Back in America

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these very young men, mostly teenagers

They get on this ship in New Jersey.  They go down underneath the deck and they barely see the  sun for a long time, weeks and weeks. They don't know where they're going  and they finally get there and they're this place they can't  even possibly imagine.

These are, before the era of mass communication and mass  travel, it's hard to understand  how exotic and weird this place must have seemed to these people.

  📍 📍 📍 In 1944, a US soldier killed, a white lieutenant, vanished into the jungle, and months later reappeared  as the king of a headhunter  Tribe. Journalist Brendan I. Koerner spent years chasing that story. His book Now, the Hell Will Start retraces  Herman Perry descent into the jungle  and the system that pushed him there. Brendan, take me back to 2003. You stumble across a single  line in a military biography about a  murderer who lived. Tribe.

What was it about that note that made you stop everything and start digging? 

I've often found that ideas come from little asides and the equivalent of notes  in the margin and things that arise in the course of  other projects. And at that time I was working in a project and I got this bibliography   from the Military History Institute in Carlisle,  Pennsylvania.

And. It was about basically the history of the death  penalty in the US military. And I was  going through and it had a citation of a self-published booklet really, that was in the  institute's archives about the case  of Herman Perry who was hanged in northeast India in 1945.

And  you know what it said in a footnote was just, Perry  Long evaded capture by hiding with Burmese Hill Tribe. And  just immediately I think it maybe think about Heart of Darkness or  Apocalypse Now of someone who was a fugitive from, Americans  and went, quote unquote upriver and found a second  act in life in a different kind of civilization society.

That's all I really knew. I  was coming from nothing in terms of information. There was very little  written about this, and I remember I basically went. And  sent away for a copy of the booklet that  was in the archives, and that turns out was written by the former military policeman  who was involved in the manhunt for Perry in 44 and  45.

Something about it just clicked with me. And I was like, this is an amazing story I love stories about fugitives.   I think there's something really alluring  about the notion of being on the run.

And then I really dove more deeply into it and I really realized there was  another dimension, which is really a commentary about  the segregation of the military in the US at that time. And it was a really important piece of  Black American history that had never been written about.

I knew very  little about segregation in the army at that time. Which, the army was not integrated into  the Korean War. So it was a whole  thing that I, was, had been sitting there that I feel very few people had actually written about and explored. And certainly  no one had really explored Perry's full  story in depth.

And that kind of led to me spending essentially five years, researching. 

So you asked for this booklet. Is it when you filled the Freedom of Information Act request.

That  was actually prior. Getting the FOIA documents was really key. It's always key to these kinds of projects. But actually the first  thing I did is I just I think I just emailed them and said, can you send me a  Xerox copy of this self-published booklet that's in your archives?

And they did. And it was written by this man named   Earl Cullum, who was lieutenant in the mps.   In India at that time in Northeast India, and he was brought in to search  for Perry actually in early 1945, predominantly.   So it was amazing, and I ended up actually speaking, he passed away by that time.

I ended up  speaking to his daughter flying out to San  Antonio having a time with his daughter and her husband. And they had  amazing memories to share and also more artifacts and  more documents and more memories he'd written down. This was clearly a really important event in his  life.

Maybe the defining event of his life. Being  involved in this case. So that was really the first kind of strand that I unraveled. And then, yes, I did write a  Freedom Information Act request regarding the legal  proceedings, the court martial that was carried out involving Perry and there was like some amazing documents and like

 

It took 10 weeks between the time you requested those documents. You got it. I wonder how did you feel when you received that envelope? Apparently it's a

thick envelope  that you got.

It was more than an envelope. It was like a real, pretty thick, almost a package that you  get, it's incredible feeling because you really  realize that as much work you've already put into it at that point there's things you haven't  even thought about.

Characters that were involved, you hadn't thought  about dimensions to the story. And also to hear Perry's voice through his testimony  and through his letters things he'd written  was really powerful. 'cause I knew that I could then really give him a rich voice in this book. 

