In post–World War II America, boys dreamed of adventure, listened to Elvis Presley, and read Jack Kerouac—but as they grew up, it wasn’t cruising Route 66 in a Corvette that united them, but Highway 1, known as the “Street Without Joy,” just outside Hue city in Vietnam. The US was immersed in the Age of Aquarius, the civil rights movement, the pill, and young girls in long boots and short skirts—but life was completely different for those in the jungle and rice paddies of Southeast Asia during the 1968 Tet Offensive. Full of innocence and dreams, adolescent passion and coming of age horror, River of Perfumes captures the contradictions of the times. It examines what the brutality of war does to young men in battle, and what happens to a country that abandons them.