Vietnam Literary Journalism

Which excerpt from Dispatches is an example of paradox?

And at night it was beautiful. Even the incoming was beautiful at night, beautiful and deeply dreadful.

Which excerpt from Dispatches contains a paradox?

Anxiety was a luxury, a joke you had no room for once you knew the variety of deaths and mutilations the war offered.

Read the excerpt from A Rumor of War. By autumn, what had begun as an adventurous expedition had turned into an exhausting, indecisive war of attrition in which we fought for no cause other than our own survival. Based on the excerpt, the narrator

Believes the reason for fighting become muted over time and eventually all that matters is staying alive.

The tedium was occasionally relieved by a large-scale search-and-destroy operation, but the exhilaration of riding the lead helicopter into a landing zone was usually followed by more of the same hot walking, with the mud sucking at our boots and the sun thudding against our helmets while an invisible enemy shot at us from distant tree lines. The paradox in the excerpt illustrates the idea that

Danger could alleviate the monotony of war

I remembered the way a Phantom pilot had talked about how beautiful the surface-to-air missiles looked as they drifted up toward his plane to kill him, and remembered myself how lovely .50-caliber tracers could be, coming at you as you flew at night in a helicopter, how slow and graceful, arching up easily, a dream, so remote from anything that could harm you. Based on the sensory details, what can be inferred about the narrator's feelings toward the airstrikes he witnessed?

He was fascinated by the way they looked.

Which excerpt from Dispatches uses imagery to reflect the conflicting emotions that soldiers face during a war?

NOT!! Night was when you really had the least to fear and feared the most. You could go through some very bad numbers at night. NOT sometimes you'd step from.....

How does the structure of A Rumor of War reflect the pace of the war?

NOT!! Short paragraphs used throughout the passage reflect how quickly the war began and ended.

Which sentence from Dispatches contains the best example of sensory language?

There would be dozens of them at once sometimes, trailing an intense smoke, dropping white-hot sparks, and it seemed as though anything caught in their range would be made still, like figures in a game of living statues.

Which excerpt from Dispatches contains sensory language to describe the geography of Vietnam?

There would be the muted rush of illumination rounds, fired from 60-mm. mortars inside the wire, dropping magnesium-brilliant above the NVA trenches for a few seconds, outlining the gaunt, flat spread of the mahogany trees, giving the landscape a ghastly clarity and dying out.

Read the excerpt from A Rumor of War. Repeatedly, I have found myself wishing that I had been the veteran of a conventional war, with dramatic campaigns and historic battles for subject matter instead of a monotonous succession of ambushes and firefights. Which best describes the purpose of the paradox in the excerpt?

To emphasize the difficulties by soldiers in untraditional warfare

Which excerpt from A Rumor of War contains the best example of sensory language?

Weeks of bottled-up tensions would be released in a few minutes of orgiastic violence, men screaming and shouting obscenities above the explosions of grenades and the rapid, rippling bursts of automatic rifles.

Read the excerpt from A Rumor of War. We left Vietnam peculiar creatures, with young shoulders that bore rather old heads. What is the author attempting to convey to the reader using sensory language?

While their bodies were young, their minds were old.

The far side of the hills around the bowl of the base was glimmering, but you could never see the source of the light, and it had the look of a city at night approached from a great distance. Flares were dropping everywhere around the fringes of the perimeter, laying a dead white light on the high ground rising from the piedmont. There would be dozens of them at once sometimes, trailing an intense smoke, dropping white-hot sparks, and it seemed as though anything caught in their range would be made still, like figures in a game of living statues. There would be the muted rush of illumination rounds, fired from 60-mm. mortars inside the wire, dropping magnesium-brilliant above the NVA trenches. The sensory details in the excerpt evoke a sense of

awe and wonder.

Weeks of bottled-up tensions would be released in a few minutes of orgiastic violence, men screaming and shouting obscenities above the explosions of grenades and the rapid, rippling bursts of automatic rifles. In this excerpt, the author uses imagery to describe

the chaos and frenzy of war.