THE JUNGLE OF A LIFE

A 21-year-old soldier -- his handsome features taut and exhausted -- began, in plain sight, to walk away from his military camp. He faced disciplinary charges for missing reveille without explanation. He had already served 90 days in the stockade for disobeying an officer. While confined, he had complained about the food, the malaria and the leeches that crawled up and down his body. Like many of the black soldiers in the unit -- men who swung shovels and pickaxes and broke rock all day long -- he complained of mistreatment. In his case it was quite specific: He had served at least two weeks beyond his 90-day original sentence without explanation. So, on that morning, he walked out of camp as easily as a man strolling across a city park. On both sides of the road on which he walked, there was nothing but jungle.

Within hours, Perry was confronted on the road by Lt. Harold Cady, who aimed to arrest him. Perry was sweating and sobbing.

"Get back! Get back!" he called out to Cady, 28, who had hopped from his jeep, unarmed, and was inching closer. Three others who had been working on the road remained in the jeep. Perry -- who, like some other soldiers, had begun using opium during his stay in the jungle -- raised his rifle and fired a shot into Cady's heart, then another into his stomach. He then turned and fled into the jungle. Cady died a short while later. He left behind a young wife and daughter.

Within days, Perry came upon a strange sight and heard voices. It was a camp of some kind. "Just outside its walls were cords of vine, hung from poles like washing lines," Koerner writes in his chronicle. "And dangling off these vines were several scrubbed and polished human skulls, with the horns of water buffaloes affixed to their sides." Perry had come upon a group of Naga tribesmen. He charmed his way into their village by using body language, then truly captured their admiration when he backtracked and retrieved some food for them from area farms.

The U.S. Army had a murdered officer to bury -- and a runaway soldier to bring to justice. The manhunt began: There were roadblocks, communiques sent over telegraph wires. But days into the search, frustration set in as nothing turned up. Some Army searchers thought Perry might have been devoured by tigers or fallen victim to headhunters.

Grilled by Army officers, the black GIs who knew Perry had no information about his whereabouts. Many believed a mental collapse had driven him to his murderous act.

What the Naga tribesmen did understand about Perry was that he was not a colonialist. He was not British. Their affection for him grew. In time he took a young Naga bride and fathered a child. "I intended to pass the remaining years of natural life in the jungles," Perry would later confess, " . . . and live with the Naga girl who I claim as my wife."

Koerner came to think of Perry as "the world's first hippie."

Four months passed. Then word of a black man living in the jungle seeped out from a rice station run by the British. The Army resumed its manhunt. One night, Perry was sitting inside a village hut and spotted a beam from a flashlight. He bolted and several shots were fired. A bullet tore through Perry's chest, but he kept going. He found a slope to descend, but his pursuers were at his heels.

Cornered and bleeding, he collapsed. The hunt was over, and Perry was taken into custody.

At the makeshift Army hospital, Perry had to be given blood. It was blood from the black soldiers; the Army would not allow a black soldier to be given blood from whites.

Perry's court-martial began in early September 1944 at a tea plantation in Ledo, India. It lasted just over six hours. His military lawyer, Clayton Oberholtzer, had been a small-town attorney in Ohio. It was his first murder case. The verdict: guilty. The sentence: death by hanging.