Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 203 - Herman Perry, The Jungle King Part 2: The US Army's Most Wanted Man

Episode Date: April 11, 2022

Joe and Jordan Holmes of the Knowledge Fight Podcast continue the story of Herman Perry, the Jungle King hero of WWII. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: Koerner, Brendan. "Now the Hell Will Start: One Soldier's Flight from the Greatest Manhunt of World WarII" https://www.cbi-theater.com/ledoroad/Ledo_Main.html https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/black-soldiers-and-ledo-road-1942-1945/

Hey, everybody. It's Joe. Before we get on to part two of the Herman Perry series, I have to do a little bit of housekeeping. Normally, whenever I use a source for the show, I both name it during the episodes I'm recording and put it in the show notes. This time, somehow, I only managed to do half that and I put it in the show notes and I did not mention it. It's my bad. It's a book called Now the Hell Will Start by Brendan Corner. And you should go check it out. It's a very good book. a book called Now the Hell Will Start by Brendan Corner, and you should go check it out. It's a very good book. And now back to Lines Led by Donkeys podcast, the podcast where I occasionally fuck up the intro. I'm Joe and with me still is Jordan Holmes of Knowledge Fight. Hello, Jordan.

The laugh that introduces me before my voice does. Yeah, I'm glad to join you again. Yeah, we certainly haven't tried to do this episode twice um how dare you sir i was recording the last part of a three-part series with my uh with my normal co-host liam and we fucked it up like three times at the point like you know what let's try again next week next week. We'll circle back around to this. Well, we've had more than a couple of lost episodes. So I understand where you're coming from there. I think my only truly lost episode, we did a premium episode on Saving Private Ryan. And as soon as we got in recording i took my laptop and i was

like i moved into my kitchen um to work on something else and i dumped a cup of coffee directly into it killed it on the spot that is absurd yeah rest in Rest in peace, homie. I'll always remember you. We ironically, our very first lost episode was the one that had Steve Pchenik saying, go home and tell your mother you're brilliant. So one of the most important catchphrases in Knowledge Fight history didn't even get redone

until like episode 300 and something yeah the one that was specifically about steve pachenik right purely about steve yeah it took us another couple of hundred episodes to get there whenever anybody brings up like one of the tom clancy novels and i'm just like have you you ever heard of Steve Pchenik? It doesn't get better. Oh, man. Honestly, I think I've said before on the show about how much of a fan I am of Knowledge Fight, but I have to say it's the worst podcast ever to listen to

when you have to roll your windows down of your car. Hey, what are you doing, asshole listen to alex jones no actually sir let me explain and i'll start from the beginning in about 2017 these two assholes from chicago decided to do a podcast and that podcast eventually turned out to be about alex jones and the alex jones part of the podcast it podcast it's I'm actually about why are you leaving come back I swear I'm not crazy so speaking of podcasts we're doing one we're on part two

of the Herman Perry saga and when we left you last time Herman Perry had been dragged off to serve in the segregated very racist US Army circa World War II. And that was also the sound of my dog shaking. Thank you for that, light guy. Fuck it.

Third host of the show who occasionally randomly barks in the middle of recordings. Now, he was shipped off to help build the Lido Road, which is in one of the most inhospitable tracks of jungle that you could find yourself in India now once he got there he already started off with malaria which is never a good sign yeah he was stuffed into what the book graciously calls a quote rustic camp wow you started an Airbnb to what the book graciously calls a, quote, rustic camp. Wow.

You started an Airbnb. You know, he got the whole rustic vibe going. He really tried to make it work for him. I gotcha. It's just a white girl nailing up random pieces of wood to the wall. There's a surf shop. There's always a surf shop. Now, this goes on to be described as mostly badly built wooden

huts on a hillside that were constantly flooded with a mixture that was simply described as goop if you're using the word goop you're not in a good space this camp is sponsored by Gwyneth Paltrow.

Every, every soldier has to shove a jade egg into their vagina. I would have preferred if they use the words Play-Doh. I know, I know branding is bad, but at least I could get the idea that if they put it on a comic strip, you know, it'd be cool.

At least it'd be fun. At least it'd be fun. Also, uh, this whole area is infested with red ants um and rats this is fucking hell it's just hell

just sloshing up to your knees and goop with ants crawling all over you like ask now what you could do for your country but how your country could feed you to ants eventually Not what you can do for your country, but how your country can feed you to ants. Eventually, eventually, Frank Herbert will write a book about us.

I'll get into it. We'll be Duke Leto II. There's little in the way of comfort or even basic sanitation in the area. Disease, of course, swept through the ranks and at one point nearly killed Perry again. Sure. Their work was with heavy machinery, which they had never used before. So you can guess how that started off as men half dead from heat stroke and internal parasites began working with bulldozers for the first time. I'm going to throw this out at you. I don't know a ton about military history, but I imagine so far that one of the more important parts of it is the fact that

armies never like to prepare people for the war! Nah, you just play catch-up. It's fine. On-the-job training. No! Learn! Soldiers would also have to scale cliffs and blow away chunks of the surrounding mountains with dynamite. Another thing they were not trained to do.

Soldiers had to redo the movie Fitzcarraldo. We're going to Fitzcarraldo the entire war effort through this fucking jungle. Yeah. It was originally called the Hannibal, but now it's a Fitzcarraldo. We got it. They were joined by coolies, which is a word for local laborers.

And since I'm not sure if that's offensive or not, I'm actually not going to use it again but I feel like it's offensive I'm just going to go I'm going to yeah I know there's some sort of anachronistic old timey racist that's like saying that word all the time so I don't trust it

yeah I mean they were rented out to the US Army by the British so you can assume that baseline they're very racist yeah these local laborers worked side by side with the black soldiers all overseen U.S. Army by the British, so you can assume that baseline, they're very racist. Now, these local laborers worked side by side with the black soldiers, all overseen by their white supervisors who did no labor whatsoever.

By February 28th, remember, Perry had got there in September, they'd finally gotten the road to stretch all the way to the Burmese border, and while that sounds impressive, that's 38 miles. Oh, God damn. The whole thing's just been done three months.

Here's what's fucking crazy. And this is what's going to, this fucking fucks with my head. The Chinese built the Intercontinental Railroad in half that time and a million miles longer. It is ironic that they are in Burma and unable to complete a road. Now, the goal was by the end of May, there's supposed to be 100 miles of the 400 and something odd mile road done,

and they were not even halfway there yet. They were still living on prayer, though. Of course, they're halfway there. Then the monsoon season started. A few, which're halfway there. Then monsoon season started. A few which boy, the few miles of finished road they had completed got churned into absolute shit by the rain. Mudslides took out their bulldozers and washed men away. Then, if that wasn't bad enough, the Chinese army, which was operating out of India and into Burma, marched through with horses, being their main mode of transportation. This ruined the road even more because it wasn't paved.

It was just loose gravel, which then had become flooded. So horse hooves kind of fucked it up even worse. Oh, man. Just like pass. Just say pass. I'm taking my road. I'm going home. I i mean let's try the we took a wrong turn at albuquerque that's what i'm feeling right now this is like a cartoonish

level of failure going on right now bugs bunny pops up and miller like hey doc i have malaria it's polio season. No, it's malaria season. No, it's polio season. Now, so much work was being undone like every time it rained that a colonel was being interviewed by a Time magazine about the road

and was asked how it was going. And he said, quote, it's doing great. We only lost half a mile of road this month was it in their 30 under 30 then if monsoons and horses wasn't bad enough it got even

hotter breaking into the triple digits the soldiers working in the line came up with a song quote long may you live and when you die you'll find hell cooler than the cbi and cbi stands for china burma india uh like the the crossroads sure sure oh man then the way has any military ever just been like fuck it let's just build a town here instead of building a road we live here now i mean back in the day like the like the early 17 1800s when like they're like all right we're done campaigning for the season

uh but yeah with the advent of modern when like total, it's like, no, we're just going to grind ourselves into shit forever. Amazing. So the rain started again. This forced men to live and work in a literal steam shower. So humid and disgusting, it rotted their uniforms off of their backs as the days went on. Men worked for 16 hours a day,

and their meals consisted of tin corned beef and unsanitary water which sounds like some kind of new age cleanse yeah if you want to get rid of ebola you need that shit that makes perfect sense it'll kill everything in you and also outside of you and also you have you ever seen uh black books there's a there's a show by dylan moran uh who's a brilliant irish comedian called black books and at a certain point he's just looking at oven cleaner and he's about to pour it in his mouth and he just goes if you can clean an oven you can clean me it's like well you know there is an argument to be made there you're not wrong but also well there is a but also that's the problem men were so hungry at the end of their

days uh at work they started like stalking the jungle looking for food and started eating frogs that they captured which normally that isn't a problem it's kind of gross i don't like frog frog legs or anything like that. But this requires you to know what kind of frogs you could eat and what frogs you could not eat. These guys had no idea. So a lot of them

died from poisonous frogs. You know, in their defense, at what point do you think, well, clearly this tiny little monster animal has hallucinogens in there you know you don't think that yeah like i can probably claim this in my mouth a year and a half ago i was living in tenement housing in washington dc what time during this point was i supposed to get fucking frog education totally absolutely Then, if things could not get worse, when the men finally tried to sleep at night,

they found the trees to be infested with monkeys that were shrieking at them. All right. Okay, so we've officially transitioned into a Miyazaki film. Now, also, the leeches. There were... Jesusesus christ there are so many leeches now more than one man went out to take a dump in the jungle only to find out a leech had gotten stuck literally to his butthole right right right right you know for the people who think that nature is the self-evidence of God, it seems like they don't think that nature is the self-evidence of we should fucking get out of here. Nobody has stopped to consider the butthole leeches. They're right. And then one officer wrote a letter home that honestly is the thing that horror stories are made out of.

Quote, officer wrote a letter home that honestly is the thing that horror stories are made out of quote one night while sleeping. One of these leeches has gotten into the tube of a man's penis. When he awakened, it was swollen to the point he could not urinate and he was bleeding. Lieutenant Quinn finally managed to, or Matt finally suggested making forceps shaped tools out of bamboo. It worked. And we were able to get the leech out and pull it.

Dick leeches, too. Yeah. I mean, that's a story of perseverance and ingenuity. If I woke up to a leech crawling into the head of my dick, I would use the

rifle that's nearest to me and shoot myself in the face oh totally pass i'm tapping out of life this plane of existence is not for me every time somebody's been like oh what would you do in a zombie apocalypse shoot myself with a fucking face fuck this noise i'm out i would probably die from one of these waterborne illnesses that all these guys are getting. What's my water stop working? I think it's the height of ego to think that you would die better than half of the entire human race, right?

We've all died of malaria. I would die as I lived, screaming and shitting blood. So on top of all of this, everybody's uh with like body lice and they're being swarmed with by mosquitoes this led to from what i can tell the highest amount of malaria contamination in u.s military history well somebody had to win. 955 cases per 1,000 men. Get the fuck out of here! It's because of the law! That's just almost 100% malaria.

