Perfume River Nights

by Michael P. Maurer

  The best part to the story the man who told it said was when Top ran back to the chopper where two men were placing the last crate of grenades on board. The helicopter began to rev. Top started to climb up, then stepped back down.

  “Those clean fatigues?”

  The two men who had just finished loading the ammo looked back toward Top.

  “Those clean fatigues? Top yelled over the noise of the rotors.

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Take off your pants,” Top said, pointing at the slimmer man.

  “What?”

  “Take off your pants. I have a man who needs them.”

  “But, Top—”

  “You can give me your pants or you can get on this chopper, but either way those pants are going to the field.”

  Top climbed on to the chopper with the pants in hand, nodded to the crew chief, then looked out and exchanged a thumbs-up sign with the short-timer standing alone watching the chopper depart back to the A Shau.

  If Singer wasn’t hanging on to a tree, he might have fallen down he was laughing to himself so hard. Singer looked at his pants and couldn’t stop the convulsions that shook his body. He had to remember to thank Top again.

  Maybe on the same day he’d seen the doc, or maybe a day or two later, Singer vaguely recalled bumping into Top on a hilltop. It occurred to him now that Top must have come looking for him. Not much escaped Top. Top would have known about him being sick, just as he must have heard about him shooting up the base camp on that first day and refusing to stop. Perhaps he had smiled at that. But Top surely also heard that Lieutenant Creely’s RTO threatened Singer the day Lieutenant Creely and his RTO were killed. And Doc. Singer replayed those threats over and over, but was still certain he’d done the right thing insisting they bring down more men, more firepower, and maneuver on the enemy. Even so, he expected there would be repercussions. Someone would be looking for a scapegoat for Lieutenant Creely’s death and unrecovered bodies and Singer would be it. Singer figured Top would come talk with him and he had waited for him to come that day and the next, but he never did. Nor did anyone else ever mention it. The issue had died along with Lieutenant Creely’s RTO and lay on the hillside. He owed the NVA something for that.

  The day he bumped into Top or Top had come to check on him, he’d already been sick for a few days. He felt weak and ragged-out, though he’d grown use to the smell. He was embarrassed to have Top see him sick like that. But he remembered thinking that even Top’s stoic demeanor looked like it was cracking a little under the strain of the A Shau, the daily firefights, and the lack of support. For a moment as he studied Top’s face, Singer forgot about his own situation.

  “How you doing?” Top asked without making any mention of the smell.

  “Okay.”

  “You holding up?”

  “Yeah, I’m doing all right, but I could use a clean pair of pants.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Top said.

  Now he had clean pants. Though he couldn’t remember who brought them to him, he wouldn’t forget the story of the REMF surrendering his pants to Top at the helipad.

  With great effort, Singer pulled himself up over a ledge and saw there was no more mountain. He’d made it. He wanted to lie down right there and not go any farther, afraid that if he didn’t he would pass out. But someone directed him to a spot on the perimeter and he slumped to the ground, for a time unable to move even to reach for his canteen. He could hear the sounds of entrenching tools striking rocks and the hacking of machetes as men dug in and cut firing lanes. He needed to dig in.

  “Help’s coming.”

  “What?” Singer asked, not realizing someone was beside him.

  “The 101st,” California said. “Shake and Bake says they’re sending a battalion.”

  “I thought you were dead.”

  “Shit, more alive than you. You smell like you died a week ago.”

  “How long has it been?”

  “Since you’ve been sick and talking crazy?”

  “No, since we’ve been here.”

  “Two weeks or so.

  “Really?”

  “Almost three. You been out of it almost a week. You any better?”

  “Yeah, I think so. But I need a shower.”

  “They’re sending help, so maybe we’ll get out of here.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  “They got to be sending help. They can’t just leave us out here forever.”

  “Been forever already.”

  California had nearly finished digging in when Singer started on his own. He worked slowly, clawing at the dirt, working around the roots and rocks trying to get deeper, but in the end he gave in to his exhaustion and settled for a shallow hole.

