Toward My Own Theory of Description: The Battle of Ap Bac

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

There are at least two types of kinetic description: terse and lyrical. Here’s an example of terse: 

Sgt. 1st Class Arnold Bowers, twenty-nine years old, from a Minnesota dairy farm and the 101st Airborne Division, heard the bullwhip crack of the first bullet burst through the aluminum skin of the helicopter while the machine was still fifty feet in the air. Bowers’s helicopter was the second in the flight. Vietnam was his first war. During his previous eight and a half months in the country he had experienced no combat beyond a few skirmishes with snipers. The whip cracked again and again over the din of the H-21’s engines before the wheels of the machine settled into the paddy and Bowers jumped out into the knee-high water with a squad of infantry and the ARVN first lieutenant commanding the company.

God, I love that first sentence. The passage is from Neil Sheehan’s classic “An American Soldier in Vietnam II – A Set Piece Battle” (The New Yorker, June 27, 1988; included in his 1988 A Bright and Shining Lie). Description of war is writing’s ultimate challenge. Sheehan’s piece puts us right in the thick of it, in a rice paddy with three downed ARVN helicopters under withering Viet Cong fire:

The tree line crashed with the opening volley. Bowers did not pause, and Mays controlled his nerves and stayed right behind him despite the cracks of the incoming bullets. Cho’s .50 caliber and the heavy machine gun on the other M-113 slammed like jackhammers in response to the guerrillas’ fire. Mays could make out amid the din the answering drumrolls of defiance from the Viet Cong machine gunner at the right-hand corner of the irrigation dike. 

What I relish here is Sheehan’s use of figuration – “slammed like jackhammers,” “drumrolls of defiance” – to convey the scene’s “din.” The prose is hard-edged, as it should be when all is action, pure adrenaline, and life is on the line. It’s also intensely evocative. It puts us squarely there, with those ARVN soldiers, in that rice paddy, amidst the crack of incoming bullets. 

Is thereness description’s ultimate quality? I think it might be. Another word for it is “immersion.” The writer uses words that bring us as close as possible to the experience he or she is describing. With this in mind, in my next post, I’ll look at an example of lyric kinetic description – this one drawn from the world of baseball.