That's crazy! Who's the asshole who doesn't get malaria? Just looking around at everybody like, Well, it wasn't me. It must have been you. You act like you had malaria. Like of the men, the men that survived their tour of duty

said that they all at least had a dozen, dozen different cases of malarial fever. And if you're wondering, why didn't they get anti-malarial drugs? Well, they did. At this point of history, there was a drug called quinine, which was a standard anti-malarial drug. However, it was made from a particular kind of tree bark from the Dutch East Indies and nowhere else. Which, of course, at this point had been captured by the Japanese, thereby cutting off the support of tree bark from the Allies.

So they had to relay in a synthetic version called adabreen um which did not work at all it would occasionally throw men into suicidal and homicidal bouts of psychosis their dicks would stop working and their skin would turn yellow of its day right adabreen is actually in the Florida water supply. That makes a lot of sense. And like I said, this did not work. And statistically, if you did not get malaria, which you probably did, you'd get typhus. Now, soldiers had been given a vaccine for typhus, which was experimental. And this did work for variants of typhus, which was experimental. And this did work for,

uh, uh, variants of typhus that we had in the United States. It was not effective against variants of typhus in India. Whoops. Disease. Have you now you're a military history guy, right?

So I assume that most, if not all of your stories eventually wind up to like most people died of disease. Yeah. most if not all of your stories eventually wind up to like most people died of disease yeah it turns out up until like the 1990s going camping in the woods with 10 000 of your friends was a bad idea you just yeah you just fucking die right how does it how did nobody think ahead it's not oh they didn't they just don't care it's not the first time that this has happened man humans are stupid like we've had to rediscover washing our hands a couple of times poor ignat semmelweis not to mention at one point like during the crimean war people thought like food was giving

people uh like spreading disease rather than like not washing your hands or or ventilating hospitals and things like that or like we've discovered the cure for a scurvy and more than one occasion people are dumb um and military people are dumber than the outliers i say that including myself i like um i mean there is a certain amount of if you want to solve problems with a gun yeah like i was uh 17 and i voluntarily like i want to be in a tank and the army's like okay dumbass that does when you put it like that it doesn't sound reasonable at all yeah it turns out you shouldn't allow 17 yearyear-olds to make that decision. Now, let's say, perhaps, you were not one of the people who got sick.

Though you probably were and you just didn't die. Enter the tigers. I haven't mentioned the tigers. There's a lot of tigers, Jordan. Okay, all right. Now, specifically during monsoon season, the heavy rains would force these big cats to leave their flooded jungle homes and move closer to dry ground, which also happened to be the same thing that soldiers did.

So more than a few people went missing in the middle of night from an assumed tiger attack. That's not okay. It's not funny. It's not funny to be in a foreign country with all your buddies and then to suddenly be ripped away by a tiger

that is not a funny thing counterpoint but it's very scary counterpoint jordan it's kind of funny it's kind of funny oh my god what happened to Terry man you don't even fucking know like this happens so often that like the we have diaries from the the white officers and control

these units and they mentioned soldiers being killed by tigers in such a boring way it had to happen quite frequently like one american colonel wrote tiger killed a soldier yesterday that was it and then the next day francis got keel bear's diary and then the next day his diary noted next night badly mauled another soldier and then it killed a native holy shit

this is like a nightly occurrence is this the Moby Dick of tigers? the great striped whale absolutely once more every night I dream of finally defeating this tiger

I no longer have any desire for war only one death will satisfy me and then soldiers had to be like tasked out at night to be like a roving armed guard to fight off the tiger scourge and all of this death uh isn't even counting all of the accidents which were constant and normally fatal on top of being ambushed because remember they're still fighting a war in the middle of all of this the Japanese had scouts in the jungles and would occasionally shoot at the construction workers

and though eventually there would be like people would be riding shotgun in the bulldozers and stuff to make sure you could shoot back then the Japanese begin bombing them from the air so on top of dying from malaria and typhus and occasionally having to fight off a fucking tiger, the sky would eventually rain bombs. Sure, sure.

And at no point in time did anybody go like, what are we doing here? Guys, I feel like we fucked up somewhere. Let's really stop. Let's take a step back. Let's evaluate our choices up to this point you you go into general stillwell's office it's just a tiger sitting there in uniform like no please continue this is going great for us essentially you're telling the story of tailspin this is starting to seem like the road was doomed to fail or like churchill said be completed and then be totally useless you're right and you're not alone in thinking that

by now even fdr was agreeing with you it had been five months and even chen kai shek was like all right but what if instead of using this road, you just airlifted me supplies? Because this road is fucking stupid. Hey, listen, this con has lasted as long as it's going to last. All of my trucks full of money are being driven by tigers now. Absolutely. americans agreed wu shak and fdr was about to kill the whole road project when it was rescued at the last moment by general stillwell and some very high up friends within the war department it seemed uh because if the road stopped and failed it would make stillwell look bad and he

already had quite a bit of baggage like a lot of the u.s's failure and burma was blamed rightly or wrongly on him and with the added fact that FDR FDR personally disliked him. So he thought if the road failed, he would find his ass back in the U S not have a job. Right. Right. He was probably right. Probably.

Yeah, probably. I mean, he probably would get stashed in some training base somewhere. You know, I'm really starting to think that one of the big problems with a lot of administrative decision-making is the desire to avoid responsibility in order to avoid consequences for one's mistakes or failure. As someone that was a government employee until my mid-20s, I agree with you.

Seems like the incentives are really out of whack. I'm just going gonna throw that out there yeah uh-huh now uh he so he was getting worried not to mention this is also personal for him like like i said he got his ass kicked in burma so burma became to him what like the philippines were to general douglas mcarthur minus the american colony part uh right yeah the road was such a fuck up that even in the American press, which remember was in the middle of wartime restrictions, openly shit talk the road and the government's like, yeah,

whatever. We don't give a shit. We'll give you this one. Yeah. We fucked up. We fucking love centering people, but Jesus Christ, this was a shitty road.

However, as it became no longer important, while not being canceled, it meant less and less supplies were being sent for the construction, like replacement parts for vehicles, which were breaking down continuously. And this forced soldiers like Perry to learn how to rig shit together like radiators and actual functioning radios out of apple boxes and discarded bits of wire. Which worked somehow. I honestly have no idea. How? I mean, that's amazing. That is amazing. I barely know how to change my own oil and this guy's inventing radios out of fucking MacGyver shit in the middle of the jungle while dying of malaria I'm I'm pretty stoked that you think being able to change your own oil is nothing to scoff at now um this but no amount of MacGyvering shit was enough obviously

you can't replace all the shit so things were eventually reverted right back to the way chen kai shek originally did them or originally did them and that is working by hand which meant things slowed down even more and became even worse um officers attempted to ease this problem not because they were worried about their soldiers but because you know as the road stopped being completed it hurt their careers as. So they spent their own money buying horses, donkeys, and even elephants. These is draft animals.

However, they ran into a problem because the Chinese soldiers of Chiang Kai-shek's army were still using this road to go into Burma and go to war. And they would either steal these animals for themselves or shoot them out of boredom. I thought it was because Hannibal controlled the spirits of all war elephants. Yeah. They immediately just turned, I don't know, south. And head towards Rome. We must invade Italy. All war elephants are invaded by the spirit of the fight of Carthage.

All of them live to only salt Carthage. Now, these supply problems eventually involved everything, not just from like bulldozers, but down to things that soldiers needed to simply exist, like food, razors, and even their pay. So, of course, this led to rampant theft in a thriving black market, which pretty much exists, from my experience,

everywhere soldiers exist. We're natural-born hustlers because we don't get paid all that much yeah and and i mean when your institutional leadership is essentially of the opinion that your job is to live or die and the die part is uh less optional than others what's the point of food i totally get it yeah i like perry for example his hustle was stealing beer out of the back of transport trucks and then selling it to officers they're like hey that's al capone what's the difference there yeah i also assume perry didn't pay taxes so they're virtually the same i hey listen i'm working on it he said not publicly the per Perry's like, what?

I thought taxes were getting taken out of this. He gets paid in like a 1099 for selling black market beer. What did a W2 look like in 1943? Now, like so many soldiers were stealing shit from these trucks that by the time they'd show up to their destinations, most of the time they were empty, which is a level of soldiering I cannot support enough. There's also a ton of weed floating around. It was grown by the local Naga people, which they used and then sold to the soldiers. It's more of a barter system. They didn't need money.

Sure. Well, yeah. Yeah. barter system they didn't need money uh sure well yeah yeah they would trade cans of beef uh or rations sea rations for grips of weed and then spend their days getting high as hell because you know not being high in this area sounds pretty fucking miserable i mean not being high now sounds pretty fucking miserable yeah i agree that's like crazy what would what is it like to be i want like 10 million diaries from the naga people of what is it like to be like okay here's what we've got we can fuck these people up and they can feed us what kind of world must that be for somebody who hasn't even had an interaction with uh

a fucking tank in their life before that's's crazy. It gets weirder. So, like I said before, the black people and the black soldiers and the native people were working side by side as laborers. So, eventually,

black soldiers began to pick up the local language so they could make small talk with these guys. And the white people didn't learn anything because they considered the natives whether they be burmese chinese naga indian whatever to be even below the black people in

their own minds like yeah stay away from me like they like yeah yeah totally which is like even a level of racism the british didn't quite do like the british would at least try to learn the local languages most of the time to help administer them. Well, I mean, the better to oppress you with. Of course. Of course. They weren't so racist as to think, like, learning a language is below me. Though I'm sure that's in this specific area,

I should say. Right, right, right. And let's, I mean, hey, how about throw this out there? Perry, he's been in this fucking jungle for how long? It's been like six or seven months now. Six or seven months, right? This dude has to learn

whatever local language is necessary to get some... He's trying to fuck. I'm learning French. It happens. I'm still trying to learn Armenian. It's fucking hard, and I'm Armenian. It's going to take some time, but you'll get there.

Probably one of the weirdest exchanges going on in the road was between the army and the Nagas as an institution. Now, the Nagas didn't work construction. They were like, no, that's not what we do. They did, however, sell the army livestock and food, which the army would then use to feed their soldiers. They didn't want to live just on rations. However, paper money

was useless to the Nagas. They didn't have a paper money economy. They worked in bartering. So, the army was told by the British like, you know the only way to get Nagas to work for you is to give them drugs. So, the US army brought a fuck ton of opium from the British

and then gave it in exchange to the Nagas for meat. Why are good ideas only ever executed out of desperation? This led to a scene of a U.S. Army military police standing armed guard over entire foot lockers of opium to make sure none of their soldiers stole it so they could give it out to the locals. Sure, sure. Were they wearing referees outfits? All right, that's a foot locker joke. Come on now. Now, the Nagas were armed with something called dows,

which were like a machete sword combo. I don't know. And they would wear very little clothes, armed with a dow and hitch like an army trucks into warp camps and trade meat for like handfuls of opium before disappearing back into the jungle which is a life i've ever heard yeah that's the coolest thing i've ever heard now with everything that i've explained in the last like i don't know hour and a half of podcast it shouldn't shock you when i say herman perry really fucking hated the

army at this point um at one day on october 4th he was forced to work an extra hour after already working 16 he refused and was immediately arrested and subjected to a special court marshal. He was convicted within 24 hours of his arrest and confined for it with hard labor as punishment for three months, as well as being an additional part of his forfeiture of being or additional part of his punishment being forfeiture of $30 of his $60 monthly pay every month during his confinement. So, yeah.

