Hole in the Ground

A song from the Vietnam War

Hi all,

A warm welcome to my new subscribers!

In this Sunday special newsletter, I’d like to introduce you to a song from the Vietnam War. If you’re not familiar with that history, you can read a short history of the Vietnam War on my website. It contains some important information that will help you understand the context of this song.

If you’d like to hear the song before you read the meaning of the lyrics, I’ve included a YouTube video below the article.

Below, you’ll find my interpretation of the lyrics. I’ve written the lyrics in italics. If you have any questions or comments, just tap the little comments icon at the end.

For Japanese students, vocabulary words in bold are provided in Japanese below.

The Song

(367 words)

The song is called A Hole in the Ground. It was written and sung by Tom Parrott in 1968.

The song is based on a true story that Parrott read about in the newspaper in 1965. A boy had wandered onto an American military base, had taken apart an M1 rifle and a mortar and put them back together again. The soldiers must have realized that this was a child who had been around Vietnamese soldiers (band of guerrillas) who worked with weapons such as grenades.

The lyrics are written in the voice of a little 10-year-old boy.

The song begins with the boy introducing himself. He wears raggedy pants, so we understand that he might be rather poor by the standards of an American audience listening to the song. The boy explains that he lives in the city with his mother, but his father lives in a hole in the ground. At first, the listener wonders about this strange comment, but then we realize that the father must be a soldier in the Vietnamese army.

The little boy becomes friends with the American soldiers. He helps the soldiers field strip their guns. The soldiers give him candy and play with him.

The American soldiers ask the boy to show them around and to show them the hole in the ground. Because the soldiers were so nice to him, he trusts them and shows them the area where the hole in the ground is.

That night, there are some loud explosions (booming).

The next day, the boy goes out to the rice fields to visit his father, but he can’t find the hole where his father had been living. We understand now that this was the area that the American army had bombed the night before. The boy can’t find his father or anyone else because they were killed in the previous night’s bombing.

The boy thinks he still has his friends, the American soldiers, but when he goes to see them, they don’t want to talk with him and turn away. The soldiers feel guilty for killing his father.

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” — Ernest Hemingway, 1946

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VOCABULARY

mortar 迫撃砲

band of guerrillas ゲリラ一隊

grenade 手榴弾

raggedy もしゃもしゃ

field strip 工具を使わずに銃を分解すること

justified 当然

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PHOTO CREDIT

"Vietnam war 1972 - South Vietnamese fighters during the Battle of Quang Tri" by manhhai is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/?ref=openverse.

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