Notes on the Debates
September 22, 2004
R. L. Norman, Jr. Ph.D.
The Bush Kerry Debate will largely be over whether the Bush War or the Kerry
War for Iraq is better for the war on terror, and whether the Bush War is likely
to lead to a new Syria War, Iran War, Afghanistan War or West Bank War. Kerry's
Going Upriver taught him a lot about leadership, while Bush's time in the National
Guard apparently led him to the catastrophic success of Iraq. As the debates
begin, it may be extremely useful for people to have see Apocalypse Now again,
thinking of Bush as a mad leader and Kerry as a relatively saner man, trying
to keep Bush (Kurtz) from destroying everything in Iraq and here in the United
States as well.
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The Bush Kerry Debate will largely
be over whether the Bush War or the
Kerry War for Iraq
is better for the war on terror ,
and whether the Bush War is likely to lead to a new Syria
War , Iran War , Afghanistan
War or West Bank War .Kerry's
Going Upriver taught him a lot about leadership, while Bush's time in the
National Guard apparently led him to the catastrophic
success of Iraq. As the debates begin, it may be extremely useful for people
to have see Apocalypse Now again, thinking of Bush as a mad leader and Kerry
as a relatively saner man going upriver again, trying to keep Bush (Kurtz) from
destroying everything in Iraq and here in the United States as well.
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Summary of Apocalypse Now
by Michael Arndt
Indb.Com
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078788/plotsummary
Burnt out Captain Willard is sent into the jungle with orders to find and kill
Colonel Kurtz who has set up his own army within the jungle. As he descends
into the jungle he is slowly over taken by the jungles mesmerizing powers and
the battles and insanity which surround him. His crew succumbs to drugs and
is slowly killed off one by one. As Willard continues his journey he becomes
more and more like the man he was sent to kill.
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The following pages of quotes from Apocalypse Now (1979) were used from Garner
Classis, a web site with hundreds of classic movies on dvd. These quotes
give a reader some of the feel for the movie, and how it compares to the present
situation regards Bush and Iraq. If the analogy fails, it is because victory
in Vietnam was at least possible, if the United States had been willing to remain
'in country' and continue to murder Vietnamese by the hundreds of thousands
indefinitely. Ultimately, the American population grew tired of the war and
is multiple lies, by all concerned. Throughout the war, the South Vietnamese
military, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam or the ARVN, fought along side
the United States. It was finally disbanded after the fall of Saigon in 197-
to the North Vietnamese. In Iraq, George W. Bush disbanded the Iraq army, thereby
forfeiting whatever slight chance the American Army had of providing some reasonably
decent alternative to Saddam. Also, George Bush is no Col. Kurtz, who in the
movie was a serious military man, who in the compression of war had simply slipped
into madness. Bush on the other hand, is simply very ignorant of the facts of
world political leadership and is too incompetent and arrogant to function as
a major world leader.
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Apocalypse Now (1979)
Francis Ford Coppola, Director
http://www.garnersclassics.com/qapoc.htm
Writing credits :
Joseph Conrad (novel Heart of Darkness)
uncredited
John Milius and
Francis Ford Coppola
Michael Herr (narration)
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[While flying in a helicopter with Air Cavalry soldiers]
Chef: Why do all you guys sit on your helmets?
Soldier: So we don't get our balls blown off.
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Captain Benjamin L. Willard: Saigon, shit, I'm still only in Saigon. Every time
I think I'm gonna wake up back in the jungle.
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Captain Benjamin L. Willard: I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes
to a divorce.
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Captain Benjamin L. Willard: When I was here, I wanted to be there, when I was
there all I could think of was getting back into the jungle.
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Captain Benjamin L. Willard: Been here a week now, waiting for a mission, getting
softer. Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every minute Charlie
squats in the bush, he gets stronger.
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Col. Walter E. Kurtz: We must kill them. We must incinerate them. Pig after
pig. Cow after cow. Village after village. Army after army.
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Freelance Photographer: What are they gonna say about him? What are they gonna
say? That he was a kind man? That he was a wise man? That he had plans? That
he had wisdom? Bullshit man!
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Photographer: Did you know that "if" is the middle of the word "life"?
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Col. Walter E. Kurtz: I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor.
That's my dream. That's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of
a straight... razor... and surviving.
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Captain Benjamin L. Willard: I was going to the worst place in the world and
I didn't even know it yet. Weeks away and hundreds of miles up a river that
snaked through the war like a main circuit cable - plugged straight into Kurtz.
It was no accident that I got to be the caretaker of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz's
memory - any more than being back in Saigon was an accident. There is no way
to tell his story without telling my own. And if his story really is a confession,
then so is mine.
