Lashio, Burma October 29, 1943
The laborer was tired. He could barely hold his bowl heaped full of rice in his hands. A few small strips of a river fish had been grilled and mixed with the carbohydrates that had made up the overwhelming majority of calories the father of five had eaten throughout his entire life. His three boys, the oldest seventeen, were laughing under a tree with a dozen other teenagers who were also working in the transhipment yards. They all had money in their pockets, and weight on their frames. They knew they looked good for the girls.
The old man felt every moment of his thirty seven years as he finished his meal and handed the wooden bowl back to the hunchbacked old woman who was responsible to take care of this particular work gang. The other older men of the gang rose and the foreman yelled at the teenagers to re-assemble. There was another train due dragging several thousand more tons of supplies that had to be moved from box cars to the long line of Ford and Canadian Pattern trucks. There would be no excitement, there never would be, as the road was beyond their imagination. 10,000 workers labored every day to send 10,000 or more tons of cargo to Kumman and beyond.