Real Apocalypse Now, Burma-Style

Vietnam, 1969. Who didn’t admire Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now as mysterious Walter Kurtz, a renegade Green Beret who has set himself up as a God among a local tribe. But take this: Kurtz was fiction. Over in Burma though, decades earlier, a true apocalyptic renegade U.S. soldier existed:

Herman Perry, an African-American soldier who rapidly lost his mind in the jungle, shot an unarmed white lieutenant and married a 14-year-old girl of a headhunter tribe. “Perry was, in may ways, the world’s first hippie,” tells us his biographer.

Perry had been dispatched to the Indo-Burmese jungle in 1943. He was one of thousands of men assigned to build the Ledo Road, a military highway stretching nearly 800 kilometers from North-East India to the Chinese border – what this Perry has to do with Bangkok and absolutely?

Not much. But a story as fascinating as a real Apocalypse Now, documenting a true Colonel Kurtz, is worth a prominent mention here, as Bangkok is nevertheless the center between Kurtz’s colonial Indochina and Perry’s Burma, a major frontline in the Southeast Asian Theater of World War II.

How we know about Herman Perry? New Yorker journalist Brendan I. Koerner wrote a book about the astonishing true tale of Herman Perry who “was, in many ways, the world’s first hippie,” Brendan told absolutely Bangkok. Brendan is also a contributor to Slate Magazine,

Brendan’s new book “Now the Hell Will Start: One Soldier’s Flight from the Greatest Manhunt of World War II” wasn’t candy research. “Though it’s easy enough to score a same-day Burma visa in Bangkok, the area where Herman Perry lived is generally off-limits to outsiders,” says Brendan.

“It is several hundred kilometers northwest of Mandalay, which is usually as far as most tourists make it. To research Now the Hell Will Start, I crossed over the border from India, descending alone the remnants of the Ledo Road toward the infamous Lake of No Return.”

The road Perry and the soldiers had to build, “with most of the route swooping through Burma’s northern plains, was a lethal nightmare,” Brendan says, “beset by monsoon, malaria and insects that chewed men’s flesh to pulp. Herman Perry rapidly lost his mind in the jungle, especially once he started indulging in such native intoxicants as opium and ganja.”

On March 5th, 1944, after being threatened with a second stint in the Army’s nearest prison, Perry shot an unarmed white lieutenant to death.

“And so, accused of murdering a commanding officer, began Perry’s epic flight through the Patkai,” tells us Brendan, “the thickly forested mountains that line the Indo-Burmese border. He eventually stumbled upon a village inhabited by headhunting Naga tribesmen, who he charmed with his personality and bribed with tins of fruit cocktail.”

“Perry would soon come to marry the 14-year-old daughter of the village’s ang (chief) – and to reinvent himself as a rice-and-opium farmer.” There we go. The world’s first hippie.

Now the Hell Will Start is available from Amazon.

Slate has a slide show on the book that “makes for excellent monsoon-season reading,” Brendan says.

Or check out his Flickr gallery with plenty of present-day photos of Perry’s area.

I’d say we need more such writers – and me wonders if there are any modern-day Perrys? Afghanistan would provide the perfect setting.