THE JUNGLE OF A LIFE

Perry awaited his fateful day in the Ledo stockade shackled to a log "like a chastised dog," as Koerner puts it. The weeks rolled on, into December, because an appeal was automatic. There was further delay as the Army misplaced some documents.

Perry used his time in a manner he thought wise: He plotted an escape. In December, he vanished, compliments of a pair of wire cutters that someone had slipped to him. Army brass exploded. News of the escape spread widely. Reporters there coined a nickname for Perry: the Jungle King.

The Army turned to Earl Owen Cullum and ordered him to recapture Perry.

Cullum had been a Dallas police officer before joining the military. In the Army, not surprisingly, he became a military policeman, assigned for a while to Calcutta. He was handsome, no-nonsense, liked having his picture taken, often recited military history, and was not amused at Perry's wiliness.

Cullum and his men caught sight of Perry at a woodcutter's camp on New Year's Day 1945. Shots were fired and one grazed Perry's ankle. But he escaped yet again. His elusiveness left Perry's pursuers with a feeling they were being taunted.

"A colored Houdini from USA aided by a few Naga tricks is sure playing 'hob' with the traps that have been set for him," read an article in the Assam Police Gazette, a military newspaper. "He has turned cart wheels and tap danced over and through rice paddies and tea patches with the grace and abandon of a Gypsy Rose Lee in her best strip tease. . . . Woe be unto that colored boy when he takes off his rabbit's foot cause then he is through and I mean all finished."

On Feb. 20, 1945, Perry was spotted yet again. More shots were fired and he was wounded in his Achilles tendon. A day later, he popped up from some jungle bush after hearing yapping dogs. A bullet nicked the tip of his nose. But he hobbled away as quickly as he could.

Days later, sitting at a campfire, surrounded yet again, Perry was out of energy. "You got me," is all he said to his captors.

Shortly before his execution, Perry wrote to his younger brother Aaron, who was in basic training at the Army's Fort Meade: "I did wrong myself please don't make the same mistake its very easy to get in trouble but hell to get out of . . . " He then urged Aaron to spend as much time as he could in the upcoming days with their mother: "While I die once she will die a thousand times . . . "

The letter closed with a blunt, chilling phrase: "Don't answer."

On the morning of March 15, 1945, Perry was driven in the dark to his date with the gallows. The convoy included 17 military police officers. Army brass feared the convoy might be stopped and fired upon by those sympathetic to Perry's plight: He had come to embody, albeit in a spasmodic and murderous act, some of the frustrations of the oppressed black soldier. If there were any confrontation on the road, Army officers were told, they were to immediately kill Perry before defending themselves. The drive went off uninterrupted.

Before he died in 2003 at the age of 89, Cullum received a letter from Hank Johnson, Perry's half brother, who had been trying to find out about Perry's last days. The two began a brief correspondence. Cullum seemed to have adopted a gentler attitude toward Perry: "If he had used the right attitude, and if the Army had used his abilities, he could have been an excellent jungle scout," Cullum wrote Johnson. "But in the 1940s he was a roadbuilder."