So essentially like his regular job was hard labor. So, really, they're just cutting his salary in half. Yeah. It also seems like the prison was even worse. Like, conditions were even worse. He had no time off. Totally. But, I mean, we have to judge relatively speaking.

You're already in a tiger-inf malaria fuck town so it's like oh my god no i have to live in a prison and frankly at least i'm not getting eaten by a goddamn tiger that's true the tigers couldn't get a real problem is the salary issue i will say the stockade was so bad it made their normal workday seem easy in comparison. Get the fuck out of here! Why did you get evil like that? So he was locked in the Lido Stockade, a

place so horrible, according to the U.S. Army, it was reserved only for Japanese POWs and Black American soldiers. Jesus. And just to give you a vibe of this place, it was commanded by an American officer who had a direct commission

after helping run the Georgia State chain gangs. God, god damn it. Yep. God damn it. Every American soldier in there was just like Perry, a black man who had told their officer to shut the fuck up. And Japanese POWs

were in a separate part of the camp. They obviously weren't allowed to interact. But from sunup to sundown, he was forced to do backbreaking labor. Any deviation from stockade rules would land you with more work and sometimes even more time on your sentence. This included rules like no swearing,

wearing your hat while you're eating, reading, sitting down without asking uh and like talking jesus and like this is this is why i'm frustrated with whenever republicans pull off like this like critical race theory thing like whenever they put a name to it why can't we just call it like regular ass american history because that's all atrocity yeah yeah i mean here's what we're gonna teach you regular ass american history it starts with fucking over black people and it ends today with fucking over black people welcome to america i think it's because that we're we're well we're not mistaking We understand that they don't want an education system.

They want an indoctrination program. It's a lot better for your job security. Yeah. Now, yeah, if you violated any of these rules, by the way, you're thrown in something called the box,

which was solitary confinement, but it was literally a concrete box that sat out in the middle of the field to bake in the sun, which was solitary confinement, but it was literally a concrete box that sat out in the middle of the field to bake in the sun and you'd have to sit in it. It was actually... This was a common punishment in military stockades. But the Lido box was so small that the Army's Judge Advocate Corps, which is like their lawyers, had to say, Whoa, that's too small. That's inhumane. So their inhumane punishment was considered inhumane by the Army's already inhumane regulations. I mean, why imagine a bottom?

We are just it's like when a man said, why go to space? You know, they said, because it's there. And it's like, why find man said why go to space you know they said because it's there and it's like why find new war crimes to commit and it's like because what what are we bored come on now now jordan there are war crimes because they won wow owned with cool with ICC and ICJ logic. Now, Perry ended up staying in the stockade for a full 18 days longer than he was supposed to. And by the time he got out, by all accounts, he was incredibly depressed and thinking about revenge on the guards that he called Pecker Woods, which, yeah, it tracks. That is the ultimate insult of the time. That has to be.

And something ironic is in like modern day American prison culture, Pecker Woods is like a subsect of Nazis, which again, fits. Yeah. Yeah. Wild. Now, by the time he got back to the construction crew, a new command had taken over, led by a guy named Colonel Lewis Pick, Yeah. Wild. Now, by the time he got back to the construction crew, a new command had taken over,

led by a guy named Colonel Lewis Pick, who was somehow even worse than the last guy. He ordered crews to work around the clock, including at night. And when, obviously, seeing at night is a problem, even though, remember, there's a subsect of the American military that believes black people can see in the dark. He lit the

entire road with hanging buckets of burning oil which really seems like a guide of starting up a really bad fire or at least how to uh step by step process how to melt your soldiers uh but all right this is an important moment for me right here. So we've already got the foreshadowing. We know Herman Perry is going to murder an officer. And honestly, he's going to self-defense the world from an officer. Yeah. I feel comfortable saying that. Yeah.

I really need you to tell me it's this guy. I wish I could. It's actually a guy who's worse. But yeah. That's a joke. That's not possible. Oh, boy. Here we go.

At this point, the road is only 22% done, and Perry had been there like six months. And Perry wasn't going to be a soldier anymore. This is is a decision he's like i'm not fucking doing this anymore and he told anybody who would listen he's fucking done he's like you've broken me i'm not doing this anymore uh and bad move keep that to yourself wait until nobody's paying attention yeah that's my advice to a guy who's been dead for probably 70 years and i can i can attest that not wanting to work in the army does not in fact grant you freedom from the army um it's unfortunate but true so perry eventually decided to start training the naga for some of their opium in order to like you know escape it all yeah the army couldn't bother

you much if you're chasing the dragon so in in order to get those drugs, you had to break even more rules by sneaking out of camp and going out into the jungle to hang out with the Nagas. Normally, this was an absolutely insane idea. The Nagas traded with the military and black soldiers, but they did not mean they were friendly. mean they were friendly there was more than one soldier who turned up in a naga camp most of the time trying to proposition their women for sex and the army would find their beheaded bodies on the side of the road like that right not unheard of um okay so we're in we're in a west side story situation is what you're describing yeah he actually communicated by slowly stomping through the jungles doing this. Yeah. It's tougher to dance fight in mud. That is true.

Now, for reasons that nobody's entirely sure of, the Nagas seem to be cool with him. Now, at least enough... It's hot, man. That's the lesson of this story. This dude is fucking hot. Be hot and charming and get opium from your jungle friends.

So he went out into the jungle and bartered them for rations. I think there was a report that he gave them a gun at one point. But that doesn't seem to actually be true. Because I don't know where he would have gotten it. Yeah. That's the kind of shit that they tell people for lies. Yeah. To say like, look at him.

He was arming the natives. Unbelievable. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. That's that kind of shit for sure. And after getting his opium, he would smoke the opium with him and then make his way back onto base before his work shift started. Now, as anybody who's ever dabbled in opiates could tell you,

they don't exactly make you full of energy or ready to work. I don't know if I can relate to this man more than right now when he's going to opium and then right to work the next day. So, yeah, he slept through his alarm a bit and that didn't help it. While he thought he was being sly, like, they'll never find me out in the middle of the jungle, fucking

everybody noticed he was gone. And because of, again, opium, he thought he was only gone for a full, like, hour or two, but he had actually been gone for a day and a half. He's got a full like hour or two but he had actually been gone for a day and a half he's got a full beard

I was gone an hour guys what is everybody talking about so as soon as he showed back up his commander's like hey someone arrest that guy but also everybody knew that Perry's attitude was like I'm fucking done with you guys everybody believe that if they attitude was like, I'm fucking done with you guys.

Everybody believed that if they tried to arrest him, shit would go sideways. Despite the fact he'd never been violent. Classic fuck around and find out situation. Yeah. And people weren't really like, there's a certain subsect of officers and non-commissioned officers with the army. If they're like, hey, go do this. And you're like, no, they don't really know how to deal with that, which I don't write. If you're in the military and you're

listening to this, I do not recommend finding out if your direct supervisor is one of those people or not. This is my little career tip. Listen, roll them bones if that's what you want to do. There's an old saying in the military, do what your rank can afford.

And if you're listening to this show, I'm assuming it's not very much. Uh, because officers probably won't put up with my bullshit. Um, other than my producer who was a captain. Oh shit. Yeah.

Oh man. Now. Um, so they wanted to arrest this guy, but like, Oh, we're not really sure to do this. So the commander got a few people to come with him in case things went sideways. And so the commander walked up to Perry while he was in line to get breakfast.

And it's like, Perry, come to my office. And Perry looked at him, kind of like gave him side eye and was like, wait until I eat. And the commander was like, fuck. Okay, I'll wait for him to eat. So there was like a group like a captain and a few non-commissioned officers standing around impatiently as this guy still probably fucked

up from opium was trying to eat his breakfast. And some of the guys that came was a few non-commissioned officers and a young lieutenant named harold caddy now caddy had a reputation he was a massive asshole he was a racist and when like other soldiers point out that caddy was a racist that means he was racist in comparison to the other white officers right it's a lot it's newsworthy that he's racist. Like, racism is a baseline function of the world. He's so racist, they're like, we have to tell people this is unusual. Previously, he had been reprimanded by a guy named Colonel Hyatt, who had since replaced Colonel Pick. Colonel Hyatt reprimanded him for hitting soldiers, which was against the rules, but rarely enforced when it came to the white officers, black soldiers dynamic.

But Colonel Hyatt was like, what the fuck are you doing? So he had been reprimanded for being violent. You remember that we're fighting a war part against not us. Yeah. Now, Perry was questioned, and rather than deny anything or have an excuse, he simply pretended not to speak English, which, sure. Oh, sir, sir, sir. Now, at this point, his captain was like, all right, fine, whatever. And he ordered him to turn in his rifle and report to the guardhouse, which is where the military police were.

To Perry, this meant that eventually these MPs were going to bring him back to the stockade, which he was destined to never go back. When someone said that he knew what to expect when he got to the guardhouse, Perry's like that said quote that's what you think no this is what we call foreshadowing nobody nobody can accuse uh herman perry of keeping anything that was about to happen secret i will say that now to perry the idea of spending three more months in that stockade was completely unthinkable. His previous time in the stockade was easily the worst time in his life and had permanently changed him. Seeing this fear in Perry's eyes, which someone notes that he looked like an animal the spotlight put on him. Somewhat incredibly, their non-commissioned officers allowed him to return to his tent to grab his weapon and ammunition to turn it in without an escort to make sure things didn't get weird. All right.

That's on you. Whatever happens from there, that's on you. You have absolved yourself of any defense whatsoever. Fucking come on, man. Yeah. I mean, one of the reasons for this is the non-commissioned officers in the unit were mostly black men. And they're like, maybe Perry will just walk it off and blow off the steam or whatever. They didn't want him to get in more trouble because they knew that the white officers would hammer him.