  “Want some help with that?” California asked.

  “It’s okay for one more night.”

  “Shit, I been digging your hole all week.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Well, you were pretty sick and I wasn’t sharing a hole with you smelling the way you do.”

  “Day I can’t dig my own hole, just shoot me.”

  “You’re dead already, then.”

  “We’re all dead.”

  “Help’s coming. Tomorrow, they say.”

  “Right.”

  Singer sat with his feet in the hole he’d dug, his rifle beside him, and ate a can of pressed meat that vaguely resembled chicken. He ate tentatively, worried whether his stomach could handle it and his bowels would hold, eventually finishing it all with no immediate ill effects. In the bottom of his ruck he had a can of pound cake he was saving for when the battle was over and he was away from the A Shau. He almost dug it out just to look at it. One more night. He allowed himself to hope.

  That night he slept little, sitting up even on California’s watch, listening to the night, praying for the dawn and for the help that was supposed to come, even though he had sworn off prayer. He watched for the lights, but tonight there were none. “The lights. Did you see them too?” Singer asked quietly.

  “For a couple nights, a week or so ago.” California whispered.

  “I thought I maybe dreamt it.”

  “You were mumbling some weird shit. Had to wake you more than once.”

  “Ballsy, carrying supplies up and down using fucking lights.”

  “Eerie.”

  “They knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “That we’d do nothing.”

  “We won’t last much longer. They got to be sending help.”

  “I hope,” Singer said, fingering his only remaining grenade again.

  Sometimes living without hope was easier.

  In the morning Singer waited, expecting the word to saddle up and move out, but there were no orders or information. He sat there with California not knowing what was going on, the minutes dragging by. The first explosion surprised him. Solitary and a klick or so away, about where the base camp would be, he guessed.

  “Finally,” he said.

  Then came more blasts, one after another, pounding the camp. Singer listened, trying to determine how many artillery positions were firing. The sound of the explosions grew, blurring into a single sustained roar that went on for a long time, and he couldn’t imagine surviving it. He was angry, even as he wanted to cheer. How many days had they waited for this, going in day after day without support, when it was there all the time? Who was running this fucking war?

  When the artillery barrage finally ended, a dramatic silence followed that had Singer wondering if he had lost his hearing.

  “Here we go,” Singer said, surprised that he could hear his voice.

  He opened the bolt on his M16 to see the round seated in the chamber, then he pulled his ruck closer and checked the lashing, but still no word came. Then he heard them. He looked at California and saw that he heard them, too. Cobras came with the first assault and Singer listened to rocket explosions and minigun fire and the successive waves of Hueys. The soun
d of choppers filled the air in what had to be a multiple-company assault. After letting Charlie Company go it alone for two weeks, the 101st was finally sending in the cavalry.

  The small-arms fire started almost before the last Hueys left. Some NVA must have survived and not fled. Singer wasn’t surprised. The Cobras came back on repeated runs with more rockets and minigun fire and Singer marveled at the firepower the 101st brought with them, even as he cursed them. The companies from the 101st wouldn’t go at it unsupported as the 82nd had. They all paid for Lieutenant Creely’s May fifth failures.

  The battle built throughout the morning, and at times Singer could distinguish at least two battlefronts. He imagined an attacking force driving the NVA in a running battle toward a blocking force that was cutting down the fleeing NVA. The fight had been Charlie Company’s for so long that, to Singer, even worn out and dispirited as he was, it seemed wrong not to be a part of the end, when there was finally a chance to even the score. It was funny how a little hope and a lot of firepower could change one’s thinking.

  For the first time in many days, since the screwed-up day with Lieutenant Creely when so much had gone wrong, he started to feel it again. He wished he were part of that blocking force, set up, hidden, waiting, with the NVA coming to him rather than the other way around like it had been for too long already. This time he would have the power. He would let them come until they were right in front of him, unaware, before he’d open up and cut them down. He felt the power of his rifle and saw them falling in piles and still he killed them.

