THE JUNGLE OF A LIFE
Long Ago, One Soldier Fled Justice, and Injustice, Too

By Wil Haygood
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 4, 2008

He was a smoothie and a cad, walking and swaying up and down U Street as if he owned the town. Young women swooned over Herman Perry in those pre-World War II days. He liked silk suits and white shirts, soul food and dancing at night. The war, as it had done to so many others, caught him in mid-stride.

Shipped out to the Indo-Burmese theater, he found the terrain strange and the heat wicked. And when Pvt. Herman Perry dashed into the jungle, fleeing the Army and the hangman's noose, then settling in with a tribe of headhunters, he knew quite well that he was a long way from U Street.

It is one of the more bizarre sagas of that war. Herman Perry's military service involved murder, arrest, escape, a young jungle bride and the mind-altering groove of opium. There was also the tangled brew of race: A black man, Perry served in a segregated Army overseen by white officers.

The story and shame of Perry's life, however, all but vanished as the years passed. Historians had so many heroic war stories to focus on. Perry's family lived, until recently, in a state of bewilderment as to the circumstances surrounding his death: His remains were returned to them only last year, 62 years after his death.

The life and death of Herman Perry might have remained a footnote -- some crazed military cat doped up and living in the jungle -- were it not for Brendan I. Koerner.

Koerner could hardly believe Perry's story when he first stumbled across a mention of it in an Army document while he was researching an article about military executions. He became obsessed with the case and left his Manhattan home to go in search of Perry in the Burmese jungle. He got frightfully ill looking for the ghost of a soldier who used to hang out at Meridian Hill Park listening to music on sweet summer days.

* * *

During World War II, American military officials set about building a road along the Burma-India border that would ferry supplies to aid the Chinese. It was a massive construction project that would tax thousands of troops. And it involved the 849th Engineer Aviation Battalion (750 black soldiers, Herman Perry among them, and about 50 white officers), which headed overseas from Staten Island in July 1943. None of the black soldiers were told their destination.

A 33-year-old first-time author is sitting in a diner on U Street. He has black hair and thin features. He's wearing a purple shirt, pinstriped pants and orange and black sneakers. Koerner, author of the just-published "Now the Hell Will Start: One Soldier's Flight From the Greatest Manhunt of World War II," is a white man living in Harlem with his wife, Courtney, and their infant son, Maceo.

A 1996 graduate of Yale, Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired magazine. To start unraveling Perry's military life, he filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Army. A box of materials arrived at Koerner's home, notably the trial transcript of Perry's court-martial. He was astonished at what he read, and became seized with a dream to write a book. "It was this 'Heart of Darkness,' 'Apocalypse Now' type story," he says.

* * *

This is what happened on another side of the world on the sweltering and unforgiving afternoon of March 5, 1944:

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.

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."

* * *

The sister of the hanged man is sitting at a dining room table in Anacostia, in her son Kirk's home. Edna Wilson, who is 83, lives next door, but she does not want to disturb her guard dog. She is the sole survivor of the five Perry siblings.

She recalls her youthful brother Herman as being "happy-go-lucky, always asking about the girls."

She has pictures of him: wooing a pretty girl at Meridian Hill Park, in his Army uniform with a cigarette in his hand; posing in a suit with a smooth smile on his face.

She says she could tell her brother was disappointed with his treatment in the military. "It was tough for him all along. Going overseas in the bottom of that ship like that. The colored soldiers were treated like a bunch of animals."

The hanged man's sister worked a lifetime at St. Elizabeths Hospital. She was a psychiatric nurse's assistant. She worked around those who had gone mad, among them the poet Ezra Pound, confined to St. Elizabeths for making anti-American statements during World War II. "I'd see him sitting out on the grass," she says of the poet.

She is holding a sheaf of materials that were gathered by Hank Johnson before he died. Some documents, letters, military pictures.

When news of Perry's death reached her family back in 1945, she says they were all perplexed. They knew nothing of her brother's precarious emotional state or his ineffective legal counsel. "I felt helpless," she says. "There was nobody to turn to to help you do anything."

She says, "We know it's a horrible thing that happened. We know that."

She says, "He was just a kid. And to go from the city to the jungle like that . . . " Her voice trails off.

She says, "He didn't have nobody on his side."

For many, many years, Perry's family did not even know where his body was buried. "We thought someplace over there in the jungle," Wilson says.

Cullum told them of Perry's resting place in a military cemetery in Hawaii. Wilson asked Koerner if he could help them bring Herman back.

So Wilson, living on a fixed income, scrounged up a thousand dollars to have her brother's body dug up and cremated. Just seven months ago, there was a knock at her door. The mailman had delivered a box holding her brother's ashes.

"He's home now," she says of the Jungle King, who used to glide up and down U Street.

Wilson purchased a silvery urn with Oriental designs. She added a small necklace with a tiny black name tag.

The only writing on Herman Perry's headstone in Hawaii had been his name and date of death. No date of birth. As if he had been born just to die -- with the things in between unremembered.