So we'll give Perry some space. Then a guy named Sergeant Stitt, one of the black NCOs, met up with him at the supply tent where he's supposed to turn his weapon in. And Stitt said, quote, Perry is here to turn in his weapon. To which Perry said, quote, me? I'm not turning in my rifle. I'll go and die and go to hell before I go back to the guardhouse. Again, this is a hint. Then Perry underlined this by cocking his rifle and storming out of the office now sergeant stitt was armed but was hoping to talk perry down like he he's like okay only we've seen this the white guys haven't seen it yet we might be able to still like make sure some because

like if if this happens perry's gonna face some pretty serious fucking shit I mean what are you gonna talk down a robocop this shit is happening man like but like they knew if like this got out Perry was well and truly fucked another NCO named Sergeant Gobold saw

not the same thing he saw things were completely out of hand and worried Perry was going to go kill someone, namely Colonel Hyatt. So he ran and told her commanding officer, Captain Carapico, what was happening. Snitch. Yeah. Yeah. It didn't help at this point that Perry was so disillusioned with the army that he started calling his black NCOs peckerwoods as well like considering that they're on

the side of the white officers so like he yeah now Perry caught a ride because like the stock gate is separate from his camp and separate from where Colonel Hyatt is staying so he caught a ride in a passing dump truck whose driver had no idea what was going on

and gave him a lift like it's not odd it's not odd to see a soldier who's armed, right? Like, oh, yeah, sure. You need a ride. Lieutenant Caddy, who was in the office when Sergeant Gobold had come and reported him, jumped in a Jeep and gave chase, eventually stopping the trunk. The truck Perry was in. He then got out of his Jeep and began to yell at him to get out of the truck and get in his jeep perry refused saying he was gonna perry refused and it's like fuck you i'm gonna go talk to colonel hyatt and every now officers at this point is like he means he's gonna go shoot the colonel

like that's what he means right yeah absolutely now that's probably not why uh their idea is that he was gonna go kill the colonel but hyatt was known for being much nicer than his subordinate officers now his support his subordinate officers like caddy punished soldiers brutally without his orders to do so and perry had been told previously by his non-commissioned officers that if something happened, report his racist subordinates, people like Lieutenant Gaddy beating up soldiers, report them to the colonel. The colonel might not make them go away, but he might intervene to get someone out of trouble, make their punishment not as bad, like get Perry out of prison effectively. Okay. So then what you're saying to me is that everybody knows that the

Colonel is giving somewhat tacit permission for the abuse, but if the abuse is brought to him with a certain amount of context that he deems worthy, then he'll kind of intervene on your behalf. You pretty much just described the officer to enlisted man dynamic in general. But yeah. All right. Well, I'm glad that I have suddenly understood all of military history.

You only did one podcast. Yeah. It's always like, oh, well, the general's a good man. Like, yeah, but look what he's overseeing. Sure. You know, it's a lot of... Sure, sure, sure. Yeah.

You know, so he probably was not going to shoot the colonel. He was probably going to go and be like, look, man, I can't go back to fucking prison. I'll do whatever else, you know. Why he needed a loaded gun to do that, yeah, that's iffy, but whatever, you know. You do you. I mean, listen, if you're a black man at this time

in the military talking to this dude, you bring a gun to make sure that you're listened to. That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying he's wrong. Also, it's important. It's also important to remember he's about 20 years old and full of opium. So he's not making a lot of great life choices at the most. His thinking process is deeply fucked. I'm not saying he's wrong.

Like I said, now, Caddy refused to allow him to leave, getting out of the Jeep and walking towards Perry, who's holding his rifle at his side at this point. He's not pointing the rifle at Caddy. Perry warned him, like, stay the fuck away from me. Don't come near me. Now, this whole time, caddy is walking towards him threatening him saying he's gonna kill him saying he's gonna be get thrown in prison saying he's gonna watch him swing from a branch

um and just regular small talk yeah yeah yeah definitely how you talk down an armed person yeah absolutely at this point according to the eyewitness this being the man who drove the truck, Caddy reached out and grabbed the gun by the barrel,

which led to Perry raising it up about waist height and shooting him twice in the chest. I mean, listen, you get what you earn. You make your life choices. You receive the consequences for those choices. What's interesting is that we'll talk about the case in a little bit, but virtually everybody who looked over the case is like, man, Caddy fucked up. He should not have done that.

Harry panicked, knowing that he was definitely fucked now, and jumped off the side of the road, running off into the jungle where he knew the army probably wouldn't follow him. Meanwhile, Carapico and the MPs, or Carapico ran to the MP station telling them what had happened, saying that Perry had killed Caddy, and this was not

the first case of murder in this unit. In fact, it happened so often people joked about jungle madness and shit like that. There have been stabbings, shootings, and more than one case of sexual assault, all of which remain mostly unsolved

and even uninvestigated. The MPs did not give a fuck. They were mostly like, in the book, they're described as directing traffic and arresting drunk soldiers for driving. That's virtually right. Right, right right right but i mean isn't that the like you do this show like isn't that the story over and over and over

again is how willing people are to overlook fucking anything so long as they obtain the goal of fighting a weird ass war yeah pretty much yeah they're willing to listen off a lot yeah i just said they're just like hey listen as long as it doesn't get in the way of us fighting this fucking war you know you can't be too drunk you can kill your buddy but there's another dynamic at play here which makes it even worse is that this is mostly soldier on soldier violence which means black men killing other black men oh my god this was a black man killing a white officer. So in the eyes of the eyes of the army,

Herman Perry was now the biggest inter-service fugitive in the entire United States Army. They dropped all of their investigations to focus on Perry and they got pissed pretty much immediately when they went to go question Perry's fellow soldiers who knew him and every single one of them refused to fucking say shit. Yeah, sure. No, the FBI

heard about Fred Hampton and they were like, let's get rid of every other investigation we've ever had. Yeah, pretty much. Fred fucking Hampton. Let's go hire the cops to kill that guy. Now, it's not because that he killed a white guy.

Most likely it's probably because he killed Lieutenant caddy who they're all like that motherfucker deserved it. Everybody knew about him. Like, nah, nah, that's fine. I don't see that as being illegal.

Now, officers in the unit blamed the murder on Perry's apparent crippling addiction to marijuana, which is a pretty popular belief of the day. Totally. Listen, I've smoked for years, and obviously every military officer I've come across, gone. That's why my producer will not do a live show with me. I smoke too much weed. show with me i smoke too much weed um i have an interesting question for you when and here's something that i think has been almost universally true it takes a lot for an enlisted man to kill or a drafted man to kill an officer is there almost it's like it seems like it's almost always justified right well i don't want to say always justified. It's certainly justified to the person who did it.

I'm not saying always justified, but I'm saying that based upon the amount of brainwashing, camaraderie, like social pressure, like all of this stuff, the amount of effort it would take mentally to cross those barriers suggests that if you're getting murdered, you probably have it common. It's really uncommon. And I think a lot

of it is social pressures, things like that, of course, but also the idea of like, at the end of this war, I'm going to go home. If I kill this fucking asshole, they're going to line me up against a wall. This is not worth my life which is why you gotta really fuck up to go there right yeah uh to end up at the end of one of your

own men's gun is is is an indictment of how bad you are as a leader because most people i mean i i never had saw this happen, of course. It's very like, it's super, super uncommon. I'm worried that my job should be to cut you off right now. Like it's super, super uncommon in the modern military, but it did happen in Iraq. There was a really famous fragging case in Iraq where I think it was in the New York National Guard, I think it was in the New York National Guard where he was a high-ranking non-commissioned officer

put a claymore outside of his company commander's window and set it off. He got away with it. That is fucking amazing. That is amazing. He got arrested, got investigated, went to a court martial, and they just didn't have enough proof.

So like, I mean, of course, a lot of this is because cops are bad at their job. Military cops are even worse at their job. That sounds right. It's a lot like when you, I mean, I'm not a true crime fan, but if you look at true crime and like through like this pretty much

through all time to include today, I was like, wow, that serial killer is a genius. In reality, it's like cops like, who whoops dropped my donut on the evidence oh totally absolutely we we were gonna investigate that but then it was in the evidence locker and it's like so far away yeah look i understand that 50 uh homeless people have been murdered in the city but i don't see a connection. Whoa, whoa, whoa. You said homeless, so I stopped caring. That's America!

This message brought to you by the Chicago Police Department. Yeah, well. Yeah. Like I said, oh, he's addicted to weed. They didn't know he was on opium yet, but there's also a huge racial undertone here.

They believe that, at theone here they believe that at the at the time they believe like the you know the reefer madness type shit that if black people smoked weed it made them extra violent and unable to control themselves you know uh this is very very stupid so they pinned a lot of it on that of course this allowed them to blame something else and not pushing a man over the edge uh through systemic racism and then giving him a gun. Now, meanwhile, Perry had been sprinting through the jungle for three days. He had no memory of the shooting, which is pretty common for people

undergoing some pretty serious trauma. Perry had never seen combat. He had never fired his weapon in anger before. He certainly never killed a man. No shit! Oh my god! So this to him was pure on like i am uh

reacting emotionally and murdering a man and he has no wow that's fucking crazy yeah yeah like i witnessed them the man who was driving the uh the dumb truck said that like well the army was painting him as like i'm gonna fucking kill this officer uh perry

was actually like crying and telling uh caddy to stay away from him so like he was 100 emotional absolutely like i'm i bet everything that i've ever lived for is avoiding this moment and you are forcing me into it yeah yeah and you can only push someone so fucking far, you know, not, not to mention, yeah, there was no light at the end of this tunnel.

Even if he didn't shoot caddy, he was going back to the stockade. And then after that, he was going to be released from the stockade and then go back into digging this fucking road. Like he had, there was no way out for him. You are building road Lito no matter what.

Yeah. Fuck that. Yeah. Now, and these three days, uh, he was, you know, you are building road Lito no matter what yeah fuck that yeah now and these three days he was you know hungry tired covered in leeches he didn't want to be out there anymore so he eventually turned around and wandered right back into his camp on March 8th

to the amazement of his fellow soldiers in his unit who of course everybody knew what had happened at this point he just reappeared one day, standing in the middle of their tent, holding his rifle. Members of his unit grabbed him and hid him, telling him that the MPs

had orders to shoot him on sight, which was true. Okay. Their soldiers even wrote letters to him and gave him... They were letters of support from around the unit. And then they warned him,

do not let yourself get captured. They gave him a ton of ammo for his rifle and then a box of rations because he needed food and then shoved him back out into the jungle. All accounts at this point that he was just out of it. He was just in a complete blank, like fugue state or whatever he was just out of it. He was just in a complete blank, fugue state or whatever. He was out of it. What I'm hearing is that this is the basis for RTJ3.

We've got, don't get captured. We've got... Not to mention, now he has enough stuff to actually resist the MPs when they come out of... Unfortunately, he lost his rifle. He leaned it up against a tree and then went to sleep. He lost his rifle? Yeah.

Own goal, man. Own goal. You've got to keep an eye on that. You've got to keep the rifle. Yeah, it's the only thing keeping you alive at this point. At least to fight off the fucking tigers. Now, the manhunt had turned into something pretty big for the local mps they put a captain named eugene kirk in charge uh yeah captain kirk yeah uh yeah yeah no no you i was yeah i got that uh no this is actually gonna

sound even worse i just realized that and I wrote this script. Though Kirk was not good at his job. Like I said, he was known for directing traffic and arresting drunk. All of this was made worse by the fact that Kirk being bad at his job and the army was even worse at it. For instance, they didn't even have

a picture of Herman Perry on file. They're like, so what's he look like? Yeah, we don't know. Kirk also miswrote his serial number that was on his dog tags and put on an all points bulletin that got his physical description wrong. Pretty much the only

thing that got right is that he was in fact a black man. So much of this story is a failure of record keeping above all else. Literally none of this would have happened if people could keep paperwork. Now, for some reason, mostly racial, Kirk believed that Perry, free from the army now, would have to go sate his insatiable sexual appetite. And he must be going to the nearest city, Calcutta, which was known for its brothels. And so he ordered a trap to be set all over Calcutta, staking out every single brothel in town. And to be fair, there was a fuckload of them. So he said...

