned roadside huts were still smoking, the air was ripe with the stench of dead men and animals and souring spilled rice. A scattered pile...
Each morning the Igorot women line up beside the road, standing or squatting like bright salt shakers on a shelf, awaiting their orders for the day. They are modestly clothed, many in American house dresses, though their men frequently wear only loose-tailed shirts and red G-strings...
...have not gone and the trucks cannot go. They carry their burdens on their backs, holding them with thin, woven bamboo head straps. Each woman takes up to 50 pounds, one-fourth the load saddled on pack horses on the same trails. But there are six times as many Igorot women available as pack horses...
...shortage of men carriers and 40 women volunteered. The Army paid them 1.50 pesos a day. The first day they made three times as many trips as the men. At least one battalion of the 33rd Division lived and fought last week on supplies, carried up by the Igorot women. When Japs fired on the trails the men dropped their loads and scattered; the women, undisturbed, plodded on in a long single file to the front...