  “What are you smiling about?” California asked.

  “Nothing,” Singer said. “Payback.”

  “You must be feeling better.”

  “Yeah, I’m feeling better.”

  By late morning the fighting had diminished until there were just scattered, brief flurries of gunfire farther and farther apart and more and more distant. While the 101st waged their battle in the distance, Charlie Company sat tight on the hilltop and were resupplied with ammo and water, but no Cs, which Singer took as a sign they were leaving. He filled his empty magazines and hung grenades from his web gear, glad to be fully armed again and not have to worry so much about fire discipline. He drank from one of his freshly filled canteens as he worked and felt stronger. Payback even at someone else’s hands was still payback.

  When the distant gunfire waned, Singer ate his pound cake. The battle for the A Shau, at least Charlie Company’s involvement in it, was mostly over.

  The last Huey that came into Charlie Company that morning brought coils of ropes and grappling hooks and three more body bags. Charlie Company had just one more job to do. This time they met no resistance. Singer hardly recognized the place where Lieutenant Creely had died and he had narrowly escaped. There were downed trees, splayed trunks, and craters everywhere. It was funny how a place could change, yet stay the same in Singer’s mind where somehow time stopped and couldn’t move on. Singer looked up at the broken canopy and the narrow rays of sunlight streaking through to the jungle floor and thought of May 5th and the sunlight on the dead man’s face. Here there was no face or even any bodies—at least, not a whole one. They wouldn’t need the grappling hooks. If the bodies had been booby trapped, they had been detonated already by artillery hits. The company set up a wide perimeter while Singer and a few others spread out within it and searched for body parts and pieces of uniforms and equipment. One of the men found a head but refused to pick it up. The Shake and Bake finally put it in a bag. A man stood off to the side retching, but Singer smelled so bad himself he barely noticed the smell of rotting flesh. Singer found a finger which, when he dug it out from the loose earth, was part of a nearly intact hand, a thumb and three fingers. There was a ring on one of the fingers. When he tried to examine the ring the rotting flesh pulled away and he quickly put the hand in a bag. Still, he’d seen enough of the ring to see it was from West Point.

  Back and forth Singer worked across the broken ground, trying to remember what he should be looking for. He couldn’t tell anymore where exactly any of it happened. Where he had lain and others died. What had been won or lost here. With the fighting over, the mop-up was all that remained. It was an exhausting, gruesome task, and Singer kept waiting for someone to call an end to it. A man walked by carrying a swollen and discolored piece of flesh that would have been unrecognizable except for the jungle boot attached to one end. Maybe it would have been better to just leave the pieces to the jungle to be part of the earth where they’d died. They all belonged more to this world than the one they’d left when they were sent here. Would he ever be able to forget and not be a part of this place?

  They picked up what they could find and put the pieces in three bags without making any effort to differentiate one man’s parts from another. Graves Registration would have to sort them out. Lieutenant Creely’s RTO had pale olive-colored, NVA-like skin, which complicated the hunt. Some of the pieces they put in the bags might have been from NVA, but no one said anything. It was a quiet, somber search that framed Charlie Company’s and especially fourth platoon’s time in the A Shau. Singer wanted it over. The pleasure in the payback of the assault by the 101st had already faded in the face of the search to recover the men who had died on the second day and laid rotting and unreachable for so long. He wanted to leave and try to forget what had happen here.

  In the end, it was Top who said “enough” and told the men to close the bags. With the body bags in tow they headed out and left the valley behind them. By late afternoon, those who had survived the A Shau were back on Firebase Bastogne.

  21

  June 8-9, 1968

  Firebase Bastogne, Vietnam

  He’s dead,” one of the soldiers gathered for mail call said.