Yeah, there has to be a million. He put an entire spy network in place amongst the sex workers, who, of course, were taking his money because they're like, yeah, sure, we'll tell you if Perry shows up. Perry was nowhere near Calcutta. He was going the exact opposite way.

He was still just off the Lido road, not even a full 10 miles away from the camp. Meanwhile, this fucking moron has established like a sex worker spy ring. But that's, that's, that's such like stereotypes. Like if,

if somebody was like, Oh, Jordan's on the run, he's a comedian. Comedians love to go to nightclubs and get shit faced and it's like yeah man when you're paying me i could go anywhere he's a comedian we have to stake out uh joe rogan's studio and like to be fair if one of my soldiers went missing and i was living in a city that had legal prostitution. Like we have to go check the brothel. That is a fair point.

That is a fair point. I won't argue that for a second. But instead he was only a few miles off the Lido Road going deeper and deeper into the jungle. He had no idea where he was. And at one point he came across a patrol of the local British police. It was like a civil, I think they call

it like a civil security patrol. They went out to local villages because there were local tribal villages that were being attacked by the naga because the naga were headhunters which was illegal yeah making headhunting illegal seems kind of fucking stupid but uh who are being victimized by the naga and the british go around like hey have they come around and they'd be like no no okay fine so he ran into one of those patrols hey listen on their own we haven't done anything but have they been like are we cool yet like are we friends are we cool yet like listen you guys you do you we do us but like let's just be cool i don't know i don't know what else you want from us we made headhunting illegal why don't they simply follow the law i don't understand why this tribe of people who have no interest in our laws or money or anything that we're associated with

doesn't follow our laws or money or anything we're associated with that's right um now the british were kind of confused like why the hell is this clearly black American soldier all alone in the middle of the jungle? And Perry hit him with the charm. He told them that he was a scout for the American military. And despite the fact, remember, he doesn't have a gun anymore. He's just standing there in his uniform. I can't begin to describe to you how much I love this dude. Yeah.

Hey, buddy! Even better than that, the British are like, yeah, I mean, he wouldn't lie to our face like that. Why would he? And then Perry is like, well, since you're here, I seem to be out of food. Can I get some? And they'd be like, yeah, sure. They gave him a fucking out of food uh can i get some and they'd be like yeah sure they gave him a fucking ton of food to include like syrupy uh like containers of fruit and stuff like that um like they gave him all the food he could carry and a handgun imagine you're hiking through the

woods and you know one of the one of the the nature hikes in chicago and someone's like hey man can i have a gun and And you're like, yeah, sure. No, no, no. And this is something that I feel like people don't know is that the most amazing thing in history is that no matter when, if you can meet the British army

when they don't know that they already hate you, they will be so kind and deferential. But if they already hate you, you're be so kind and deferential. But if they already hate you, you're fucking dead. Yeah, pretty much the weird army that they've got going around there. Yeah.

And there was racism in England, of course, but like they didn't have, they didn't have Jim Crow shit. Uh, so like, right, right.

They had tacit Jim Crow. I mean, they didn't have a constitution either, you know, so they've got some, they've got some tacit shit that they don't need to write down of course and perry was an indian so he's like well he's one step above that we'll give him a gun uh yeah uh and then perry eventually came up to some naga tribesmen who

gave him food also uh now they either knew him personally from trading opium with him or because they did understand the kind of fucked up dynamics between black and white. Not necessarily in America in general, but they saw because the British treated them the same way. So they're like, well, he's not white, so he can't be that bad. Wait, wait, wait. Are you saying that an aboriginal tribe instantly grasped that apartheid was wrong? tribe instantly grasped that apartheid was wrong i mean at least i think that they at least had a comparison because like whenever we're around white people they treat us like shit right right all right that doesn't seem right it's like what it's like cops explanation for stockholm syndrome

of like well clearly it must be some weird sort of psychological disease that people don't like cops. Now, he also then stumbled upon an entire Naga village, which was decorated with hundreds of polished human skulls. This is generally known as a warning. Perry seems cool and just

walked right up to it. I love Perry. I want I'm loving it. Like I said, the Herman Perry grind said, I wasn't even kidding. I'm all about this life, man. Right on it. Yeah. Now he walked right into the village.

And like I said before, just because they did business with you did not mean they were going to be friendly if you showed up at their house. However, Perry showed up with a fuckload of looted rations that he got from the army and then the British patrol and the leader of the tribe, which is known as like the Ang. The Ang was like, you can stay here. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, like it was a barter system.

He effectively bought a room, rented a flat, if you will. Yeah, absolutely. Doesn't matter what era of history or what tribe you are, man. You bring a lot of food. You're probably going to get a place to stay. Yeah, not to mention,

the Naga had problems with the Americans and especially the British, but those problems were with white people. Like, well, once again, you're not one of those guys. So cool. You probably won't give us problems. Yeah, yeah.

And what's true is that yeah absolutely ended up being 100 true yeah uh now almost immediately perry found that he loved this place uh they still worked the fields during the day which he remembered from his youth but they were working in rice fields and and weed crops and things like that uh but then after working for a couple hours everybody would stop working and get fucked up on rice beer. Right. Sexually, it was a very

free society. Of course. Pre-marital sex was expected. And this is a lifestyle I feel like all of us are like yeah he's onto something here he effectively became america's first hippie that but he's that's the story that's the story again and again of aboriginal people or or indigenous people or whoever coming into contact

with white society joining white society experiencing that and then experiencing a non-white society being like fuck white society that happens all the time every native american that ever went to england was like i'm gonna go back to america and leave you people forever fuck this shit to be fair i am not an indigenous person to the americas and I would also not want to live in the UK. Right? What are you talking about? Why did you guys build a society this stupid? Why did we like it so much we wanted to spread it?

Fuck. What is wrong with you people? Yeah, totally. Remember, he's 20 years old. He had spent his entire life being discriminated against in and outside the army. And to him, he had just walked into fucking heaven. And eventually, through this process, he met the Aang, or the tribal leader's daughter, who was four years younger than him. The leader told Perry that he's fine with this relationship.

However, you owe me a dowry. Uh, and he said specifically, you need to go get more American rations. Um, and Perry was like, okay, you know,

he's 20 years old. He desperately wants to fuck the chief's daughter. Uh, so he did what any other young man would do. He simply hiked six miles through the jungle, waved down a passing American truck, and acquired supplies somehow. Now here's the fun

part. He didn't bring his gun. It's questionable if he even had his gun anymore. So it's not like he robbed them. But he did make off with literally tons of supplies. And here's the explanation why. The easiest explanation is probably my favorite.

Everyone knew who Perry was at this point. His status had been elevated to a, to a kind of local soldier folk hero. And the people driving the truck would have immediately known who he was and probably given him anything he wanted or he invoked bro laws. Like, look guys, I'm really trying to get laid.

Could I get some fucking rations excuse me gentlemen paul bunion has emerged from the amazon in like the news articles and stuff had called him herman perry the jungle king so like the people knew who people knew who he was like huh that must be a Yeah, we'll give him some fruit. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. No, we're going to feed Tarzan if it kills us. Yeah, of course we are. They gave him so many boxes of rations and supplies.

He had to go back to the village to wrangle up some locals to help him carry it all back. The soldiers also gave him a new rifle. Once again, complete stranger. Like, hey, bro, you want a gun? Oh, shit. So we've gone from a fun time to Ocean's 11-ing military rations. Got it.

Yes. Now armed with the only gun in the village, Perry proved his worth to the Naga by going hunting with them, and he hooked up with the chief's daughter. His life was paradise. For the first time in his entire life, he wasn't being judged for his race.

Nobody was telling him what to do, and he was pretty much allowed to do whatever he wanted. So he decided to marry into the family. Wait, wait, wait. So you're telling me he doesn't want to continue being a part of the greatest nation on the Earth? Are you telling me that this man is not looking at the united states and jerking off at the thought of a nation this great existing instead he decided to uh scamper off into the jungle

marry a chief's daughter and begin growing weed and opium for himself. That sounds crazy. What sane human being would think that's not better than working from nine to five, five days a week. And he, he was, he was considered kind of well off for village standards because he could hunt so well, you know,

because he had a gun. So he, he could hire middle class. Yeah. He's solidly upper middle class because of the invention of the firearm. Sure, sure. And he could barter with other villagers to work his field for him.

So all he did is spend his time doing drugs and shooting monkeys in the jungle. All right. All right. Listen, I'm just saying that if you learn a behavior from the white man, maybe it's not supposed to replicate it elsewhere. He paid them at least. Maybe I'm just saying that if you learn a behavior from the white man, maybe it's not supposed to replicate it elsewhere. He paid them at least.

Oh, and within a short amount of time, only about a few weeks, really, he was going to be a dad again. Holy shit. That's quick. That is quick. He just spent eight months digging a a road through the jungle he's making up for lost time sure sure sure we're talking like uh you know what was his regular work schedule 16 hours a day yeah right okay well now he doesn't have that so he's got to fill 16 hours a day with something and i feel like now we know what it is you're Doing fat bowls of opium and shooting monkeys only takes up so much time of your day.

Right, right, right. You gotta fuck. And I feel like the shooting the monkeys thing was almost vengeance for them screaming at night while he was trying to sleep for all that time. He's like, now motherfuckers, it's time to level the playing field. I just don't understand why you're not spending all

of your time trying to domesticate tigers because that's my number one move right now Herman Perry rides into the camp on tiger back holding a rifle brothers follow me into the jungle

buddy print the legend oh that'd make a good fucking shirt. Now, unfortunately, he would not be able to live in this village for too long without word finally getting out. Someone from the village went down to the local bazaar where all the local villages

converged upon and said something about, hey, we have this weird dark-skinned guy living with us who married into the tribal royalty. Oh god when have gossipy bitches not ruined everything always that's something that's like the book really lays out pretty well that's like the nagas were a bunch of gossipy bitches uh and they like the great find is how they got their news that's how they got their news right no no of course uh like the british i'm not gonna judge their behavior clearly no of course not imagine if someone that's like completely alien

to you showed up and started living in your garage like you you tell someone and like you're not gonna keep it a secret you're gonna be like holy shit i got a fucking alien man yeah what if et showed up to your house and fucked your mom? I got to tell someone about this. And the British had established a bizarre checkpoint, like markets and stuff where they could use to monitor

the local population of the remote tribes people. On top of they gave out huge amounts of rice there to try to win people over so you only could yeah of course you can only pass this rumor of like this black guy showing up in our village through so many

Nagas before it finally got back to the British commander of that distribution point named Captain Sutherland he was like that's gotta be fucking Perry like there's yeah and he had told the American He was like, that's got to be fucking Perry. Like there's. That'd be hard to assume anybody else. Yeah. And he had told the American provost.