So now I'm really curious at how you manage to get into the head of  Herman Perry. To describe, the man  left very little writing. And yet you managed to express the smell of gun power or  the panic that he felt,

How did you  did you reconstruct that?

And I also read that you really, now you, when you write, you start by  a storyboard.

I wonder if  you used a storyboard

at the time, like a visual storyboard, and if you did, what did that look like? 

My process is to take, lots and lots of  images. Sometimes they'll be photographs.

 Sometimes they'll be just screenshots from documents that detail what  the action. In that scene is gonna be,  they can be all sorts of things, but it's basically like a bunch of images that I really just arrange.  Honestly, at that time. I think I was just using iPhoto  to arrange them and then caption them with couple sentences saying why it's there  and where it fits in the story.

Then I sequence  them in the arc of the story. And that's like a technique that I've just used  time and again, because it really helps with visualization.  And I will say I didn't do that until I actually went out to this part of the world. I went to  Northeast India and Northwest Burma and  traveled this what remains of what's called the Ledo Road, which is the  military highway, the project that Perry's  Battalion was assigned to help build in the jungle and that really remote part of the world.

So  for. Unfamiliar with it. What? What was the Ledo Road

and why was it  important, and mostly why was  it such a crucible for the black

people that were taken there to build it? 

So the idea was that when the Chinese government in exile which basically set up shop  in central China after Japan took over, the  eastern coast of China they went to the interior and we needed to keep them supplied. They were our  key ally in this part of the war. And we  had a land route we were able to use up through Burma until the Japanese also took over Burma. 

Sees that means of supplying them. And so we decided  to build another road called the Ledo Road, extending from the northeast tip of  of India the Assam Province across the  border into Burma. And then the idea was to have its snake all the way up to China. Through ing and  up to a Chong ching to su keep them supplied. 

Now this was a incredibly actually foolhardy endeavor. This is like one of the most hostile environments on the  planet. It's this incredibly, high  mountains and thick jungle. And so they would like. Had all these difficulties building this road. That's what a lot  of the book is about, is that someone had this  idea in Washington DC or somewhere, that they were gonna build this road and keep the Chinese supplied, but on the ground  it was almost impossible.

It was really difficult,  and it took them a couple years and it wasn't until like basically the spring of 1945.  That they were able to complete the road. And by the next  year, most of it had washed away. So it really only had a couple months of actual use in the war. And beyond that, like we'd actually gotten pretty good at supplying them via the air.

By then we had a lot of air bases. And so it ended up being this kind of huge  boondoggle and kind of this project that didn't really have  a use in the end. And you mentioned these black soldiers who were assigned. What's interesting about the segregated  military is that usually  these all black units would be assigned not to combat, but to labor projects. 

They were used as laborers, and so that's  what Herman Perry's unit was. They were shipped he's from Washington dc. They did their basic training, and then they  were shipped around the world and then taken on trains  and other vehicles from Calcutta. All the way up to Assam and then up to the Burmese  border and basically building this road in the  jungle in these really terrible conditions.

And that's a lot of the book is about how terrible the conditions were. 

Half of the people working there had malaria, 

Yeah.

 955 out of 1000.

I want to pause here just to better understand who is Herman Perry? He grew up in Northern. 

He's born in North Carolina, but actually, but he  moves to Washington DC that's like a pretty  popular migratory story for black Americans from the South.

But his parents were cotton pickers. Did he work in the field too, or was he too young? 

No, he was too young. But he becomes a butcher actually in Washington, dc. And he has a brother named Aaron  Perry, who's a pretty famous boxer, which was another part  of the story that, at this time was like really rising up the ranks of professional boxing.

But Herman Perry was working as  a meat cutter in Washington, DC. And it's actually  drafted into the military and assigned to this labor unit that departs to go to the, what's called the China Burma, India  Theater of the War. So they actually take a ocean  liner and they take it to Calcutta, and then transit there to the bur India Indo Burmese border.

