Those two months on Bougainville were so hard and strange. It wasn’t just the Japanese attacks. The earth itself seemed displeased at the warfare being waged upon it. The deep mud that sucked at our feet, the swarms of insects, the eruptions of the volcano were like messages of the island’s unhappiness. On December 6, the whole place began to quiver underfoot like a giant animal trying to shake fleas from its back. I was on a little hill in the jungle with several other Marines looking down on the valley below, which was still in Japanese hands. Until the quake, we’d seen no signs of the enemy. That changed as the ground shook and rolled, and the tall palm trees in the valley began to whip back and forth. Students, respond to the prompt below as the teacher models:

PROMPT: Write a short description of the important literary elements and explain why they help the reader understand the facts presented.