WP: The Jungle of a Life

[MountainLaurel]

A rather captivating and still sad story:

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.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/03/AR2008060303880.html