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Question for Discussion: How does the film,
Apocalypse Now (1979), represent the
violence,unreality, and disillusionment of
the Vietnam War?

Reading: Levine and Papasotiriou, pp. 107-115, 141-143, 177-180; President Johnson, "Peace without Conquest" ; John Kerry, Vietnam Veterans Against the War Speech; Sitkoff, "Vietnam Revisionism"

Video: 1994 CBS interview with Robert McNamara, VHS; David Brinkley: Johnson on Vietnam, VHS;
President Johnson's Anguish over Vietnam, tape ;
The 1960s:The Years DVD

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Apocalypse Now (1979) Web links
History of American Involvement in Vietnam: 1945-1975

Debating American Involvement in Vietnam

Fighting the War in Vietnam

The Vietnam War at Home:
The Struggle over Hearts and Minds

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"At the Cannes Film Festival, Coppola, speaking about his film said "This movie isn't about Vietnam -- it is Vietnam." The controversy surrounding the film at the time caused this statement to be disregarded as the ranting of an egotistical director. But after watching the film, I understood exactly what he meant. The confusion, the senselessness, the violence, the otherworldliness of the images Coppola created -- the horror of it all -- truly captures the reality of war."                  
                Skyler Miller, "In Focus: "Apocalypse Now"

"Everywhere in the world where knowledge is being suppressed, knowledge that, if it were made known, would shatter our image of the world and force us to question ourselves--everywhere there, Heart of Darkness is being enacted."
Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate the Brutes

Johnson, Peace without Conquest

"Tonight Americans and Asians are dying for a world where each people may choose its own path to change. 

"This is the principle for which our ancestors fought in the valleys of Pennsylvania. It is the principle for which our sons fight tonight in the jungles of Viet-Nam."

"We fight because we must fight if we are to live in a world where every country can shape its own destiny. And only in such a world will our own freedom be finally secure."

"The first reality is that North Viet-Nam has attacked the independent nation of South Viet-Nam. Its object is total conquest."

"We are there because we have a promise to keep. Since 1954 every American President has offered support to the people of South Viet-Nam. We have helped to build, and we have helped to defend. Thus, over many years, we have made a national pledge to he!p South Viet-Nam defend its independence. "

"We are also there because there are great stakes in the balance. Let no one think for a moment that retreat from Viet-Nam would bring an end to conflict. The battle would be renewed in one country and then another. The central lesson of our time is that the appetite of aggression is never satisfied. To withdraw from one battlefield means only to prepare for the next. We must say in southeast Asia--as we did in Europe--in the words of the Bible: "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further."

"Our objective is the independence of South Viet-Nam, and its freedom from attack. We want nothing for ourselves--only that the people of South Viet-Nam be allowed to guide their own country in their own way. "

Every night before I turn out the lights to sleep I ask myself this question: Have I done everything that I can do to unite this country? Have I done everything I can to help unite the world, to try to bring peace and hope to all the peoples of the world? Have I done enough?

"Ask yourselves that question in your homes--and in this hall tonight. Have we, each of us, all done all we could? Have we done enough? "

Kerry, Vietnam Veterans against the War Speech

"They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country."

"We call this investigation the Winter Soldier Investigation. The term Winter Soldier is a play on words of Thomas Paine's in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriots and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough."

"We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country, we could be quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out.... "

"We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese or American. "

"We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes were used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by the flag, and blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs and search and destroy missions, as well as by Viet Cong terrorism - and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong."

"We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.

"We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals."

"Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."

"We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?.... "

"An American Indian friend of mine who lives in the Indian Nation of Alcatraz put it to me very succinctly. He told me how as a boy on an Indian reservation he had watched television and he used to cheer the cowboys when they came in and shot the Indians, and then suddenly one day he stopped in Vietnam and he said, "my God, I am doing to these people the very same thing that was done to my people," and he stopped. And that is what we are trying to say, that we think this thing has to end. "

"We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission - to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more. And more. And so when thirty years from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning."

