Perfume River Nights by Michael P. Maurer

Michael P. Maurer survived the Vietnam War. He needed to give a voice to the men who died. He worked on his novel for a dozen years and when it was published he donated the royalties to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund.

I was afraid of Perfume River Nights, afraid to know the drudgery and fear, the earnest naivety, the dark passions of war. But what better time to read it than for Memorial Day?

***

As a girl, I wrote in my diary that the boys were talking about the Vietnam War and fear of the draft. I felt bad, knowing my safety, and thought it unfair.

I didn't understand that war. I had not studied any war but the Revolutionary War; the teachers never seemed to get have time for the Civil War and certainly not the wars of the 20th c. The war movies I had seen, like The Bridge on the River Kwai, reinforced the wasteful stupidity of war.

Like most of my cohorts, I was anti-war. At sixteen, I wrote anti-war poetry. Such arrogance! What did I know to speak for veterans?

my poem in the school newspaper

A neighbor was drafted. Mom wrote him letters. He came home and told Mom he couldn't understand the way soldiers had treated the women. He had two sisters. In my innocence, I didn't understand then what he meant.

At college, young men were returning from Vietnam to complete their disrupted education. One man, who had been non-infantry, told how he learned never to wake his vet brother because his first instinct was to kill. I listened to his stories but did not suspect the unspoken.

***

Maurer's novel follows Singer, an earnest eighteen-year-old with patriotic dreams of glory. He bonds with the men and is eager to learn from them. When they are deployed he hears crying and wonders, Can it really be that bad?

Yes. It is that bad.

When he sees an unarmed enemy he doesn't shoot. The hate comes after his friends are killed.

Readers understand the physical, mental, and spiritual toil war exacts on Singer. We feel the desperation, the dirt in our face making its way into our nose and throat. We feel the paranoiac fear of the unseen enemy. The anger and hate.

And the profound guilt that accompanies the desire for revenge, the self-questioning when we know we have been inalteringly changed into someone we no longer recognize.

He had been innocent and naive then, younger and less angry. Now he was angry all the time. Angry at the deaths, the stupidity of it all, and at incompetent leaders who saw their men as pawns toward obtaining body counts and their next promotion, Angry at the things he'd done and at the knowledge that he would do more.~from Perfume River Nights by Michael P. Maurer

Singer realizes that the enemy likely felt the same way. Soldiers were all pawns in a game in which nothing seemed to be truly gained.

Singer grieves for the men who died and also for the boy he had been, the loss of his goodness and values. Revenge was just another lie.

He makes a choice, a crazy choice, but one that will save him.

***

My dad was to go to Korea until Mom became pregnant with me. I asked him about it once, and he said he would have gone to war. But I could never imagine it. Dad, who went hunting and never shot a deer. Dad who went fishing and threw the fish back into the lake. Dad who during WWII raised rabbits and then couldn't kill them for food. Dad, the soft touch. There were no war stories from my family, the last soldier having served in the Civil War. I can't imagine Dad killing a human being.

And yet, there is the story he told of first meeting my mother's grandparents when they were dating. My great-grandmother had tasked my grandfather with killing a litter of kittens. He asked my dad to do it. It shook dad. I supposed he did it because he never told a story about setting them free. Is there a killer in all of us, just waiting for instructions?

One man I know did have a war story to tell. Floyd Erickson, from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and a skier, volunteered for the 10th Mountain Division during WWII. (read about them in The Winter Army.) He was on the side of a mountain in Italy when his best friend died. He prayed to God, asking to be spared. In return, he would change his life. Floyd survived, and as his wife often said, he did change his life. His church and his God and his family were the bedrock of his life. Last I knew, he still could fit into his uniform.

When he was a kid our son watched To Hell and Back with Audie Murphy on tv and his obsession shifted from dinosaurs to WWII. He spent years reading everything he could, became an expert on aircraft and tanks, expanding his interest into other 20th c wars. At school a boy teased that he like war. No, our son replied. He hated war. He read about war because it was the scariest thing he knew, just like dinosaurs and big trucks had fascinated him earlier in his life.

And so I read about war, too. Because it is the most awful I can imagine. In the comfort of my home, even in lockdown during a pandemic, I am safe and protected. I want to understand what I have not experienced.

***

Perfume River Nights took me on the transformative journey of one eighteen-year-old soldier. It made me better understand what I don't know. I won't soon forget these characters.

Michael P. Maurer is a Twitter friend through David Abram's Sunday Sentence on Twitter. Learn more about Maurer at
http://www.michaelpmaurer.com/about.html
Read about Maurer and the novel at
https://www.twincities.com/2016/07/01/perfume-river-nights-michael-maurer/

I purchased the book.

Perfume River Nights
by Michael P. Maurer
North Star Press
Published June 2016
Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-68201-022-8