Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
We're pleased to welcome Brendan I. Koerner to Inkwell to discuss his
book "Now The Hell Will Start".

Brendan is a contributing editor at Wired whose work appears regularly
in The New York Times and Slate. He has won a National Headliner Award
for magazine feature writing, and he was named one of Columbia
Journalism Review's "Ten Young Writers on the Rise." Please visit him
at www.youthrobber.com.

Leading the conversation with Brendan is our own Cynthia Barnes.

Cynthia Barnes is a long-time WELL member whose work has appeared in
National Geographic, Humanities, Voyaging and Salon. Her Slate series,
'Timbuktu for the Timid' was listed as "notable" in Best American
Travel Writing 2006. A graduate of the University of Missouri-Columbia,
she is currently bouncing between Bangkok, Thailand and Boulder,
Colorado. Her online home is www.cynthiabarnes.com


Welcome, Brendan and Cynthia!
  

    
Thanks a million for the warm welcome, David. And thanks to everyone
for being here to discuss my little 386-page labor of love. Really
looking forward to the back-and-forth over the coming weeks.

Before we get going, folks might want to check out the book's website,
which has plenty of photos and ancillary details about the creative
process: www.nowthehellwillstart.com

Onward, y'all.
  

    
Welcome, Brendan; we're glad you're here! 

I've just finished NTHWS and join the chorus of reviewers who've
likened it to "a real-life The Fugitive." I'll start at the beginning:
How did you come across this story in the first place, and what made
you realize it would be such a compelling narrative?
  

    
Thanks for the kind words, Cynthia.

It all goes back to September 24, 2003. At that time, I was writing
Slate's "Explainer" column. Every morning, my editor and I would get up
bright and early and comb through the day's newspapers, looking for
stories that demanded further exploration. On that particular day, we
both noticed the big to-do over an Air Force translator who'd just been
arrested for espionage--he was accused of spying for Syria. (The
charges never went anywhere.) The news reports all mentioned that the
man would be put to death if convicted of espionage. And that got us
thinking: When was the last time the American armed forces had executed
one of its own? So my day's assignment was to delve into the history
of military executions.

Somewhere along the line, I got a hold of a bibliography from the
Military History Institute in Carlisle, Penn. It was pretty useless for
the most part--lots of obscure sources about the War of 1812. But just
as my eyes were about to glaze over, I noticed a small, fragmentary
note wedged beneath an entry. It read: "Pvt Herman Perry, murderer who
long evaded capture by living with Burmese tribe."

That just stopped me. It sounded so very Mr. Kurtz, and thus right up
my alley--"Heart of Darkness" is one of my all-time favorites. So I
flipped open my Palm Pilot (remember those?) and jotted "Herman Perry?"
in my Ideas folder.

At that point, I really only thought of Perry's tale as a straight-up
adventure. And to be honest, I kind of figured that the story couldn't
possibly be as interesting as the bibliographical note made it sound.

But it ended up being far wilder and richer than I ever thought
possible.
  

    
Having lived in Thailand, I'm familiar with Burma, which is
notoriously difficult, even when one is NOT a journalist. Can you tell
us a bit about your travel there?
  

    
I remember my dad forcing me to watch "The Execution of Private
Slovik" when it came out!

For further background, here's the Slate piece on military executions
that started it all:

http://www.slate.com/id/2088854/
  

    
People often forget that a young(-ish) Martin Sheen played Pvt. Slovik
in that movie. It was actually a TV Movie of the Week, back when such
things flourished--roughly 1977.

I took an unusual route into Burma, traveling over from the Indian
province of Arunachal Pradesh. The Ledo Road, the construction of which
is much discussed in "Now the Hell Will Start," still exists in
North-East India, and runs approximately 39 miles from the Assamese
railtown of Ledo to the Pangsau Pass. It's a short distance, but it
took my guide and I a while to traverse--in large part because of the
strong military presence. There are a lot of militant group in NE
India, most notably the violent United Liberation Front of Asom, and
the Indian Army (as well as its paramilitary offshoots) are a force in
the region.