Is he traveling in good condition?

No,  it's pretty bad. Quarters on the ship were segregated you have these black battalions just traveling in the hold, essentially like cargo. And so they're only allowed limited  time above board.

So when they arrive in India,  they're not particularly in good shape. And what's interesting to me is that, they didn't tell them where they were going. I think that's always such a fascinating part of this, is that, you have these, these  very young men, mostly teenagers, they get on this ship in  New Jersey. They go down underneath the deck and they basically barely see the sun for a long time, weeks and weeks. And then they don't know where they're going and they finally get  there and they're this place they can't even possibly imagine. 

These are, before the era of mass communication and mass travel, it's hard to understand how exotic and weird this place must have seemed to these people. 

So Herman Perry North Carolina moves to  Washington, DC is drafted travel.  He doesn't know where he goes. Then he hand up  like forced laborer having to carve  this root in the jungle.  What happened, what happened for him to take  his rifle and kill lieutenant caddy, 

Yeah,

Help  us understand that moment. 

I think it's what we would now diagnose as a mental health  crisis. He basically had a mental health breakdown. So there  was a time when he basically was sent to the stockade for some  relatively minor offenses. And this was pretty common  practice to punish the soldiers by sending the stockade  where the conditions were terrible in Ledo, India. 

And he had a really difficult time there. And when he got out, he started 

So  

Stockade is a military prison. . And when he gets out, he's pretty traumatized by that experience. And he actually starts abusing drugs, which was really common.

There was  a lot of abuse of like cannabis and opium  in particular among soldiers working on the road. It really exacerbates his mental health problems that he's having. And then one day he oversleep  and he misses the call to work in the morning. 

And so he arrives late. And basically he's told that he's gonna be taken to the guardhouse and probably court-martial and sent to the stockade again. And  he has a breakdown, a nervous breakdown, and  he grabs his rifle and starts wandering down the road. And he is saying I'm not going back to the stockade.

Essentially, like he's having just these  visions of going back to this place where he was traumatized  and unfortunately this lieutenant is following him and trying to apprehend him and probably misjudged the condition, the mental  condition he was in. Probably tried to seize the  gun away from him, and Perry shoots him in the chest and kills him.

A young man from, New York state and I will say, like one of the things I  wish I could have done in the story is better understand.  His story. His name was Harold Cady, and he also was a young man who had been sent to a part of the world. He was from a small town here in  New York State, in south central New York state, near the Pennsylvania  border. When he left his wife was pregnant. So he had a daughter he never got to see, which is really tragic. He was just trying to do his job. He was basically told  to go. Apprehend this man.   And WW was killed in the course of doing so. And I really did try to contact people in his family.

I tried to find his daughter, but it was so long ago I wasn't  really able to get too much more information about him. Unfortunately,  whatever I could find I put in the book. The second that Perry does this, he runs off into the jungle. And I think that once he like clear, clears his  mind a little bit, he realizes that he's killed a lieutenant  a white lieutenant, and that he's surely gonna be put to death if he's apprehended that he's murdered a, a commanding officer. 

And so he makes the decision that he can't  go back. He needs to escape. There's not a lot of options to escape, and I think this is some of the most fascinating part of the story is like you are in the middle of this  incredibly hostile jungle. You  have the entire might of the American military searching for you, the military police in that part of the world.

What do you do? What's your play? And I think a  lot of the book is trying to like. Track exactly  what he did and how he survived. And I think part of it is early on, especially, he did come back to camp and he was assisted by people, to some,  I think that, I don't wanna say the say folk hero, but  I think that there was obviously animosity between the black laborers and the white officers.

And so I think that he found some people in his unit  and other black labor units that  did provide him with some basic supplies that was able to sustain him during the early part of his journey into the jungle.

You went there in person. 

Yeah. 

Tell us, how does it look like? Would you see yourself just fleeing in the jungle like it did? 