Marshall is the swamp fox. He told the American provost Marshall, who's like the head of military law enforcement. And which was shocking to him because they actually assumed that he had died out in the jungle. He'd been gone for like five months so like that guy's gotta be fucking dead for whether it be

or tiger or whatever like he's fucking like holy shit Perry still alive yeah why what kind of crazy person would assume he was still alive I would figure I mean he would have been dead if he didn't find that village yeah for sure if he hadn't fucked the village. Well, yeah, for sure.

If he hadn't fucked the chief's daughter, he'd be dead as shit right now. Yeah. Now, this rumor mill did not work one way. And soon the Naga from Perry's village heard that Americans had heard about him being there and warned Perry to get the fuck out of there. And thus begins the worst moment of any story about history. And then the white man came. It's like the Aang of the village that he was staying in knew the Aang of the other village

because they were related. He's like, I'll take you over to his village and you can hide there. Yeah. Yeah. And so by July 20th, the detachment of MPs was sent out to get him, finding that he hadn't been moved two days before.

However, they had hired a Naga guide who knew the Aang of that village and was like, ah, his cousin is the leader of this village. I bet he put him over there. So this guide fucked him. Whoa. Well, okay. All right. All right.

Everybody knows fucking everybody. This is like World War I shit where the Queen of England is married to the King of Germany. I got it. Yeah, yeah. Everybody knows everybody. I mean, these villages are only a couple dozen families at most. Sure, sure. Very small community. So the guide led them over

to the second village and the guide snuck up to the hut where Perry was staying in and asked him like hey can I borrow your weapon I want to go hunting and Perry who has been so used to like half of a year now helping Naga

without questioning their motives like yeah of course so the guide then now holding Perry's only weapon went back to the MPs like he's in there and I disarmed him no yeah so the MPs

what are you doing Judas come on man what shit is this he did have like a thousand rupee bounty on his head so like you know he was worth a lot of money that's like 50 bucks the MPs snuck up to the hut where Perry was staying He was worth a lot of money. That's like 50 bucks.

The MPs snuck up to the hut where Perry was staying, but Perry noticed flashlights. He's like, wait a fucking second. Nagas don't have flashlights. And then the village dog started barking, which is it doesn't bark at Nagas. So he's like, oh, fuck, the MPs are here. So like any man who had already killed one guy, he grabbed a dow, which remember is like a sword, went outside and fucking hucked it at the MPs, barely missing taking one guy's head off.

That's like when a guy is out of bullets and he throws the gun, man. No, no, no, you keep the sword in your hand. He voluntarily brought a sword to a gunfight and almost won. Carolee brought a sword to a gunfight and almost won. The MPs then opened fire on him and Perry took off running into the jungle, despite the fact he knew that this particular stretch of jungle

was very popular with the local tiger population. The MPs closed in after him and noticed... You spent a lot of your time domesticating tigers. That's all I'm saying. Once again, it comes back to bite you in the ass that you haven't domesticated tigers. He should have married into the tigers. Oh my god, it's obvious in retrospect.

Now, they noticed a blood trail going from the hut so Perry had been wounded. They followed that blood trail to find Perry shot in the chest and suffering from a collapsed lung. He had managed to make it to a nearby stream before collapsing. And they found him near death, brought him back into the village and to the shock of collapse lung. He had managed to make it to a nearby stream before collapsing. And

they found him near death, brought him back into the village, and to the shock of the gang of MPs, their commander by the name of Captain McMinn ordered them to give him first aid. Now, most of these white MPs had been figured they were part of a glorified lynch mob, that they would

just murder him. Right, right, right. They're just a death squad yeah yeah yeah but their commander wasn't and to be clear here I need to say this very quickly this is not because he's a decent man or cared about Perry or the rule of law um like I said before his notoriety had grown amongst black troops

he had been he had become like I said a folk hero to them he's a guy who gunned down a shitty white officer and ran off into the jungle, and since then, rumors had run rampant. He's a hero. The general,

the guy going there, it's not like he had a bet that the guy was going to live. Right. Yeah, they were worried that... He's trying to survive himself. Yeah, I gotcha. There have been a growing number of insubordination cases, and again, they blame these on Perry and his story rather than everything that they were doing. Right, right, right, of course. Captain McMinn figured if they just shot him that nobody would believe it.

Because remember, they had already believed he was fucking dead, and they already had been spreading rumors for half of a year at this point so okay so what you're telling me is this is if they had spent their time domesticating tigers they could have loosed the tigers on this dude and they never had to worry about this is a story about people not

domesticating tigers is all tigers arms race yeah this is way cooler version of the cold war. Like McMahon was given very strict orders to make sure that Perry made it in alive so he could be executed publicly for his crimes. He was going to be made an example and under interrogation, which by that, I mean being asked while still in the village and bleeding out if he was who

he was. And if he had shot Caddy. He was like, yeah, that's me. I did it. And ask why he shot Caddy. He said because he deserved it. I mean, what else are you going to say? Why the fuck do you think I shot him?

Get the fuck out of here. Whoopsie doodle. I gave him a double tap to the chest. What are you going to say? I tripped. tap to the chest what are you gonna say i tripped i tripped what are you gonna do now since he was talking uh mcminn demanded to know uh how much help perry was getting from soldiers in his unit to which perry looked him dead in the eyes said nobody's helped me at all. Yeah. Guess what? The first not a snitch so far in this goddamn story. Yep. He was eventually brought back to base where he stashed in the hospital for medical treatment and pumped full of painkillers. While he was high as shit on painkillers, he began to get interrogated again, where he once again admitted to everything.

But now he was out of his mind. I learned how to speak to tigers. I know the language. I will live forever. Me and my tiger son will come back with you for vengeance. I am Mowgli. But like his interrogation, his answers to the interrogation made no sense whatsoever.

Like he said that the rifle that he had used to kill Lieutenant Caddy had been stolen. That was his issued firearm, and there was a paper trail that confirmed that. Sure. But the Army investigator was like, good enough. Our job here is done. Okay. And with that, he was ready for his trial. Now, during World War II, the Army General general court marshals handled serious crimes within the military.

They'd undergone reform since World War I when someone pointed out that, hey, the accused actually have no rights whatsoever. Like, not even the right for counsel. Oh, that's not good. Yeah, so in 1920, that was all fixed. You were allowed the right to counsel, but there was one problem. Nowhere in that article of reform did it note anything to do with that counsel's actual qualifications.

Like, for example, we did a premium episode on Eddie Slovic, who was the only U.S. soldier to be executed for desertion during World War II. His defense counsel wasn't even a lawyer. It was just Derek from down the way yeah yeah guy he's like he read a couple books he dabbled in law on his free time like the guy didn't even file paperwork correctly shit like that sure now in the civilian world i'm not saying this is a good system but you're you're tried before a jury of your peers generally speaking

we get there's a whole other podcast at length of why that's actually a lie the system is deeply flawed however in the military that is not the case there's not even a facade of it being in front of your peers the judges and jurors assholes your peers. The judges and jurors... Yeah, you're trying to buy some assholes. Yeah. I mean, the judges and jurors are all officers, which meant that Herman Perry would be facing an entirely white tribunal. Yeah, I read the great Santini. I'm with you. Now, who would be the defense and prosecuting attorney was also decided by the same office

that ran the trial, the CBI Services of Supply. Excuse me, Your Honor, Your Honor, I'm seeing a very slight conflict of interest here. Oh boy, wait, it gets worse. I am a four-year-old. That is how much education it takes to see a conflict of interest here. They picked the judges, they picked the jurors, and they picked the defense, and they picked the prosecution. So,ordan already alluded to in theory they could control how these trials went by assigning people they knew to be good or bad at their jobs which is why that happened uh they assigned prosecution to a guy named bernard frank he was a veteran criminal attorney from Florida and the army's top prosecutor for India.

Okay. Defense fell to Clayton Oberholzer. Now, prior to army life, he was a small town lawyer in Medina, Ohio. Your honor, I'm just a small country lawyer.

I don't know much about your fantastic law practices here. However, I must say that my client cannot have committed this crime. Now, not only was he actually a small country lawyer, he was a

small claims court guy. He handled divorces. He had never once defended a murder case. He wasn't even a lawyer in the army. He actually did not practice law because he didn't

want to. When he commissioned into the military, he asked to not be a lawyer. So they put him in the Quartermaster Corps, which ended with him commanding a unit of black truck drivers there in the Lido Road. Sure. So they put him in the Quartermaster Corps, which ended with him commanding a unit of black truck drivers there in the Lido Road. Sure. So he got picked because they're like, well, fuck, he's a lawyer.

He hadn't practiced law in three years. And because the CBI office is like, you're going to defend him. That's an order. He can't be like, no, the fuck I'm not. So without a divorce lawyer ended up trying a death penalty case within three

years of commanding a truck driving unit. Sure, sure. No, no, no. The army makes sense is what you're telling me. Absolutely. Now, Oberholzer had only a month to prepare for this trial and figured out pretty goddamn quick that there's no way he was going to get an acquittal.

His best bet was to prove Perry hadn't planned the murder, which made it a manslaughter case and not a murder case, which therefore would save Perry's life. And so the whole thing came down to Oberholzer was going to do his best to make Caddy look portionally responsible for Perry's actions. Now, this was a problem for the other attorney, who completely

agreed that Caddy acted like a fucking idiot right before the murder, so he's like, Uh-oh. Listen, everybody here in this court agrees. The guy who got murdered had it coming. But is murder okay? Like, maybe murder's bad. I mean, sure, this guy

needed to be murdered, like, so bad. Oberholter's defense comes down to, come on. Come on! Let me murder him! Let me murder this guy! Come on! However, unfortunately, none of this, like, the legal matters

never actually mattered in the first place. Numerous American soldiers had gotten away with murder and desertion, but no black man had ever gotten away with killing a white officer. Before the trial even began, judge advocate general corps officers were sending memos back and forth to each other saying it did not matter how the trial played out. This is all ending in a death sentence. saying it did not matter how the trial played out. This is all ending in a death sentence. Now, the U.S. Army in India had yet to execute a single soldier, but the army otherwise made with capital punishment quite occasionally.

