My Essay

Goodnight Saigon Essay

Billy Joel’s ‘Goodnight Saigon’ was written and sung in 1982. It is about American soldiers going from Parris Island to Vietnam to fight.  The meaning of the song is hidden very deep in the song. I will explain the meaning and the language features of the song to you.

The main idea of this song is that Marine Army corps are going to Vietnam in the 1960’s to fight in the war ‘And we would all go down together’ as it says in the song.

At the beginning of the song it says ‘And we were sharp / as sharp as knives.’ This is like saying they’ve just arrived at Vietnam with all their guns and bombs and they’re feeling on top of things.

 In the next verse it says ‘We came in spastic / Like tameless horses / We left in plastic / As numbered corpses’. So they’ve come with all their training they’re prepared to kill, but it turns out that life in the jungle was hard and they were falling fast.

Then it says ‘We had no home front / We had no soft soap’. This means that there is no safe place, and they had no soap to keep clean.

They were also scared, ‘And we held on to each other’  ‘And it was dark / so dark at night’. These lines show that even though their prepared to do this, no amount of training can stop fear.   

They also had things to pass the time and hide the fear, like when it says ‘They sent us playboy / They gave us Bob Hope’ and ‘We passed the hash pipe / And played our Doors Tapes.’ So they had magazines, cigarettes, even a comedian to keep them occupied.

A strong message the song is getting across is that war is stupid and pointless, this is expresses when it says ‘And who was wrong? / And who was right? / It didn’t matter in the thick of the fight.’ This is saying they were fighting because they were forced to, and they didn’t really want to.

And at the end it says ‘And they were sharp / as sharp as knives’ so now instead of them being in charge, the enemy was now controlling them. ‘They heard the hum of our motors / They counted the rotors / And waited for us to arrive’.

The song also has quite a few very interesting language features, mixed in with a good tune and a powerful meaning.

Probably the most powerful and obvious language feature in the song is rhyme. ‘We met as soul mates / We left as inmates’  ‘We came in spastic / We left in plastic’  ‘We had no soft soap / They gave us Bob Hope’ And my favourite ‘And we held on to each other / Like brother to brother / We promised our mothers we’d write’. These are all examples of rhyme.

The song also had some good similes in it as well. ‘As sharp as knives’  ‘like tameless horses’  ‘Seemed to last as long as six weeks’ are all good examples of similes throughout the song.

Another language feature that was in the song was metaphors. ‘We held the day in the palm of our hand’  ‘We left as inmates from an Asylum’  ‘They left their childhood on every acre’.

Goodnight Saigon is a great song about the Vietnamese war and it has a very powerful message of antiviolence. It tells us how stupid and pointless war is. The language features re-enforces the meaning and shows us what is going through the soldiers’ minds while they are there.

By Daniel