Anthony Alexander Poshepny (1924–2003), known as Tony Poe, was a CIA Paramilitary Operations Officer in what is now called SAD. He trained the Secret Army in Laos during the Vietnam War. In 1959, he received the Star for his heroic actions while leading these forces in combat. He was assigned with J. Vinton Lawrence to train Hmong hill tribes in Laos to fight North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao forces. In Laos, Poshepny gained the respect of the Hmong forces with his actions in combat and his victories on the battlefield. He and his Hmong fighters collected the ears of dead enemy soldiers; on at least one occasion, he mailed a bag of ears to the U.S. embassy in Vientiane to prove his body counts. He also dropped severed heads onto enemy locations twice in a grisly form of psy-ops. He was wounded several times, but refused to leave his troops to be evacuated. Over several years, Poshepny grew disillusioned with the U.S. government's management of the war. The CIA extracted him from Laos in 1970 and reassigned him to Thailand until his retirement in 1974. He received another Intelligence Star in 1975 for an undisclosed operation. Several press stories have suggested that Poshepny was the model for Colonel Walter Kurtz in the film "Apocalypse Now". He was one of the driving forces behind the Laos Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.