We paid a lot of bribes to get over the border, but once we crossed we
traveled a bit more freely than I had anticipated. It was quite a
moment, descending the Patkai Mountains along the old Ledo Road, just
as Herman Perry did some 62 years earlier. When I first saw the Lake of
No Return, which is a landmark much remembered by Ledo Road vets, I
nearly burst into tears. The Burmese, for their part, were rather
mystified by my presence--I reckon they don't get many tourists in that
part of the world.

That said, I'm not sure I would recommend this travel gambit to most
folks. We did run into some problems with the Burmese military, and it
was only by virtue of my guide's supreme intelligence and wit that we
were able to make it back to India without gross difficulty.

BTW, I have photos of my Ledo Road journey up on Flickr, if anyone
cares to take a peek:

http://flickr.com/photos/nowthehellwillstart
  

    
Great photos! Were you on a journalist or tourist visa? At what point
in the writing of the book did you make your research trip?
  

    
I was on a tourist visa to India, but had no papers for Burma. It is
virtually impossible to get a visa for that part of the country--the
authorities occasionally let people up to Shingbwiyang, about 64 miles
southeast of the Pangsau Pass, but they're pretty strict about the area
above there. That's largely because of the insurgent and criminal
activity in the region, but also because they don't want outsiders to
see how they treat the hill tribes. I heard some horror stories, as you
might imagine.

I started actually writing the book in June of 2006, but didn't travel
abroad until November of that year. I had a huge hole in my first
chapter as a result, which was a little tough to deal with. But once I
got back, it all flowed--thanks in large part to those pictures I took.
I filled up nearly four gigabytes worth of space on my Canon PowerShot
G7 while I was over there. The visual aids really came in handy
throughout the writing process.
  

    
I rely on tons of (usually not great) pictures as well ... so helpful
especially for a writer who's not a "visual."

What was your contingency plan if you were detained without a visa,
and how did you hook up with your fixers, translators, etc?
  

    
I was put off by what a generally bad guy Perry was, but was very
taken by the two groups of people who protected him: the black road
builders and the Naga headhunters. I kept wanting to hear more about
them, but it must have been fearfully difficult finding about either
group. Could you find anyone from either group who was around back then
and would talk to you? Were they forthcoming?
  

    
I did, indeed, interview several veterans of the Ledo Road. Most are
quite aged, of course, and their memories generally weren't the
sharpest. But those interviews were integral to helping me describe the
day-to-day life of an Army roadbuilder in Burma. A lot of the jungle
horrors that I described came directly from the mouths of living
veterans--one that sticks out in my mind is the passage from Sgt. Mahon
East, who described how his comrade's head was sliced off by Japanese
sniper fire.

I wasn't able to locate any Nagas old enough to have first-hand
recollections of World War II. I did meet a few who were a generation
younger, and thus could relate their parents' memories second-hand. It
was a Naga elder, for example, who told me about how the American GIs
gave away their firearms to the "tribals," and thus inadvertently
fueled much of the violence that ensued after the end of the British
Empire.

Also, I think you raise an interesting point: Perry may be the book's
protagonist, but he's certainly no conventional hero. Readers have had
very different reactions to Perry, and many share your viewpoint. It's
a valid one, for sure: Thousands of other GIs endured the hardships of
the jungle and Jim Crow without killing unarmed superiors.

That said, I personally never thought of Perry as a truly malicious
man. He was young, sensitive, and foolish, and he certainly suffered
from genuine psychological trauma (abetted, of course, by his own drug
abuse). To me, the fact that Perry is a morally questionable
protagonist is part of what made him such a fascinating character to
explore. 

Along the Ledo Road, some men revered Perry as a hero, while others
reviled him as a villain. I always expected that readers of "Now the
Hell Will Start" would be similarly divided.
  

    
Ah, Cynthia, apologies--just saw your question.

Contingency plan? There was none, really. I just made sure to travel
with lots of cash, aware that bribes can usually fix any situation in
that part of the world.

I did have one panicky moment, though, when I first arrived at
Dibrugarh, India. That's where I was supposed to meet my guide, the
incomparable Oken Tayeng (who I had reached through a
friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend reference). I got off the plane, walked
through the shack of an "airport," then looked for someone who would
introduce themselves as Oken. But no luck--all of my fellow travelers
piled into cars, but I was left there alone. 