Sitkoff,"Vietnam Revisionism"

"This is especially the case since the Vietnam War, the United States' longest, most agonizing war, and its most undisguisable defeat, left many Americans skeptical about the use of American military power overseas. To dispel this so-called Vietnam syndrome— the apprehension of foreign involvements that might require armed intervention, especially in the Third World—some authors refurbish old tales of American virtue and omnipotence. Former president Richard Nixon, in his book No More Vietnams, even claims that "we won the war." (But then we abandoned South Vietnam after the Communist North violated the Paris accords of 1973 that were supposed to end the fighting.) Few others dare reverse the verdict of the war quite so boldly, yet they too revise the past to counter American defeatism, to teach the rightness of an activist U.S. foreign policy, ready, willing, and able to employ American troops abroad in order to prevail."

"For the primary cause of the continuing misery in Indochina was the obsession of the United States for more than a quarter of a century to keep. Vietnam, or at least half of it, from going Communist. For both domestic political considerations and geopolitical advantages in the struggle against international Communism, the United States intervened, first in an anti-colonial war and then in a civil war. It did not intervene to protect freedoms that the mass of Vietnamese never enjoyed. It did not seek to preserve a democracy that the Vietnamese never practiced. It did not go to war to defend liberty in South Vietnam."

"Our motives were not altruistic. Successive American presidents acted, in the main, according to their reading of American national self-interests, and, secondarily, to protect their own political hide. Well aware of the political price Harry Truman paid for "losing" China, Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon all desperately sought to avoid being blamed for "losing" Vietnam. To bolster American security, the United States supported the reimposition of French colonialism in Indochina after World War II. It paid most of the cost of France's efforts to quell an indigenous insurgency, which, although led by the Communist Ho Chi Minh, had the broad support of the Vietnamese people to achieve both national independence and the unification of a land that had been divided by the colonists."

"That such a war may well have been unnecessary compounds its tragedy. Obsessed by the formative lesson of Munich that allowing aggression to go unchecked only leads to further aggression and then wider war, the Truman administration resolved to contain the expansionist Soviet Union everywhere around the globe. Ignorant of the history of Vietnamese resistance to foreign domination and longing for reunification, the United States first responded to the Vietminh uprising as an aspect of Moscow 's drive for conquest. Shortly thereafter, Washington claimed its stake in Vietnam to be the thwarting of China 's drive to extend its influence in Asia . Despite a two-thousand year history of warfare between China and Vietnam , the United States insisted that Hanoi was Beijing 's puppet and the Vietnamese insurgents a mere stalking horse for Chinese imperialism. That view soon evolved into the "domino theory," which reduced a hodgepodge of Asian nations and peoples—each with their own particular history, social structures, and cultural patterns—into neat black dominoes all ready to fall. President Dwight Eisenhower warned that if Vietnam fell to the Communists, nearby Thailand , Burma , and Indonesia would inevitably fall, and, ultimately, all of America 's allies would topple. Subsequently, President John Kennedy defined the burden as thwarting "the onrushing tide of Communism from engulfing all Asia ."

"When such realities could no longer be ignored, the American rationale for intervention in Vietnam became the need for the U.S. to prove its "credibility." Whatever the reasons for our initial intervention, we had to persevere in the fighting to demonstrate to friend and foe alike that the United States honors its commitments, that it is not "a pitiful, helpless giant" or a "paper tiger."

"The much-feared toppling of dominoes did not occur. In fact, rather than having to fight Asian Communism on the beaches of Waikiki or San Diego, the United States joined a tacit alliance with the Chinese and Cambodian Communists (the Khmer Rouge) in their war against Vietnam. Moreover, in the very midst of America 's war to stop the spread of international Communism, it pursued detente with the Soviet Union and the normalization of relations with the People's Republic of China ."

"Whatever the myths of the nobility or necessity of the war, a growing chorus of veteran officers contend that the United States could have won if it had not been forced to fight such a limited war. As General William Westmoreland now regularly exclaims: "It takes the full strength of a tiger to kill a rabbit." But if spending more than $150 billion, sending nearly three million American troops to Vietnam, and conducting the most massive bombing in history did not produce victory over what President Lyndon Johnson sneered as "a fourth-rate, raggedy-ass, backward nation," what General George Patton, Jr. dismissed as "an eight-rate power (if that high)," what would have been necessary? How much more would it have taken to vanquish a foe militarily outnumbered ten to one, without an air force, and employing for most of the conflict almost primitive means of communication and transportation? Would any strategy have worked against popularly supported guerrillas who simply had not to lose and outlast the foreigners? What costs would North Vietnam have found so intolerable that defeat would have been preferable?"

"So American planes kept raining rockets on peasants and livestock, and dropping flesh-burning napalm on schools and pagodas. The mindless carnage made the very civilians whose hearts and minds the United States was supposedly trying to win despise America , and it prompted countless recruits for the Communist adversary. The massive aerial bombardment also further isolated the United States from world opinion. As Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara observed: "The picture of the world's greatest super­power killing or seriously injuring 1,000 non-combatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly debated, is not a pretty one."

Could any responsible commander-in-chief, moreover, have ordered this invasion? Given America's experience in Korea and the explicit warnings of Beijing to rally to North Vietnam's assistance if the United States crossed the seventeenth parallel, what president could have ignored the consequences of what LBJ called "spitting in China's face," the possibility of another land war in Asia with the People's Republic of China. And what would the United States have gained by broadening the war, by making a continental or world-wide war, perhaps even a nuclear confrontation? How would an invasion and occupation of a nation along China 's southern border have affected the strategic goals of Washington to pursue detente with Moscow and the normalization of relations with Beijing ?

Most vitally, even an American victory in North Vietnam would not necessarily have ended the insurrection in the South. Turning Hanoi to rubble would not have secured the U.S. objective of a viable, independent non-Communist South Vietnam . "

"To kill is not to prevail. Military superiority does not guarantee political victory. The hunger for national liberation and social justice made the Vietnamese Communists willing to accept appalling casualties until they had outlasted their enemy. Those who still believe that more firepower would have lead to an American triumph ought to study the Russian experience in Afghanistan .

T o understand the painful truths of the past, rather than the myths, Americans must recognize that they are not outside of history. This means realizing the advantages their adversary possessed in this conflict rather than repeating President Richard Nixon's claim that " North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States . Only Americans can do that."

Colonel Walter E. Kurtz: I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream. That's my nightmare. Crawling, swiftly, along the edge of a straight... razor... and surviving.

Kurtz: "It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies
to be feared. They are truly enemies."

Kurtz: "I've seen the horrors, horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me, you have a right to do that, but you have no right to judge me."

Kurtz: "Then I realized they were stronger than we. They have the strength, the strength to do that. If I had 10 divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling,without passion, without judgment."

Kurtz: "We must kill them. We must incinerate them. Pig after pig. Cow after cow. Village after village. Army after army."

Colonel Walter E. Kurtz: The horror.
The horror.

"His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines. But I had not much time to give him, because I was helping the engine-driver to take to pieces the leaky cylinders, to straighten a bent connecting-rod, and in other such matters. I lived in an infernal mess of rust, filings, nuts, bolts, spanners, hammers, ratchet drills -- things I abominate, because I don't get on with them. I tended the little forge we fortunately had aboard; I toiled wearily in a wretched scrap-heap -- unless I had the shakes too bad to stand.

"One evening coming in with a candle I was startled to hear him say a little tremulously, 'I am lying here in the dark waiting for death.' The light was within a foot of his eyes. I forced myself to murmur, 'Oh, nonsense!' and stood over him as if transfixed.

"Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror -- of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision -- he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: " 'The horror! The horror!'

