In May 2012, GQ magazine published a story written by Chris Heath. This haunting and reflective account pieces together events from the previous fall, in which 51 exotic animals were released in Zanesville, Ohio and subsequently killed. Heath’s article, while published by a men’s magazine, appeals to a wide and general audience; no one would be alienated while reading it. Heath occasionally uses second-person to address the reader, but, more often, he makes comments to the reader to ground them to reality, to guide their opinions, and to bring closure to the reader. The author establishes a sad, reflective tone early in the story, and his voice is conversational and humble. Stylistically, Heath employs varied sentence structures and syllable-to-word ratios. Latinate words are kept at a minimum, and connotative words are used in his most reflective sentences. The story is told in three parts: the first part, titled Fifty-one Deaths, is told from the perspective of nine different people and immediately places readers at the scene of the tragedy; the second part, titled The Animals Among Us, consists of Heath defining and struggling with the moral and ethical implications of exotic pet ownership in the U.S.; and the third part, titled A man called Terry Thompson, is Heath’s attempt to humanize Thompson and help the reader understand why this tragedy occurred. The result is a reflective and haunting look at the ways American veterans are forever changed by war and failed by their country.
Since GQ, a magazine for educated and stylish men, published Heath’s story, it would be easy to say that the story was written for educated, stylish men. However, the piece maintains objectivity, and, though Heath occasionally presents his own thoughts, he refrains from passing any judgment on characters within the story. The article was written for the most general audience possible, and I believe no one would find it over their educational level or offensive.
Stylistically, Heath varies both his sentence structure and syllable-to-word ratio; he uses long sentences and short ones. His longest sentence is his opening sentence:
“A little before five o’clock on the evening of October 18, 2011, as the day began to ebb away, a retired schoolteacher named Sam Kopchak left the home he shared with his 84-year-old mother and headed into the paddock behind their house to attend to the horse he’d bought nine days earlier.”
With 94 syllables and 54 words, this syllable-to-word ratio clocks in at 1.74. But this sentence is an anomaly. The majority of his sentences stay within the 1.4 range; another long sentence is 35 words and 48 syllables long with a syllable-to-word ratio of 1.37. His shortest sentence (“No answer.”) has three syllables and two words, giving it a ratio of 1.5 (2). Another short sentence (“Along came a wolf.”) has five syllables and four words; the ratio is 1.25 syllables per word (2). These sentences are evidence that Heath hovers in the highly readable writing range.
When addressing the audience, which Heath does minimally, he uses the second-person and provides commentary that grounds the reader to reality. For instance, when writing about the deputy’s experiences killing these animals, Heath describes a scene we would never think possible:
“Merry went back for his rifle. An African lioness crawled under the livestock fence and ran south down the road then headed toward someone’s home, so he shot her before she could go farther. Then he turned back, intending to deal with a black bear and a tiger along the roadway, but he was distracted by a cougar heading south, so he followed the cougar into another driveway where he met a male African lion coming the other way. He shot the lion while some other deputies shot the cougar. Soon he was instructed to patrol the border between the Thompson property and Interstate 70, and over the evening he shot another wolf, two more lions, a tiger, and–later on, after its hiding place was revealed by a fireman’s thermal-imaging camera–a grizzly bear. That’s what it was like” (3). (Emphasis added.)
The last line is Heath’s way of saying to the audience ‘yes, this crazy shit really happened.’ It grounds readers to the reality of the tragedy.
Elsewhere, he mostly addresses readers in part 2, when he raises moral and ethical questions on exotic pet ownership and in part 3, when humanizing Thompson. On behalf of “the majority of Americans who know little about the world of exotic animals,” Heath asks: “How could a private citizen have amassed a collection of so many unusual and potentially dangerous animals in the fire place? Surely he must have broken every law that prevents your next door neighbor from secretly housing an ambush of tigers?” (7).
While navigating these morally murky waters, Heath addresses the audience in second person: “Only once you slide up and down these slippery moral slopes can you see how much easier it is for all of these owners to believe that they are acting with kindness to animals that they love, and that their love is on some level reciprocated” (8). My two favorite parts, however, are when Heath addresses the audience before diving into part 3 and at the story’s end. Heath ends part 2 by discussing why we should be interested in Thompson’s story:
“When a life explodes like this, in a shower of sparks and shrapnel, people pick through the remains and see what suits them best. That’s what happens when your death defines you. The bigger the bang that takes someone out, the more likely it is that the person at its center will be obscured. Terry Thompson’s story went round the world, but it was also barely told at all. Whether he was a daredevil hero or an idiot or an animal lover or an animal hater or a victim or a recluse or a good man betrayed, he was assumed to be a cartoon of a man whose whole life could be extrapolated from its final minutes. Almost from the moment Mrs. Kopchak picked up her telephone and reported that wild animals were on the loose, it was taken for granted that the manner of Terry Thompson’s death explained all anyone needed to know about the life that came before it. It seems worth taking at least a moment to wonder whether it might be the other way around” (9).