I sat down to wait, when an Indian Army soldier (armed with a really
high-tech submachine gun) came up and started berating me in Assamese. 
I had no clue what he was saying, but it didn't sound good. I got the
impression that Westerners were a rarity in those parts, so he was
immediately suspicious of my motives.

Fortunately, a slender, gap-toothed kid came out of nowhere and said
in passage English, "He wants to know what you're doing here." The kid
talked the soldier down, got me into town, and acted as a translator
when I tried to reach Oken (who, it turns out, was stranded down in
Nagaland due to a faulty car). And when I tried to give him 100 rupees
for his troubles? He turned it down.

Without him, my trip would have been over before it even started. I
thank him in the Acknowledgements--"the gap-toothed kid at the
Dibrugarh airport." (Alas, I never did catch his name.)
  

    
Some road builders thought him a hero, did they? I suppose that many
of them had wanted to shoot a lieutenant, and, besides, even if he was 
a fool, he was their fool. What bothers me is that Lieutenant Cady,
though very imprudent in trying to take the rifle from Perry, was
imprudent in the direction of lenience. He would have been perfectly
justified, it seems to me, in shooting him. Certainly that is what most
civilian police officers would do under similar circumstances. Perry
shot a man who was going to some trouble not to shoot him, and who he
could have laid out with the rifle butt.

To my mind, the road builders are the heroes of the story. That road
was quite an engineering feat. It was pointless and doomed, but that
takes no honor from the guys who built it. They built a road to nowhere
under the most difficult circumstances imaginable, and then they
rebuilt it again and again, as it washed away in monsoons. It's a
wonder that more of them didn't lose it.

Is there anything in print on the daily life of the Naga at that time?
In the book, we get them mostly from Perry's point of view, first as a
danger, then as a refuge. I wonder what they were like when they
weren't out taking heads. 
  

    
We can certainly all agree that Lieut. Cady didn't deserve what he
got. But when I interviewed Bernard Frank, the man who prosecuted
Perry, he made an interesting point: Perry wasn't out to hurt anyone
that morning, but simply wanted to talk to the battalion's commander,
Lieut. Col. Wright Hiatt. True, he was technically breaking arrest to
do so, but I don't think an AWOL soldier could be construed as a
life-or-death matter. Since Perry posed no immediate threat to
anyone--and remember, he was sobbing and trembling throughout the
encounter--I don't think Cady would have been justified in using lethal
force.

Yes, Perry could have used non-lethal force himself. But he was in the
throes of a serious emotional collapse, so logic wasn't really his
strong suit at that point in time.

Your words of admiration for the Ledo Road's engineers are wonderfully
moving, and entirely accurate. They are, indeed, the book's real
heroes. It's a shame that they received so little gratitude upon their
return back to the U.S. in 1945.

In terms of day-to-day Naga life in the 1940s, I highly recommend
Ursula Graham Bower's "Naga Path." J.H. Hutton also has a fine body of
anthropological work on the Naga, but most of it dates back to the
1920s and '30s. 

Also, you should really pay a visit to the Naga Database--an
indispensable resource for serious researchers:

http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/bamboo_naga_front/front.htm

I tried to pack a lot of anthropological information into Chapter
Nine, but I'll confess that I probably spent an inordinate amount of
time discussing headhunting techniques. Apologies--ritual decapitation
is just an endlessly fascinating topic.
  

    

Those photos are fascinating, Brendan.  Did you ever find out who Mr. 
Accident was?
  

    
Mr. Accident is everywhere!

Seriously, that specific photo was taken at a coal mine in Tipong,
just outside Ledo. It was a real spooky place--the mining equipment all
seemed to predate World War II, and there were obviously some very
young kids working there (esp. piloting the canoes that carried lump
coal down a stream). You should check out this gallery if you're
interested in seeing the Tipong Colliery in all its Dickensian glory:

http://www.irfca.org/gallery/Steam/TipongColliery/

The colliery is apparently a big draw for British train buffs, due to
its ancient coal-powered locomotives. Some of my own photos of the
place are available on the "Now the Hell Will Start" website:
http://www.nowthehellwillstart.com/
  

    
I want to know about Mr. Accident, too.

Here's Jonathan Yardley's review in The Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/10/AR200807100233
8.html

I unsympathetic to Perry, but found the whole story fascinating ...
and especially the info on the SEAsian theater during World War II.
  

