EXPERIENCE OF WAR

Trinh Cong Son

“Death appears unexpectedly / one is lying down and it is as if in a dream.”

Son wrote and sang a lot about death. And in these songs, he presented a view of life based, on one hand, on Buddhism and, on the other hand, on his existentialist philosophy:

Once I was lying down and had a dream And in my dream I saw myself dying, And even though I shed one small tear, I was not especially sad about it.

“Ben doi hiu quanh” (A quiet life)

How many years a human life lasts, One afternoon we suddenly realize our hair is white as lime, Withered leaves falling down, And even if we’re given one hundred years, One day we still must die.

“Cat bui” (Dust)

Unfortunately, Trinh Cong Son did not live to a hundred, although he very much would have wanted to. He loved this life and enjoyed it to the fullest. In “Toi, oi, dung tuyet vong” (Don’t despair, my soul), he sang, “Who am I, still crying now and then? / Who am I, still firmly rooted in this world? / Who am I, who am I, loving this life so much?” In “Moi ngay toi chon mot niem vui” (Each day I choose something to enjoy), he said explicitly, “I love this life with all of my heart.” In his antiwar songs, he sang not only about death, but also about life. In “Gia tai cua me” (Family treasure of the mother), he noted with irony that “A thousand years enslaved by the Chinese, / a hundred years oppressed by the Westerners, / the family property the mother leaves to her children is the sad country Viet Nam.” In “Cho mot nguoi nam xuong” (To someone killed in action), he described the suffering of a girl whose lover, a pilot, was shot down; and in “Tinh ca cua nguoi mat tri,” he told of the despair of a girl who lost her boyfriends, one after the other, on the cruel battlefields of the Central Highlands jungles:

I had a lover who fell in the battle of Pleime
I had a lover who died in war zone D
He fell in the battle of Dong Xoai
People die in Ha Noi,
Die oh so suddenly all along the border.

Son’s antiwar songs describe the pure facts of war; they are never ideological. He never engaged in politics because that was simply not his objective in life. But he dared to speak up and tell people about the negative and harmful consequences of human behavior.