At the story’s conclusion, Heath addresses readers one last time before connecting Thompson’s love for exotic pets to his life-changing role in Vietnam:
“For those who’d prefer a Rosebud moment, here’s one more story from forty years earlier, from the time when an Ohio youth with beautiful blue eyes found himself forsaken and lost, deep in the kind of darkness and damage that some never completely escape. There are all kinds of ways that tragedy and fate can reach across decades to taunt us and trap us” (15).
Even while addressing the audience, Heath’s tone is sad and reflective. His words give voice to the reader’s natural thought progression, and it’s easy to observe the profound effect researching this story had on him. “All evening it went on, the slaughter. Encounters with animals that would normally have been remembered for a lifetime were forgotten moments later as the next came along” (5). He also reflects on why exotic pet owners agree to be interviewed by him: “Partly, I think, they talk because they’re proud of what they do and the way they do it, but it’s also because their way of life is under attack. They need people to know that not everybody who has a tiger or three tucked away behind their house is a Terry Thompson” (7).
In addition to Heath’s reflective tone, his voice is conversational and humble. He uses standard English–somewhere between formal and informal–which is effective for intimate communication. I counted only six latinate words: menagerie, unequivocal, laceration, antidote, extrapolated, and idyllic. He employs connotative words in his most reflective sentences; words like beautiful, massacre, slaughter, heart-breaking, noble beasts, trigger-happy, and ambush. I don’t foresee anyone struggling with formality in this story.
Heath’s reflective tone, his humble, conversational voice, the low syllable-word ratio, and the way he addresses the audience all contribute to what makes this story so well-written and effective. However, perhaps the strongest contribution to its success is the way the story is presented to the reader. In part 1, we are instantly dropped into the tragedy’s action. From nine different points of view, a complete picture of the evening’s events is stitched together. When Sam Kopchak is locked in his barn, we hold our breath as the two lions, a wolf, and a black bear go by. And when the tiger “started snarling and went after the horses,” we feel his terror (2). Heath also interviewed the police who killed all 51 animals and, by doing so, illustrated that they were just as upset about killing those beautiful animals as we are.
Part 2 takes us even further into the world of exotic-pet ownership. Heath rightly assumes that most Americans can’t imagine a tiger living next door to them, so he shows us the surprising lack of state laws in existence. But, best of all, he raises the moral questions of owning a leopard and of having a state-law passed that would forbid it. Heath points out that such a law would surely mean the mass euthanasia of endangered wild animals. Then he humanizes those exotic-pet owners who did speak with him and tells a beautiful story of a man who built himself a cage in his living room to protect himself post-surgery from a tiger cub. The tiger cub was given free-range of the house while his caretaker (who runs a wildlife sanctuary for abandoned exotic pets) recovered in a cage. Heath presents both sides of alternative-animal ownership, passes no judgments on anyone, and then asks us to look further into Terry Thompson’s story.
Part 3 exposes parts of Thompson’s story that surely no other news outlet covered. The 60-second sound-bite culture of America was quick to write Thompson off as a quack or to vilify exotic pet ownership. But Heath takes us farther than that. He takes us back to Thompson’s childhood in the Boy Scouts, back to receiving his pilot’s license at 16 years old, back to his being well-loved and full of life. Thompson’s many friends recall that the man who went to Vietnam was not the same man who returned. Heath goes to great lengths to paint a fully-developed picture of Thompson, and in many respects, he is exactly what Americans love: a free-spirit with an anti-authority streak, but a good guy. He quotes a recorded conversation with Terry, in which Thompson says “I’ve never killed anyone in civilian life. I don’t even kill flies” (13). Heath concludes the story with a quote from Thompson’s friend, who recalls that Terry made friends with a monkey while in Vietnam: “It planted the seed of caring for wild animals for the rest of his life. He took care of that monkey most of the time he was over there. It kept him sane while he was there. I don’t know what happened to it when he left” (15).
In conclusion, Chris Heath told a beautiful, reflective story that gave voice to the characters within it and even to the audience. His conversational, humble voice, combined with a low syllable-to-word ratio, appeals to a wide audience–despite that it was published in a men’s magazine. The depth of his research and his dedication to objectivity created a haunting article that casts light on the ways American veterans are forever changed by war and failed by their country.