Read the excerpt from dispatches. 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: