Character Study: Willard and Kurtz (SPOILERS!)

Rating: Null/10 (18 July 2002)

As the film has been analyzed to death, I'd like to focus on the characters of Willard and Kurtz, specifically their military roles. "Apocalypse Now" is not a film about the war most military men were fighting; it is about the secret war of "covert operations" that went on from 1958 until Saigon fell in 1975. Willard, though he is dressed as an paratrooper, is in fact a Special Operations Group (SOG) employee. One gets the feeling that he has worked for the Phoenix Program while in SOG...in any case, he worked for the CIA while in uniform, and you get the suspicion that he hasn't been "real army" for many years. Kurtz is the same; both men were attracted by the freedom of movement allowed by SOG, the fact that you have the highest security clearance, that you are no longer just a gear in the machine. This freedom allowed Kurtz to build his tribe/army and demonstrate his "American Viet Cong" combat philosophy. It didn't work, namely because their was no animating ideology behind it, just "win the war." Thus the Colonel had to use Vietnamese aborigines, and adapted his tactics to their style of fighting and social organization. The longer he was away from Saigon, the more tribelike his army became, until we see them in Cambodia. There the transformation is complete. The moral: work with the people, not against them, or worse, use them as puppets.