It wasn't super frequent, not for desertion, but for other crimes like murder or rape. This is almost always against locals. In Europe, 70 soldiers were eventually executed for their crimes. Of those 70, 55 were black. This is despite the fact that only 9% of the army in Europe was black. In the Pacific, the number was even higher. 21 soldiers were executed, 18 of them black. actually follows with civilian numbers as well which is why recently the state of Washington outlawed the death penalty claiming it was racist

and the Supreme Court was like yup the Supreme Court of Washington I should say yeah yeah no no no it's not going to make it past the Supreme Court well thankfully it's thankfully because like the states are allowed to regulate that, so it doesn't

matter. Unfortunately, federally, you're fucked. Now, much like their willingness to throw black soldiers in jail for no reason and at the drop of the hat, they were also much more likely to walk them to the gallows. So, statistically, Perry was doomed from the start. His trial began

September 4th, 1944, and one of the jury officers didn't even bother to show up for work. And after that, he never came back. Yeah, nobody really knows why. He's like, yeah, one guy just didn't show. I mean, this,

again, there are very few heroes in this story, but we've got another one. Yeah, I mean that guy probably sucked because he was an officer, but at least he had nothing to do with this. Right, right. Then Major Paul Grove, who was a medical

officer tasked with being on the jury, was asked by Oberholzer to be recused. The guy didn't even wait for the judge to make a ruling. He's like, yep, I'm out of here. I didn't even question it. Peace! Listen, I just want to give love to everybody who came out here to support

me, but listen, I got to get out of here. All right. Bye. So at that point, there's only six jurors left. Perry pleaded not guilty. And they didn't, they weren't replaced either. It's not like they have a reserve jury pool. The owner's like, oh, ah fuck it I guess we just keep going from here

so potentially all we've got is Darren and Terry those are the only two people we've got on our jury and listen man they're not fair Perry pleaded not guilty to all the charges and the defense

called Colonel Hyatt as a witness. And they used him to show that Caddy was, in fact, brutal, racist and an asshole with a history of harming soldiers. Hyatt did not deny any of that. This was also followed by just about every non-commissioned officer that came in contact with Perry, admitting that they had told Perry that he should talk to Colonel Hyatt if he wanted to get out of going to prison. Next, the driver of the dump truck that Perry had hitched a ride in pointed out that Perry wasn't mad. He was

distressed and crying while Caddy was screaming insults and threats at him while he was armed. So, you know, that's the tactic of trying to shift the blame onto Caddy, which was his fault. So, you know, that's the tactic of trying to shift the blame onto Ducati, which was his fault. Yeah, sure. Yeah. When it was the prosecution's

turn, they pointed to the confession that Perry had made in the hospital while under the influence of painkillers. However, even though even back then this would probably easily be able to be thrown out, but Oberholzer fucked up the process to get it withdrawn as evidence because he didn't know

how yeah because he's a divorce lawyer yeah yeah something happened that you normally like yeah i know i know this seems so trite and stupid but it's like come on man that's not fair

yeah frank was just a better lawyer right that shouldn't be allowed the law is supposed to be man. That's not fair. Yeah. Frank was just a better lawyer. Right. That shouldn't be allowed. The law is supposed to be impartial, but you can just be good at it and win. That's not fair.

That doesn't seem right. So like now, whenever overholter brought up an argument, Frank was like, we'll look at this confession. It's like, fuck shit. Oh man.

I wish there was some sort of legal recourse. Like an appeal. Oh, yeah, we'll get to that. Weirdly enough, by the time the court case closed, Oberhalter was pretty clearly unsure of what the fuck was going on anymore. He got lost in court proceedings.

He hardly even mentioned the main point of his defense, that being that we're not debating that he did it. We're debating that it should be manslaughter, not murder. He only brought that up once and then completely forgot about it. That's not good. Instead, he focused so much on Caddy being a bad person that he spoke more about him possibly committing adultery in the brothels in Calcutta more than,

uh, you know, that his actual defense, like this was so petty at this point that like the judge had to point, finally point out that caddy was not on trial in my client's defense. I want to murder the shit out of caddy. I want to kill this dude so bad. This motherfucker did this.

I want to stab him for that. This motherfucker did that. Okay. All right. Now, in the end, this trial took only six hours, which included two breaks and an hour for lunch. Oh, fuck me. The jury took only five minutes for Perry to be found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. Now, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on which side of this fence that you're on, this is not just like you're marched out back and strung up.

In order for this to be final, two general officers would have to sign off on the sentence for Perry to face the gallows. The first of these was General William Coville, who was the commander of the services of supply. So he was the commander of the unit that set the entire jury up in trial and everything. However, this guy is not on Perry's team. Well, he's probably not,

just by a default, but he also had no idea about military law. He wasn't a lawyer. So the army lawyers under his command, which remember just prosecuted this case, helpfully loaned him an advisor to advise him on this death penalty case, which made him completely dependent

on this advisor's advice. He didn't know the first thing about the law. So of course he signed off on it. Sure. Right, right, right. So this dumb dumb gets a smart handler to guide him through the process necessary to hang this dude. Who's fucking cool.

It's actually even worse than that. Um, so the, the advisor that they gave him was again, a major Charles Richardson and the case filed. They gave him, uh, read on the cover quote,

this case being a case in which the death penalty has been imposed, this reviewing authority has only the power to approve or disprove this sentence in its entirety and has no power to order the execution or the sentence or grant commutation. So this is completely untrue. So if I understand correctly, what they're saying is you can either say this guy lives or dies. You can't say he's innocent or guilty or that his sentence should be like life in prison or something like that, right? Right. The case that Koval was looking at in his mind and per his advisor,

he had two options, execute Perry or release him. Right. That's what, yeah. Okay, cool. So which,

which is completely untrue per the articles of war as a general officer, Koval had fully the right to commute his sentence to literally anything else. What? Yeah, but he had no idea. He just didn't tell him? He didn't know? And they lied on the official casework. Can you do that? Nope.

There's so much of history that really just comes down to somebody had the gall to do something and nobody punished them for it yeah the lawyers just lied to a general's face knowing he wouldn't know any better yeah what the fuck do you know idiot yeah that's so confronted with those as only two options he signed off on it and then the the old had to be signed off by one other general this case went to general stillwell who waited a month to actually look over the file, but

by the time that he actually went to sign it, he didn't actually have the authority to do so. The army had since promoted in his place a guy named General Sultan, who had also no authority, because in order for a general to have authority as a new commander, which included the

right of execution, he had to get a letter from the Secretary of War to validate that he was in command. And he was still waiting on that. So Perry is in prison now, a real prison, not the stockade, waiting through all of this. And that's when he's like, I'm not going to fucking stick around here. The guards of the prison had kept him in chains and handcuffed since the trial, which had been, remember, over a month. But, because they're in India, the handcuffs

badly made, whatever, had literally rusted off of his body from the humidity. Great. That's a huge win. It doesn't get better than that. Yeah. He didn't even have to try to escape. He was allowed to freely wander the prison and learn that other

soldiers coming to and from the camp for jobs weren't even searched by the guards. So before long he managed to get his hands on a pair of wire cutters, clip through the fence and escape back off into the jungle. Buddies, I've got to tell you this right now. These people

are trying to force us to escape. This is the only explanation for what's going on here. They're fucking daring you to stay in prison. And now all my clothes have melted off. Now, unfortunately

for him, he was about 80 miles from his adopted Naga home village. But the MPs had no place to start. Like newspapers and radio all broadcasted that Perry had. But the MPs had no place to start. Like newspapers and radio all broadcasted that Perry had escaped. And MPs began their search by stopping random black soldiers and harassing them

and insisting that they were helping Perry. Now, they weren't because some of these guys had been miles away, like I said, 80 miles from his original camp and actually never heard the Perry story. But now they're being harassed by the fucking cops.

They sure as fuck are on Perry's side now. Yeah. What was he arrested for, sir? Oh, he shot a white officer. Like, huh, you don't say. Nope, haven't seen him. Are you? Hold on. Let me ask you a quick question. Tell me more of this folk hero's

exploits who identifies closer with me than with you. Jungle King, you say? Now, the MPs are actually close on capturing him in one occasion, but he managed to escape. They let a trap out for him, and he managed to escape it. But after that, the trail went cold. But then he reappeared. He'd gotten his hand on a pistol. And now, because

he was in an area that didn't quite know who he was, he began robbing any Americans he came across. At one point, he broke into a man's tent and held a man at gunpoint as he cooked him a meal and then sat down and ate it while he watched. That's fucking...

That's just... You just don't get that from the modern criminals no you just don't get that kind of level of respect and just like i respect my profession i respect your position listen we're all just gonna try and make it through this together i like it yeah like if you weren't lieutenant Caddy, the chances of him hurting you were zero. Zero. And then he waved down another truck, which had two truck drivers in it. He said,

Hey, how about you let some stuff fall out the back? And the truck drivers went and told the MPs that they had seen Perry. Who until told their commander, whose name was Major Earl Cullum, who's a former Dallas cop. So, you know,

he's a piece of shit. Oh, yeah. When, when column and his MPs, who's a former Dallas cop, so you know he's a piece of shit. When Cullum and his MPs tried to set a trap for Perry, Perry escaped, and despite the MPs being the only ones who opened fire during this encounter, Cullum got shot in the leg.

Okay. Okay. Alright, I'm liking this. Let this see how this plays out but by this point perry had made it back to delito road and wanted to hop into the back of a passing cargo truck which would hopefully bring him into burma instead he kind of fucked up tripped and fell and ate shit out of the back of a moving truck in front of what the watchful eyes of construction workers who are really confused which ended him running back out into the jungle. Right,

right, right. So we're, we're in a sort of like ironic, we begin at the end, uh, uh, situation where all of a sudden he winds up back on Lido road and he's

fucked. He never really gets away from the road. Uh, like, right. I mean, by this point, uh, like they call him and his mps had

formed like a local posse uh like deputizing the local lasam police to help them find this guy mostly so they didn't get lost in the fucking jungle and die um right right right yeah that makes sense and then eventually like they were getting tons of rumors getting them because now everybody knew about the Jungle King. Like, this is all over the radio and the local newspapers. And someone finally reported a possible hideout. And that someone was a local Assam policeman who actually ended up regretting his decision. He didn't really know who Perry was.

At this point, Perry was not in peak Jungle King form. He was suffering from terrible dysentery and couldn't get food. He wanted to make it back to his normal... I mean, that's regular Jungle King form. That's fair. Yeah, this is a baseline dysentery at minimum. Yeah, baseline dysentery is normal, yeah. And he was a little

worried because now the reward had been raised to like 10,000 rupees. So he's a little bit worried if he did show up at his camp, even though he was technically family, they're like, it's business, fella. We're sorry. Right, right, right. He wasn't sure what to do. Not to mention during that last shootout where Colm got shot in the leg, he had been grazed by several bullets, which is not a serious wound. But when you're stalking through the jungle, those get infected pretty quickly.

So he was pretty sick. Now, this entire time, the entire time he'd been living with his Naga family, he had actually stayed in his army uniform, mostly out of comfort. But now he had switched over to the clothes of the locals to try to blend in. He'd also hacked off his hair with a knife, which had grown out over the last eight months because he wasn't allowed to get a haircut while he was in prison. I can't imagine his regular clothes were in tip-top shape either.

Definitely not. Maybe he just wanted to look better. They had some good shit. Yeah, definitely not. He wanted to try to pass as a Naga at a distance, but they didn't do any favors because an MP barged into the hut that he was living in with a Naga tribesman.

