Excerpt: 'Now the Hell Will Start'

It is best to use discretion when confronting an emotionally shattered man, especially if he's holding a semiautomatic rifle. Lieutenant Harold Cady should have heeded that commonsense advice on the morning of March 5, 1944. But several fellow soldiers were watching as he drew near Private Herman Perry, a sobbing, trembling GI armed with a .30-caliber M1. Cady couldn't have the spectators thinking he was soft, or his hard-ass reputation would be ruined. He'd show them he could quell this bad egg Perry, loaded rifle be damned.

Perry was walking toward the muddy roadside, a few dozen yards from Cady's parked jeep. He glanced over his shoulder and spied the onrushing lieutenant. "Get back!" Perry yelled. "Get back!"

Cady had left his pistol at the battalion's camp, near the Burmese village of Tagap Ga. But he didn't appear fazed by his lack of firepower: he advanced to within four feet of the quivering Perry.

Perry spun and faced his pursuer. He nervously pressed the M1's stock against his right hip and trained the muzzle on Cady's chest. Tears spilled down his gaunt, dark cheeks.

"Lieutenant, don't come up on me," Perry sputtered.

Cady froze. The dank and toxic Burmese jungle, its chaotic flora tinted a hallucinogenic green, towered over the two Americans. To the west loomed the Patkais, the mountain range that lines the northern border between India and Burma. Their thickly forested slopes, teeming with monkeys, tigers, and ornately tattooed headhunters, peeked through wisps of haze.

Courage recouped after a moment's pause, Cady now crept forward. Perry repeated his six-word warning, this time in a frantic shriek: "Lieutenant, don't come up on me!"

Cady took another step. He crouched low, like a wrestler set to grapple, then placed his outstretched arms on either side of the M1's barrel, as if preparing to clap his hands around the rifle and wrest it away. It was a risky move, but Cady couldn't imagine this kid actually being dumb enough to shoot. That would be straight-up suicide: the Army wasn't shy about using the noose, particularly on black GIs like Perry. The slangy repeated warnings, the rifle pointed at his heart? Cady figured it was all part of a childish tantrum, and that this wayward Negro just needed a little correction.

But Perry was far too broken to care. He'd been working sixteenhour shifts crushing rocks along the Ledo Road, the rugged Army highway on which he and Cady now stood. His limbs rife with leeches, his bowels tattered by disease, Perry had come to loathe not just the jungle's hardships, but also the officers who treated him like chattel. He'd found solace in furtive puffs of opium and ganja, but the narcotic veil was always too fleeting. Stress and rage had slowly corroded Perry's will.

Now Cady wanted to haul him off to jail. Perry knew the next stop after that: the Ledo Stockade, an Army prison known for its brutality. Perry had served time there once before, enduring three grim months of taunts, parasites, and broiling confinement in "the Box." He'd sworn that he'd sooner die and go to hell than spend another day behind barbed wire.

Hell or the stockade? That terrible choice, rather than a vision of the gallows, was foremost in Herman Perry's addled mind on the morning of March 5, 1944. Soon enough he'd visit both those dreaded places. But he'd also discover paradise.

The 465-mile Ledo Road — or at least what's left of it — stretches from the Indian province of Assam to the Chinese border, with much of the route swooping through Burma's northern plains. In the darkest days of World War II, when Japan seemed poised to conquer all of Asia, the road was devised to keep wobbly China flush with supplies. Instead it became a mammoth relic of twentieth-century hubris — a mud-caked Ozymandias jutting from the Indo-Burmese wilderness.

The jungle began reclaiming the Ledo Road as soon as the war ended. The highway's thin gravel layer quickly sluiced away in the drenching monsoon rains, as did many of the bridges that spanned the route's abundant streams. In the fall of 1946, a reporter named David Richardson, who'd covered the Allied military campaign in northern Burma, returned to check on the road's condition. He was stunned by the swiftness of the jungle's reconquest:

The jungle, like a selfish woman, was stretching its green fingers out to take back The Road that had once been part of it. Creepers and weeds were already ankle-high across sections of the highway. In other places, the vegetation came drooping down from overhead. Where The Road had been graded, the rains had washed so much of the earth away that there were large bites in The Road, looking as if they had been made by some giant dinosaur. Erosion had set in, deeply rutting miles of the highway, splitting it open like an earthquake.