It would be pretty difficult and frightening. It's a very rough country.   You have a lot of hazards. You have mosquitoes, you have  tigers, you have a lot of, you have very harsh weather, very wet, harsh weather. It's a really  difficult place. It's a really difficult to imagine  being out there with shelter in particular, which you didn't have for part of this.

And without like medical supplies,  without changes of clothes, you're constantly wet.  Yeah, it would be a really rough place to be on the run. I gotta be honest, it's pretty incredible. He made it as, as long as he did. Okay. 

So indeed, as we know, he flees. And he made  it to a tribe, the Naga People  known for being headhunter. So tell us, how  does he manage to be accepted and to be  pretty, pretty quickly named the Jungle King.  He married a very young girl. 14.  He even has a child with that. Woman.

Take us back there. 

People called him the jungle king. He wasn't actual like royalty in the tribe. But the head of this village, did  bestow his daughter with Herman Perry, and they were married  according to the customs of this tribe.

Yeah, the Naga basically have occupied that area for long  time. And, the British were, contacted  them quite a bit during the colonial period. There were a lot of violence back and forth with the British, and they've always been  fiercely independent. And live in these very harsh conditions  in these bamboo structures in these very small villages.

And yes, they're religion centers around two  things. One is like basically,  anthropy, basically they believe in like men becoming leopards and things of that nature. And also headhunting is really  important, was really important to them at that time. No  longer, but at that time it was still something the Bri the British had tried to suppress but was still very much part  of their culture.

And the  Americans knew them. They would come down from the hills and they live in pretty inaccessible areas. Of these mountains, they would come  down and try to trade with the with the  Americans. This was actually a source of opium for a lot of soldiers. They would sell trinkets and things of that nature.

But I think the  first way he ingratiated himself with them was by bringing  things that his allies back in the camp had given him. For example, things like tin foods were  really big. So all these kinda like modern.  Conveniences and modern bobs that the Naga had previously traded like opium for.

Now Herman  Perry basically gave to them as a gift. And so that was  really the first way that it was almost like a transactional kind of thing. As he spent more time there they obviously  became more affectionate and more supportive  of him. And yes, and eventually he ends up, marrying the daughter of this chief of the, of this  village called called Tag ga.

And that's where he  basically settles down and he gets involved in agriculture. They have terrorist farming there. And so he gets involved in like rice cultivation  cannabis. Opium things  of that nature. And so really he started a new life up in the mountains. It's pretty incredible.

It's, the thing that first attracted me to the story is  like, for me, the theme I keep  on writing about again and again is personal reinvention. And he achieved that for sure, if only for a relatively brief time. 

He clearly spoke some of the language and that was noted  when he was apprehended by the Americans that he was able to pick up a good deal of the language during his time there. 

When you went there, did you manage to find this tribe? 

So the Naga are a people. And they have different villages and  different settlements, and they have different branches.  It's a very complex, society. So certainly the naga  there and, have gone through a great deal of transformation  since then.

I think one of the biggest ones is now the Baptist missionaries really got  up there after the war. American style baptism is the dominant  religion there now. But in a lot of ways they still live, especially on the Burmese side of the border. I  would say still live a lot like they did  in the forties simple bamboo structures.

Subsistence agriculture  weariness and even hostility towards outsiders  a lot of the time. Certainly weariness towards the governments of both India and  Burma. The border is militarized. At least it  was when I was there. And so there is a lot of.  Hostility or conflict between these native  peoples and the, these military outposts that are there in the Indo Burmese border.

Did you stay with them? 

I did stay with them sometimes. In fact, I got super sick eating some fish in one of the  houses. But yeah it's a very, it's a very subsistence.  Lifestyle, very bare bones.

When I remember going to this,   bamboo hut in the middle of nowhere,  and the only decoration they had in the main room of this bamboo, it was called a bacha was like a  tapestry of Jesus holding a lamb. So  you can see the influence that the Western influence subsequent to World War II is still there. 

