There are things that can not be greened up
(Baonghean) - On August 10, 1961, the barrels of herbicides marked with orange paint were sprayed by the US military on this land, and it has been exactly 52 years! 52 years, enough for the forests to be green, enough for the gentle men and women to return from the war with the dream of giving birth to children - children of a FREE - INDEPENDENT nation, and also enough for them to grow up... But, there are things that still cannot turn green like the color of that forest, or is it because they have been defined by the orange paint, the beautiful color that has become the color of pain for nearly 5 million Vietnamese people?
Photo PV
I met that mother, tilting her head down to the crumpled body of her fourth child and singing a lullaby. Her hands had buried three children she had carried and given birth to and who had come to this world for such a short time. She had no more tears, all of them had flown out during the times she gave birth and saw the bodies of her children. I also met fathers who used their own hands to chain their naughty, screaming children to the point of madness. I met bewildered children who did not understand why they had such deformed bodies even when the war had only passed through their grandfather’s silver hair? Someone once said that those bodies were formed by the pain.
I always wonder, under the wings of the American C123 aircraft that dropped that toxic substance in the shape of a fog cloud more than 50 years ago, how many people had to leave, how many people stayed to fight with illness and shame, how many people were still conceived with an incomplete body? No one can answer when this lingering pain can end. But, like that mother, when people asked: Why, she had enough courage to give birth so many times, to raise so many children only to have them leave her one day, she only sang a passionate lullaby. Her lullaby, let me understand, that "the last ghost of that war" could make her suffer to the point of death and rebirth five, seven times or more, but nothing, no one could extinguish her hope for the health of her children as well as the hope for the health of this life...
I listened to the song “Vi dau em chet”, the song chosen as the official song of the program “Chorus for Justice” for victims of Agent Orange, to see that the song was written with the tears of musician Thanh Truc on the long journey of the North - South, meeting and witnessing the fate of many people torn by pain is the cry to awaken the conscience of humanity. As a musician, as me, as us with the desire to “grab a drop of sunshine from the darkness”, like the hope and belief of Mother.
Nowadays, the popular question among young people is: “Why did you come to this Earth?”. I believe that if that question accidentally comes to any of the millions of Agent Orange victims in our country, they themselves are burning with the answer: So that this Earth will no longer have war!
Nghe An weekend