Joseph Conrad, "The Heart of Darkness"

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1.  What does Kurtz mean when he says: 
"I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream, it's my nightmare. Crawling, slipping along the edge of a straight razor and surviving....But we must kill them, we must incinerate them, pig after pig, cow after cow, village after village, army after army, and they call me an assassin. What do you call it when the assassins accuse the assassin? They lie. They lie and we have to be merciful for those who lie, for those nabobs. I hate them. I do hate them."
2. Who do you think is more insane Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) or Colonel Kurtz?  Is Kurtz seen as more insane because he is not following the military's program in Vietnam?

3. Do you agree with Tim Dirks' that Kurtz needs to be killed, not because he is insane, but because he is a threat to the U.S. military's understanding of the war:"Kilgore, the 'respectable' side of the Vietnam experience, is ironically contrasted to the other side of the same coin - Kurtz, the 'barbaric' character who is the object of the mission. Willard questions what the real reason might be for the orders to assassinate Kurtz:
"If that's how Kilgore fought the war, I began to wonder what they really had against Kurtz. It wasn't just insanity and murder. There was enough of that to go around for everyone."
4. Why does the military want Willard to assassinate Kurtz?Captain Benjamin L. Willard: "Terminate the Colonel.

General Corman: He's out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct. And he is still in the field commanding troops.

Civilian: Terminate with extreme prejudice."

5. What does Kurtz mean when he tells Willard this: .Colonel Walter E. Kurtz: "I've seen the horrors, horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me, you have a right to do that, but you have no right to judge me."

6.. Why does Kurtz allow Willard to ritualistically kill him?  The director seems to imply that Willard's killing of Kurtz is just like the tribesmen's ritual killing of the cow.  What does this have to do with Kurtz's guilt or innocence?

7.  What does Kurtz mean when he tells Willard that horror must be your friend:Colonel Kurtz:  "It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies."

8.  What do you think Kurtz wants Willard to tell his son about why Kurtz died in Vietnam?

9..  Why do you think Kurtz and his tribesmen army are so vicious and bloodthirsty?  Why do they strew heads, bodies, and torsos around their camp?

10.  Why does Kurtz read T.S.Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men" aloud?  Are Kurtz and Willard and the rest of the American military "the hollow men"?  T.S. Eliot's (1888-1965) Hollow Men .

11.  Do you understand the necessity for Willard's long, slow trip up the river into Cambodia.  Like in the Conrad short story, "The Heart of Darkness," Willard takes a trip up the river into the jungle and into the "heart of darkness."  What lies at the heart of darkness?

12.  What does Kurtz mean when he says that he realized they were stronger than we are:"Then I realized they were stronger than we...They have the strength, the strength to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgment - without judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us."

13. Why does Willard after killing Kurtz put down the machete and leave the tribesmen rather than becoming their new warrior leader by replacing Kurtz?  Why are the tribesmen willing to let Willard be their new leader?

14. According to Tim Dirks, in the 70 mm version of the film (for its initial release), there were no credits for the film - printed credit booklets were issued to audiences. Two other test endings were shot for the film:
  1. Willard kills Kurtz and remains in Cambodia in his place.
  2. A large-scale airstrike raid is staged at Kurtz's retreat and the compound is bombed and napalmed as Willard and Lance start downriver.
Do you think the controversy over the three possible endings for the movie changes the larger meaning of the film?

15.  Would ending the film with Willard calling in an airstrike and scenes of the village being enveloped in fire radically change the ending of  Apocalypse Now?

16. How does the film's title, Apocalypse Now, help us understand the larger moral critique of America's role in Vietnam at the heart of this film?

17.  Why does Kurtz write: "Drop the Bomb. Exterminate them All"?  Does he want Willard to destroy his people and everything in their compound?  Is this the apocalypse the film is driving towards?

18.  Can America really destroy Vietnam and its people in order to save them?  By destroying the Vietnamese aren't we undermining our moral position in the war?
 


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© 2002 by Chris H.  Lewis, Ph.D.
Sewall Academic Program; University of Colorado at Boulder
Created 7 August 2002:  Last Modified: 10 March, 2009
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