So now that you went there, that you even stayed with the tribe,  you can really put yourself into the mind of Herman Perry.  If you were able to ask him one question, what would it be? 

Why did you commit this crime? What was going through your mind? We can   know he was having a mental breakdown, but I'd love to know more about  his thought process and what led him to make that horrendous  decision that, ruined multiple lives. 

That's another thing that I often write about. It's fundamentally  decent people who just find themselves in crazy  circumstances and make terrible decisions. I just wanna know, like  for you, what was it like  as someone from a completely different alien culture?  To live literally on the other side of the  world in a world that you probably couldn't even imagine, in your wildest dreams   as a child growing up in North Carolina and then being a teenager  in dc what was it like?

Like how did you  process, the fact that you reinvented yourself as this  basically gentleman Naga farmer in the Indo Burmese Wilder. 

Yeah, that crazy. And another thing that seems to be. Crazy is the amount  of energy that the military  spent to find him,

and to prosecute him and to execute him. What do you make of that?

 They were obviously afraid of there being general unrest among the troops and the longer this guy's on the run, the more the troops  can be maybe we can get away with that. Maybe like these officers   aren't so tough or aren't so fearsome, they can't even find one guy.

It was like partly about just keeping the chain of command and keeping military discipline  was important to this project ledo road.  It's like you can't have labor unrest essentially. The other part is just like he killed a commanding officer and that's gotta be the most serious crime that  an enlisted man can commit. 

And I think it would've been inappropriate for them to just give up after they were frustrated for the first couple months, they really did have to see this one through. 

So it took them five months

and they finally.  

Yeah, it took them five months and this is the, this is what's so amazing about the story is that it took them the five months, the  first time, so you know, they are able to eventually  get a tip. That leads them to the village where he's living. And  actually they go in and in the course of trying to apprehend  him, Herman Perry is shot in the chest with a rifle.

Miraculously  survives is is court-martialed  for murdering. Lieutenant Cady found guilty, sentenced to hang.  But the death sentence has to be approved by the  War department back in Washington, DC So they're waiting for that. And at, during that time,  Perry is incarcerated at the Ledo stockade the  same place he'd been trying to avoid the first time when he killed Lieutenant Cady. 

And he manages to escape from there. And he goes on the run  for three more months. Incredibly. And this time there's even a bigger manhunt, and  that's when Lieutenant Cullum, whose booklet I obtained  from MHI in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, that's when he gets involved in this case. 

And the finding thanks to his gun his rifle. 

Yeah. Yeah. He had a rifle at the time and that's an important  clue for them to track him. They were able to track back  the M1 rifle that he had, so they eventually  pinned him down. They basically find him and he had a much more difficult  time. The second time he was out

the village where  he was living to Gunga is on the Burmese side  of the border, up in the mountains. The Ledo is quite a ways  away, so they drive him back down. It's on the low lands of  Assam. And so he clearly was trying to get back to his  village, but it's many miles away.

And he was on foot  and he had nothing. And so he is, living out  in the open trying to  get help from people if he can, trying to steal things like really  just some of the gutsiest, like fugitive machinations  you can imagine. He never did make it back to his home village though.

He never see his child, 

When he was apprehended, his wife was pregnant with his  child. Is one of the most amazing reporting things I dug  up, is that I found a veteran who had  seen the child in 1945  that I basically went to the hill country in Texas.

He was quite elderly at that  moment, but I found him and he had vivid memories of, he'd been sent  up into the wilderness. I forget the exact mission he was on, but they go to  this village and they show him this child.  And it's clearly, half black American,  half Naga baby, like a really young child 

and partly what I wanted to do when I went over there is can I find what happened to this  child? But it just I didn't  really get any information. I did get a lot of people telling me like, oh yeah, there's other babies, there's  other people that had children with us,  service members.

But, it's this is a rough area of the world. And  

So do you know if.

that.  It was a boy. I should also say that the Naga, especially  after World War II in like the fifties, were involved  in like insurgent activities trying to establish more political autonomy  up in the mountains.