    
Here's more on the book from BoingBoing:

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/05/29/now-the-hell-will-st.html
  

    
(Those of you following the conversation who are not members of
The Well can e-mail inkwell@well.com and we can post here for you.)
  

    
I really like that we're discussing the notion of sympathy.

There's no question that Perry's tragedy was partially attributable to
forces beyond his control: Jim Crow, the cruelty of the Indo-Burmese
jungle, the egoism and bungling of the military brass. But at the end
of the day, it was Perry, and Perry alone, who pulled the trigger and
ended the life of a 28-year-old husband and father. No matter what led
up to that event, some readers are bound to find Perry off-putting.

But others won't. In fact, I've had several people write to me and
laud Perry as a hero, a symbol of resistance to tyranny. They endorse
his lethal actions as justified, given what he was made to suffer
through.

As is usually the case, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle.
I have sympathy for Perry because of what he endured, simply due to the
fact that he was deemed less than fully human by virtue of his race.
On the other hand, I've never bought the justification defense. Lieut.
Cady may have been guilty of bad policework, but that obviously
shouldn't be a capital offense.

The bottom line is this: a war was raging, a man's psyche fractured,
and a series of flawed judgments led to a split second that ended two
young lives and ruined many more. It was a senseless tragedy, plain and
simple, and one that would have been lost to time if Perry hadn't
embarked on such a grand post-crime adventure.
  

    
Beautifully put, Brendan. I found the initial description of Cady's
murder off-putting, not knowing that it would be gone into in detail
later. But the remaining chapters put things in context, while by no
means justifying Perry's actions.

Did you consider including more personal info on Cady? What (if any)
response have you had from his family?
  

    
While you're mulling over Cynthia's question, I've got one that's
about the business of the book:

How did you and your agent pitch this book to potential publishers? 

Was it the WWII angle -- the War still being a hot subject right now?
Or: Lost story of proto-hippie? Interesting story from little-known
WWII front? Investigation of effects of a Jim Crow military? All of
these? Or some other angle?
  

    
The photos of the Tipong Colliery are amazing.
  

    
Cynthia, I tried my best to contact Cady's family, but I never quite
made it work. I reached out to a local historian in his hometown, and
she said that he had a sister who was still alive. But she had
apparently had a major stroke a few months before I made my inquiry,
and was in quite grave condition in a nursing home. So, alas, no
interview was possible.

I knew that Cady left behind an infant daughter named Paula Jean, but
I wasn't able to locate her. If anyone out there might have a lead as
to her whereabouts, I'd be much obliged--I would very much like to get
her a book. 

Thankfully, I had much more luck getting in touch with Perry's family.
The interviews I conducted with his sister, Edna Wilson of Washington
D.C., were critical to the book. She really helped me round his
character into shape, by providing details of his pre-Army life in both
North Carolina and Washington. And she was extremely generous in
sharing some of Herman's letters from overseas, as well as photographs
from his youth. It took me about a year to track her down and set up
our first interview, but, boy, was it ever worth the effort.
  

    
Thanks for the excellent question about the business aspect, Steve.

I recently took a look at my proposal, which I wrote toward the end of
2005. I was surprised by how different it was from the finished
product--the focus in the proposal was much more on the "forgotten
history of World War II" angle than I remembered. And there really
wasn't much in there about the effects of segregation--that's a theme
that didn't blossom until I went hammer-and-tongs into the research. 

When I first stumbled upon Herman Perry's name, I viewed his saga
purely as an adventure story--or, perhaps more accurately, a rollicking
culture-clash story. But I knew the simple strangeness of the case
probably wasn't enough to justify a book. So I started thinking of
Perry's flight as a way to tell the story of the Ledo Road, which is a
project I hadn't been aware of until I started my research. And then,
while studying the Ledo Road's history, I became aware of the toxic
effects of Army segregation.

And that's how the book came together, with one theme layering atop
another--systematic racism, Naga anthropology, military drug use, the
jungle's brutality. It's a texture that didn't really come across in
the proposal, mostly because I just hadn't done enough research at that
point. Fortunately, my dynamite editor, Vanessa Mobley at The Penguin
Press, saw the potential. Very few other editors did.