And they noticed when they started asking questions in English that Perry seemed to understand what they were saying. So his cover was blown pretty immediately. When it was clear that the game was up you guys pay attention to how the yankees have been doing perry himself finally just shrugged and said you got me uh that the assam policeman who had ratted him out to call him uh found out now that he was actually facing execution uh and that's when he uh he regretted it because i guess he was a devout buddhist and uh he said afterwards it's like if i knew that he was going to be executed i wouldn't have

told the cops but yeah man a devout buddhist gets tricked into that shit god God damn. That's some bad Dharma, homie. Now, this time Perry was not thrown back into a stockade, but locked into a cement prison so he wouldn't be able to escape again. Again, the army tried to get Perry to admit that he had been getting help while he was on the run, and he still refused to say anything. He even refused

to show sympathy for shooting Caddy, saying in quote, if I hang for it, I'm at least going to hang like for shooting Caddy, saying in quote, if I hang for it, I'm at least going to hang like a man. Yeah, absolutely. That guy got to go. I'm willing to take it. And listen, you win some, you lose some. I'm willing to bite the bullet on this one. Yeah, like I'm going to get it regardless. What the fuck am I going to rat on anybody? It's not like if I tell them you're not going to kill me. Yeah. And that guy fucking sucked. If that's why I'm going to die, I'm fine with that.

I'm with him. Perry's execution was scheduled for the morning of the 15th outside of the Lido stockade. The date was kept a secret to the possibility of armed soldiers might show up and try to free him. The secrecy even went for Perry, who had no idea that he was going to be led to the gallows until it happened. When Perry was finally led to Leto for the execution,

he was put in a convoy of 17 different vehicles of armed MPs with explicit orders that if black soldiers were to ambush the convoy to try to free Perry, their first thing that they did was to turn and summarily execute Perry.

That seems excessive. Yeah, yeah. Which of course just didn't happen no of course not why would anybody do that that's that's a level of paranoia that is itself born out of bigotry of just this idea of like it's not like they're regular military people yeah that's fucking oh man i oh white people and even then it's like another form of racism with with like the othering is like yeah they're in the army but they're not in the army you know exactly they would never abide by yeah i know it's such a fucking fucked up oh man yeah and when perry got there he was asked if he had any final requests and he said he only had one

and that was the right one last letter to his brother. I want to fuck your daughter! Bring me my tiger! Come on, baby! He wrote one last letter to his brother Aaron, who was ironically undergoing training, because he had also been drafted. Oh, of course. He told him to not get undergoing training because he had also been drafted.

He told him to not get in trouble like he had and ended the letter with I love you, do not respond. Perry walked to his death without flinching. The army chaplain tasked with giving Perry his last religious rights began to cry and Perry had to comfort him saying, quote, don't cry, chaplain. I'm the one that's going. When the guard

came forward to put a hood over his head, he refused it, saying he didn't want one. And the executioner said, it's army regulation to use a hood. Perry sarcastically remarked, oh, well, I don't want to break any rules, do I? Like, you

gotta respect a man who goes out with a bit. You gotta respect a man that goes out with a bit you gotta respect a man that goes out with a bit come on what are you you shouldn't there should be some sort of weird law that nobody knows about but like if you get a good laugh right before you're gonna go they're like fine okay you make you make the executioner giggle you get a fucking mutation yeah you've got a good bit in there come on what if we we got to see what you come up with next every good

bit you get another two weeks I feel like that's just fair get a work on your tight five at the prison cantina absolutely now admittedly if that were on me when I was first starting out, I'm dead. I'm just straight up dead. No chance. I'm out.

Looking at it this way, we at least would have gotten rid of Joe Rogan and Steven Crowder. Ooh, so fast. Real quick. Would have gotten rid of him. Would have gotten rid of Gavin McGinnis. All those guys. Was he in stand-up? Yeah.

Oh, God. His stand-up. I just knew him as the vice fashion guy yeah he was the vice fascist uh the vice fashion guy and he was a shitty stand-up comic first outstanding i did not know god i cannot i mean conservative comedy in itself is terrible because it all comes down to my pronouns are attack helicopter or whatever. Yeah. No, you, you scratch the surface of any, any of the conservative pundits and you'll find somebody who tried regular

comedy and found out it was hard. That's fucking incredible. God, the idea of Gavin McGinnis as a standup comedian makes me laugh enough to make this next part. Not so sad. All right, bring it home.

Land this plane into fucking hell. Now the army had no trained executioners. Uh, so the men that were assigned to be the executioner for this did not even know how to tie a noose correctly, let alone place one. Uh, because in case people didn't tie a noose correctly, let alone place one. Because in case people didn't know, a noose is supposed to snap your neck, not strangle you.

Right, right, right. That's the idea. Yeah, so that didn't happen. Perry strangled to death, and they left him hanging for 25 minutes just to be sure that he was dead. Herman Perry was buried only about 100 feet from where Lieutenant Caddy

was buried, alone and under a tree separated by a hedge. Now, if you're wondering how exactly, because if someone dies in the military, you get a death notice

if you're family. Flanny Perry, who is still alive, Herman's mother, received a note in the mail on St. Patrick's Day that read only, quote,

now this, a notice that Herman Perry has died of judicial asphyxiation due to his own misconduct. That was it. What a kind and really like just sympathetic note to send. Now this, your son, we killed him. Great. Good work, guys. Yeah. And before this, the only thing that she had been made aware of is that he was facing a trial.

Like she had no idea. Herman Perry's remains were eventually reinterred at the Schofield Barrack Cemetery here in Oahu, Hawaii. Only probably about 30 minutes from where I'm sitting. But in case people are unaware the way military cemeteries work is if you're executed by the military you're segregated and you're kept with other people you just can't fucking win like a good example of this is there's a like a a cemetery for the dishonored in fr or Belgium. I think it is. And you have to request visitation to go there.

And they're always denied. So like, now this isn't the case for the one in, this isn't the case for the one in Hawaii. Thankfully, like if, if Perry's family wanted to go visit his grave and they did, they were allowed to. But they also noted that he was buried alongside

rapists and murderers. And they fought for years. Because if you die like that, your body is still the property of the army. Right, right. Yeah. She had to fight until 2007

to have his body reinterred and cremated and brought back to DC where it could be buried alongside the rest of his family. That's his last surviving sister named Edna Wilson who finally got that done. Jesus Christ. And that's where he's interned to this day. Now, as for the road, since I talked about the Lido Road, that's another story that should probably also be wrapped up.

It was a total and complete dismal failure. Adjusted for inflation, the project cost over $1 billion, but even that's a bit of a low ball. One of the generals in charge of the project said in 1946 that the project probably cost $1 billion. That's in 1946 money. Adjusted for inflation, that's over $10 billion today. But that's not really the true cost. The true cost is the human cost, which we have no idea. As for Americans, over 1,000 men died working on the road. Almost exclusively black men died working on this road. While working on it, this earned the Lido Road the nickname of the Man-a-Mile Road, which is actually... Way underestimating the the cost of human life yeah

because the man a mile road would be less than 500 men you'd give you'd give a million dollars to have a man a mile road compared to this bullshit wow and not to mention that number is only americans it does not count the number of indian chinese and burmese laborers who died building it who nobody ever bothered to stop and count. Nobody has any idea, but people assume it's three times that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. God damn. And as one final fuck you to this entire thing, with only a few months of the road being completed, most of it is completely destroyed in a monsoon as the jungle slowly retook all of the cleared

areas. Today, virtually nothing remains of Toledo Road other than a sign that reads, The Stillwell Road, and a monument alongside next to it. Man, that's brutal. That's brutal. Let me ask you a question. Let me throw

this out at you. I feel like this is a question that Let me throw this out at you. I feel like this is, this is a question that's raised by the very end here. All right. You throw so many human lives at something. Is it more valuable if there's something left, you know, like is the pyramids more justified because it still exists than this fucking shitty ass road.

You know what I'm saying? Um, now i'll say that's not justified as much as it's like um a place of learning if you will like i've been to auschwitz which still exists today um and like it's a it's a place that i cannot recommend that people go enough um because you you learn something you simply can't learn. You feel something you can't feel somewhere else. Maybe the Stilwell Road could exist as a memorial to the people who

died there, but that's the only thing I can think of. Now, on the bright side, we do have one thing to lighten the mood before you go, Jordan. On this show, we do something called Questions from the Legion, where our fans that donate to this show

can ask us a weirdly innocent question that has nothing to do with anything we just talked about and we answer it on air. That is a very smart way to end your show, the one that almost always ends the saddest that it could. That's kind of the way I started

doing it. I'm like, man, every time I log off I'm fucking sad. It's smart. Now, this question comes from our Discord. If you want to join our Discord, donate a dollar to the show, you get a link on our Patreon, please. If you enjoy what we do here, you know, that's my

sales pitch. But this question is, if you become a supervillain, what kind of Acme doomsday device are you going to build in your lair? Ooh, man, that's a good question. Because I mean, the immediate answer is for a child, you know, lasers. Lasers are always the coolest way to solve any problem. Of course. Sharks with laser beams on their head. Right, exactly. But as an adult, you find out that steampunk is a better way to solve problems because it's less efficient and it's more fun. So I would say I would build a sort of inverse steam bomb that would explode or no, it would implode into a tiny little piece of ice my plan is falling apart there but i

feel like there's something to it how about you what's your plan oh um well if there's one thing that i've learned from the pandemic and that that is you can make society fall apart if you take toilet paper away. So I'm going to give every, I'm going to invent some kind of atmospheric weapon that doesn't kill anybody. This makes you poop a lot. This is, this makes you poop a lot, but also kills the trees.

Okay. Okay. What is, is there a certain frequency or like the brown note? Yeah. No, no, no.

Exactly like the brown note, but it eliminates toilet paper instead of makes you shit. So the brown note and the melting toilet paper note in concert would destroy the world. Hell yeah. And I would become King because I'd have all of the toilet paper. Now we figured it out. Jordan,

thank you so much. I never thought I actually thought I was gonna be able to get you on the show and get you trapped in here for three hours of podcasts. Oh, always. Which I guess you're used to. That's the length of like one of your podcasts. It's a regular show for me.

So I guess you can use a spot to plug your show if people aren't already listening to it for some reason oh sure uh the show is knowledge fight uh we my friend my best friend and uh maybe the most uh i don't know some sort of level of brilliant man i've ever met dan friesen talks about alex Alex Jones and I do what I did today and laugh at it. So that's what I do. And people always ask me questions of like how I research what I research without getting sad. And I truly want to ask Dan the same thing. Like, I mean, well, you don't want to know the answer because like i've i've introduced

the show knowledge fight to several friends of mine and they're like i can't listen to more than like one episode every three weeks because it does too much damage to me like having to listen to alex jones that much i'm like oh poor dan yeah you guys should go listen to it it's legitimately one of my favorite podcasts uh and jordan, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much for having me. This was a fantastic, fantastic time and a great show. And you did a fantastic job. Thank you.

I promise next time, if you come back, we will not talk about the racist army executing a guy. Isn't that most armies? Yeah, yeah. It's actually load-bearing. The racism that most armies? Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's actually load bearing. The racism is load bearing.

Yes, that does make sense. But everybody, thank you again for listening to the show. If you like what we do here, maybe throw us a dollar or two or don't. It's, it's,

it's your money. And the show will always be free anyway. So until next time, tame tigers and destroy your officers. Nate might have to edit that part out.