Vietnam Literary Journalism

Question 9 • GA-GSE English Language Arts 11 B

Which excerpt from Dispatches contains imagery that evokes a sense of helplessness and inevitability?

Answer

Sometimes you’d step from the bunker, all sense of time passing having left you, and find it dark out. 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.

One hit anywhere in the chopper would bring you back, bitten lips, white knuckles and all, and then you knew where you were.

Nights were when the air and artillery strikes were heaviest because that was when we knew that the NVA was above ground and moving.

No wonder everyone became a luck freak, no wonder you could wake at four in the morning some mornings and know that tomorrow it would finally happen, you could stop worrying about it now and just lie there, sweating in the dampest chill you ever felt.

Explanation

Choice D evokes helplessness and inevitability through the narrator’s certainty that “tomorrow it would finally happen.” The soldiers cannot control or avoid the expected danger, so the narrator stops worrying and lies sweating in fear. The other excerpts describe darkness, the danger of a helicopter flight, or the timing of attacks, but D most strongly conveys a sense of doom that cannot be escaped.

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