And there was a pretty brutal suppression  campaigns, so there was a lot of violence a lot of bloodshed up in that part of the world  during that time, unfortunately. It's unclear what happened to the  child, but as I read in the book, it wouldn't be surprising to know that he died rather young. 

Herman Perry is hung in India. And

you spent years trying  to help. 

Edna

Fine and Rebury the remain of her brother in Washington. 

yeah, so this was interesting. So I, I tracked down, it was very difficult, but I found that Herman Perry had a living sister. So I went  and visited her and her family in  southeast Washington, DC and, I didn't really know what they were gonna say about this.

I'm like, I'm writing a book about this terrible tragedy your family went  through. I didn't know what they knew about what had happened or  anything. And what I found in the course of talking to them is like they didn't even know where he was buried. No one had ever told the family  where he was buried.

She was a absolutely  fantastic resource. She gave me letters that her family had saved that Herman wrote back from the war, which were absolutely key to the book.   And the one thing she said is, I'll help you, but  I really want you to help me get.

Herman's remains back with his family. And so yeah, I spent a lot of time just researching what had happened to his remains,  and it turns out he was buried in  Ledo, India after being hanged. But then. Soon after the war, the mortuary services component of the military brought  all of these remains back to the US  and buried them at the Schofield Barracks in Hawaii.

And so he was buried there, and I will give great credit to the mortuary services. At Scofield  Barracks were fantastic to work with and very  understanding and helped us exhume and cremate and return the ashes of Herman to his sister. 

What does this story helps you understand about America? 

It helped me understand that a lot of the issues and viewpoints that we're dealing with today we wanna say they're rooted in history that none of us have contact with, but we do.  This isn't that long ago that this occurred  and I sitting in a room with her and Perry's sister and understanding.

The impact that this had on her and her extended family  really brought home the nation's history of   racial segregation, racial resentment still resonates with people, that it's not just an abstract concept for them, it's something that affects them.

Directly  still that were not, that the past is not that long  ago, I think is the cliche. And it really drove that home for me. And the other thing that drove home for me also is like how decisions get made. At a very high  level that don't really deal with the realities on the ground  and that the people that are often in charge and are hailed as being the best and the brightest and the smartest are also people who've lost contact with the circumstances on the ground. 

And that's really the story of the ledo road, that  it looked great if you trace it on a map, but people didn't understand the human. Cost of it and how foolhardy it  was because they weren't familiar with the terrain or the cultures that existed  there. And so it really drives home that, sometimes when we think that we're endowing power and responsibility and people who. 

Purportedly know what they're doing. They actually  don't. That they, to them things are abstract and not concrete, and they, maybe they need to listen better to people who have real first firsthand experience of things. 

Thank you so much.

Finally I know that spike Lee purchased the right 

of this story. Apparently he hasn't done  anything with it so far. That was back in 2009. Where does it sit? 

Yeah I ended up writing a screenplay for him, which was an one of the defining creative experiences of  my life, and I learned so much from that experience. And fortunately,  we weren't really able to get the financing to get that movie made. The good news is that it's  still in development with another filmmaker I admire.

I  actually have the latest screenplay sitting in my hard drive that I'm gonna read very shortly.  I just got it like a couple days ago. So I'm looking forward to reading  that and maybe this is a story that we can tell in a different format someday. 

Do you know who the director would be? 

I'm not a liberty to say it right now, unfortunately. 

Anything that I did not ask you that you think I should have? 

No, I'm just glad that this book resonated with you. This was my first book and  definitely one of my lesser read  definitely didn't gain the audience I was hoping for, but people do rediscover it.  And I hope that it gains a wider audience because I  poured my whole heart into this one, so I really hope people will crack it open. 

There's a lot we didn't get a chance to go over I hope people won't think that we   📍 went over everything there. We only went over the surface. There's a lot more to tell. 

Yeah. We barely scratch the surface.

Brendan, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you.