On July 4, 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt declared the Philippines War officially over. Except, of course, "in the country inhabited by the Moro tribes." The Moros, so called by the Spanish, were 35,000 fanatical Islamic warriors, Muslim terrorists if you will, who "fought in the way of Allah" and declared a jihad, or holy war, against American infidels. The Moros were a small, fierce people with no fear of dying. One of the few things they feared was that their families would survive them, so they often charged into certain death holding their children in front of them as shields. With almost unstoppable bullet-eating assaults, booby trap warfare as sophisticated and deadly as in Vietnam, and suicidal attacks reminiscent of the Middle East today, the Moros kept more than one-fifth of the entire U.S. Army fully occupied for a decade.
With hair and eyebrows shaved, arteries and genitals bound in leather to slow the flow of blood and deaden the sensation of pain, drugged out of their minds on who-knows-what, and armed mostly with spears, hatchets, daggers and swords, plus a few old Arab matchlocks, ancient flintlocks dating to the American Revolution and the Southern War for Independence, the Moros made superhuman efforts to fulfill their oaths to kill (and eat) Christians in order to assure their places in paradise.
Moro invincibility was legendary. In one instance, a Moro warrior received 14 bullet wounds in five minutes, three of which penetrated his brain, and yet he fought on. As a seasoned Army officer put it, "Even the veteran Indian fighters among [the Army regulars] had to learn that a Moro was more dangerous than a renegade Apache and twice as hard to kill."
The arrival of the new Colt semiautomatic pistols in 1911 was welcome, as this account of the death of a Moro warrior by an American soldier attends: "He had 32 Krag balls through him and was only stopped by the 33rd bullet - a Colt .45 slug through both ears."