  The clerk looked down at the letter, studying the name as though doubting the man was right. Finally he fumbled with the letter, trying to put it in his pocket with the stack of others already there, before pulling another from the mail bag and tentatively reading the name.

  “Yeah,” Singer said. He pushed forward and reached through the crowd of men gathered around the clerk. The envelope was powder blue, like the sky, like her eyes, and he didn’t need to look at the return address to know it was from her. He moved to the back again and stood waiting.

  The clerk read more names and men called out and pushed forward with extended arms and letters were passed back. There were a few packages, some partially crushed. The men receiving them brightened at the prospect of some kind of treat from home. Singer waited, hoping for a package and more letters. A man tore a letter open and strolled away from the gathering, reading as he walked. Men stood waiting, some empty handed, looking desperate.

  The clerk read Trip’s name.

  The group was quiet. A few men looked around at each other as if checking who was there. Singer stood mute.

  The clerk called Trip’s name again.

  Singer turned away, feeling the loss. Trip had been the last guy he cared about.

  “Gone,” the Shake and Bake said.

  “What?” the clerk asked.

  “WIA. Medevac’d. You should forward it.”

  “Oh,” the clerk said, his fingers dancing as he shifted hands and put the letter in a different pocket. The clerk called more names, a roll call of the living and the dead, adding more letters to both pockets. Two packages went unclaimed.

  Behind the clerk, the sun was settling toward the vague peaks on the horizon marking Laos. Singer watched it over the clerk’s right shoulder. Somewhere amongst those peaks was the A Shau, where he’d been this morning. Closer, he could see stretches of the road that led there. Everything looked different in the sun. A distortion of truth. So many men were gone.

  “That’s it,” the clerk said.

  Singer looked at his single letter and then at the clerk, who was bundling up the unclaimed items. Not much after weeks in the field. The New Guy rushed up to the clerk as the rest of the men walked off, those with packages trailing hopeful-looking
friends.

  “You sure there’s nothing else?” the New Guy asked. “There’s got to be more.”

  “Nothing,” the clerk said.

  “Check again. I’ve got to have something.”

  “Sometimes it takes a while for mail to catch up with you.”

  “Fucking great.”

  “Hey, it ain’t my fault.” The clerk hurried away.

  “Sure.”

  Singer held the blue envelope, feeling its thinness, and watched the clerk depart and the New Guy storm off. The Shake and Bake had kept the New Guy away from Singer since the New Guy nearly killed Singer in the first days in the A Shau. Whether to protect Singer or the New Guy, Singer wasn’t really sure and didn’t care. He was just happy not to have to look after the guy. How long could someone like that last? How many would die with him? It wasn’t his concern. He was clean, had his letter, and would spend at least tonight in the relative safety of the firebase.

  Some things, like a letter, a shower, or a drink of water had taken on such great importance, and yet so many things just didn’t matter anymore. The sun still shone and the base held the heat of the day. Artillery pieces sat quiet in sandbagged pits where shirtless artillery men stacked rounds. Chaotic piles of spent shells were spread outside each pit. Beyond the artillery were the bunkers and the lines of rolled wire that encircled the base. Singer stood soaking up the sunlight and the security of the sprawling fire-base with its many artillery pieces that had been unable to help them where they’d been.

  In the distance, the mountains of the A Shau stood solemn and foreboding against a liquid blue sky, offering no hint of the violence they held and all that had happened there. But Singer knew their deception. For a long time he stood with the sun in his face and stared at the mountains. The morning had been shrouded in jungle darkness and marked by digging through battlefield litter for parts of themselves. That he was standing here in the sunlight again, freshly scrubbed, a letter in his hand, had been unimaginable just a day ago. Even now, there was something unreal about it. Though safely out of the A Shau, it was still the A Shau, the dying and killing that dominated his thoughts. The shower had washed the smell of the days of sickness off his body, but the odors and horror of the A Shau remained. Payback would come. He promised all of them that. It wasn’t much, but it was all he had to cling to now. Payback would come.