Back in America

These very young men, mostly teenagers, they get on this ship in New Jersey and 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 in 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. If you're tired of arguing with strangers on the internet, try talking with one of them in real life.

Welcome to Back in America, the podcast. 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 Brandon Corner spent years chasing that story. His book, now The Hell Will Start, retraces Hermann Sperry's descent into the jungle and the system that pushed him there. Brandon, take me back to 2003, you stumbled across a single line in a military biography about a murderer who lived in a Burmese 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. At that time, I was working on a project and I got this bibliography from the Military History Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. It was about basically the history of the death penalty in the US military. 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 Hermann Sperry, who was hanged in Northeast

India in 1945. What it said in a footnote was just Sperry long-evaded capture by hiding with Burmese Hill tribe. Just immediately, I think, 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. I remember I basically went and sent away for a copy of the booklet that was in the archives and that, it turns out, was written by the former military policeman who was involved in the manhunt for Perry in 1944 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 was something really alluring about the notion of being on the run. Then I really dove more deeply into it.

I really realized there was another dimension, which is really a commentary about the segregation of the military in the US at that time. 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 until the Korean War. It was a whole thing that I had been sitting there that I feel very few people actually written about and explored. Certainly no one had really explored Perry's full story in depth.

That led to me spending essentially five years writing that book. 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. The first thing I did was I emailed them and said, can you send me a Xerox copy of this self-published booklet that's in your archives?

They did. It was written by this man named Erlo Cullum, who was a lieutenant in the MPs in India at that time, in Northeast India. He was brought in to search for Perry, actually in early 1945 predominantly. It was amazing. 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. 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. That was really the first strand that I unraveled. And yes, I did write a Freedom of Information Act request regarding the legal proceedings, the court martial that was carried out involving Perry.

There were some amazing documents. 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. It was more than an envelope. It was a real, pretty thick, almost a package that you get. It's an 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 because I knew that I could then really give him a rich voice in this book. So I'm really curious at how you managed 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 reconstruct that? And I also read that you really, now when you write, you start by a storyboard. I wonder if you used a storyboard at that 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 there'll be photographs, sometimes there'll be just screenshots from documents that detail what the action in that scene is going to be. They could 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 a couple sentences saying why it's there and where it fits in the story. Then I sequenced 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 Lido 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 listeners unfamiliar with it, what was the Lido 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 and seized that means of supplying them. So we decided to build another road called the Lido Road extending from the northeast tip of India, the Assam province, across the border into Burma. And then the idea was to have it snake all the way up to China, to Kunming and up to Chongqing to keep them supplied. Now this was an 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, D.C. or somewhere that they were going to 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 of 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 of 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 from Washington, D.C. 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, 955 out of 1000. I want to pause here just to better understand who is Herman Perry. He grew up in Northern Carolina. He's born in North Carolina, but he moves to Washington, D.C. That's like a pretty popular migratory story for black Americans from the South. But he's born in the country. Did he work in the field too or was he too young?

He was too young, but he becomes a butcher actually in Washington, D.C. 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, D.C. And he's actually drafted into the military and assigned to this labor unit that departs to go to 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 Burma-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 very young men,

mostly teenagers, they get on this ship in New Jersey and 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 then they're in this place that 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, D.C., is drafted, traveled. He doesn't know where he goes.

And then he ended up like forced laborer having to carve this route in the jungle. What happened? What happened for him to take his rifle and kill Lutten Caddy? 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 soldiers by sending them to the stockade

where the conditions were terrible in Lido, India. And he had a really difficult time there. And when he got out, he started using a stockade as 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 oversleeps and he misses the call to work in the morning.

And so he arrives late and basically he's told that he's going to be taken to the guardhouse and probably court-martialed 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'd say, 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 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 clears his mind a little bit, he realizes that he's killed a lieutenant, a white lieutenant, and that he's surely going to be put to death if he's apprehended, that he's murdered a commanding officer.

And so he makes the decision that he can't go back. He needs to escape. And 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 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 want to say that you 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 he 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, 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 he 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 got to be honest.

It's pretty incredible. He made it as long as he did. So indeed, as we know, he flees and he made it to a tribe, the Naga, known for being headhunter. So tell us, how does he manage to be accepted and to be 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 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 a 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, their religion centers around two things. One is like basically, canthropy. 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 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 Americans. This was actually a source of opium for a lot of soldiers.

They would sell trinkets and things of that nature. 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 tinned foods were really big. So all these kind of like modern conveniences and modern baubles 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. But 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 this village called Tugunga. And that's where he basically settles down and he gets involved in agriculture.

They have terraced 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 are 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 40s. Simple bamboo structures, subsistence agriculture, wariness and even hostility towards outsiders a lot of the time. Certainly wariness 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 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 is called a basha, 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 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 want to 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 being a teenager in D.C.?

What was it like? How did you process the fact that you reinvented yourself as this basically gentleman Naga farmer in the Indo-Burmese wilderness? Yeah, that's totally 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 is 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, Leader 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 got to be the most serious crime that an enlisted man can commit. And I think it would have been inappropriate for them to just give up after they were frustrated for the first couple of months. They really did have to see this one through. So it took them five months? Yeah, it took them five months.

And this is what's so amazing about the story is that it took them 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, he survives. He 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, D.C. So they're waiting for that. And during that time, Perry is incarcerated at the Lido 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 she gets involved in this case. And they find him 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 pin him down. They basically find him and he had a much more difficult time the second time he was out. But the village where he was living, Tugunga, is on the Burmese side of the border, up in the mountains. The Lido is quite a ways away. So they drive him back down. It's on the lowlands 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's living out in the open, trying to get help from people if you 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. And he never see his child. When he was apprehended, his wife was pregnant with his child. This 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 go to the 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 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 campaign. 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 write 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 Perry's sister, Edna Wilson, find and rebury the remains of her mother in Washington. Yeah. So this was interesting. So 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 going to 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 an 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 Lido, India after being hanged. But then, you know, soon after the war, the Mortuary Services component of the military brought all of these remains back to the U.S. 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 Schofield Barracks were fantastic to work with and very understanding and helped us exhumed and cremate and return the ashes of Herman to his sister. What, Doug, this story helps you understand America?

It helped me understand a lot of the issues and viewpoints that we're dealing with today. We want to 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 sitting in a room with Corinne 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 lost contact with the circumstances on the ground. And that's really the story of the Lido 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 in people who purportedly know what they're doing, they actually don't. That to them, things are abstract and not concrete, and maybe they need to listen better to people who have real first-hand experience of things. Thank you so much. Finally, I know that Spike Lee purchased the right of the 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 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 going to read very shortly. I just got it like a couple of 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 at liberty to say 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 is 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.

We only went over the surface. There's a lot more to tell. Yeah, we barely scratched the surface. Brandon, thank you so much for your time. Thank you.

Thank you.