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Captain Benjamin L. Willard: How many people had I already killed? There was
those six that I know about for sure. Close enough to blow their last breath
in my face. But this time it was an American and an officer. That wasn't supposed
to make any difference to me, but it did. Shit...charging a man with murder
in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy 500. I took
the mission. What the hell else was I gonna do?
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Col. Walter E. Kurtz: What do you call assassins who accuse assassins?
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Captain Benjamin L. Willard: If that's how Kilgore fought the war I began to
wonder what they really had against Col. Walter E. Kurtz. It wasn't just insanity
and murder, there was enough of that to go around for everyone.
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Captain Benjamin L. Willard: Oh man, the shit piled up so fast in Vietnam you
needed wings to stay above it.
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Captain Benjamin L. Willard: No wonder Kurtz put a weed up Command's ass. The
war was being run by a bunch of four star clowns who were gonna end up giving
the whole circus away.
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Captain Benjamin L. Willard: It's a way we had over here with living with ourselves.
We cut 'em in half with a machine gun and give'em a Band-Aid. It was a lie.
And the more I saw them, the more I hated lies.
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Lance: Disneyland. F---, man, this is better than Disneyland.
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Chef: He's worse than crazy, he's evil!
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Chef: I used to think if I died in an evil place then my soul wouldn't make
it to heaven. Well, F---. I don't care where it goes as long it ain't here.
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Freelance Photographer: He likes you because you're still alive.
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Willard: He came from some South Bronx shit-hole, and I think the light and
space of Vietnam really put the zap on his brain.
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Chief: One look at you and I know it's gonna be hot.
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Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore: You either surf or you fight.
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Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore: If I say it's safe to surf this beach, it's safe
to surf this beach!
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Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore: Charlie don't surf!
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[Radio announcer]
Zack Johnson: And now here's another blast from the past coming out to Big Cind,
all alone in the mantle room out there with the First Battalion Thirty-fifth
Infantry, and dedicated by the fire team at Ang Cape to their groupie CO Fred
the Head: The Rolling Stones' Satisfaction.
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Captain Benjamin L. Willard: Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission,
and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It
was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I never wanted another.
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Captain Benjamin L. Willard: Never get out of the boat. Absolutely goddamn right.
Unless you were goin' all the way. Col. Walter E. Kurtz got off the boat. He
split from the whole F---in' program.
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Captain Benjamin L. Willard: They were gonna make me a major for this, and I
wasn't even in their F---in' army anymore.
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Captain Benjamin L. Willard: Charlie didn't get much USO. He was dug in too
deep or moving too fast. His idea of great R&R was cold rice and a little
rat meat. He had only two ways home: death, or victory.
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Freelance Photographer: One through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions.
You can't travel in space, you can't go out into space, you know, without, like,
you know, uh, with fractions - what are you going to land on - one-quarter,
three-eighths? What are you going to do when you go from here to Venus or something?
That's dialectic physics.
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Colonel Walter E. Kurtz: We train young men to drop fire on people. But their
commanders won't allow them to write "F---" on their airplanes because
it's obscene!
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Freelance Photographer: There's mines over there, there's mines over there,
and watch out those goddamn monkeys bite, I'll tell ya.
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Colonel Lucas: Your mission is to proceed up the Nung River in a Navy patrol
boat. Pick up Col. Kurtz's path at Nu Mung Ba, follow it and learn what you
can along the way. When you find the Colonel, infiltrate his team by whatever
means available and terminate the Colonel's command.
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.
Colonel Lucas: You understand Captain that this mission does not exist, nor will it ever exist.
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Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore: You smell that? Do you smell that? ...Napalm, son.
Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the
morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for twelve hours. When it
was all over I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink body.
The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like... victory.
Someday this war's gonna end...
[Walks off unhappily]
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Colonel Walter E. Kurtz: Did they say why, Willard, why they want to terminate
my command?
Captain Benjamin L. Willard: I was sent on a classified mission, sir.
Colonel Walter E. Kurtz: It's no longer classified, is it? Did they tell you?
Captain Benjamin L. Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.
Colonel Walter E. Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?
Captain Benjamin L. Willard: I don't see any method at all, sir.
Colonel Walter E. Kurtz: I expected someone like you. What did you expect? ...Are you an assassin?
Captain Benjamin L. Willard: I'm a soldier.
Colonel Walter E. Kurtz: You're neither. You're an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill.
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Captain Benjamin L. Willard: On the river, I thought that the minute I looked
at him, I'd know what to do, but it didn't happen. I was in there with him for
days, not under guard, I was free, but he knew I wasn't going anywhere. He knew
more about what I was going to do than I did. If the Generals back in the Trang
could see what I saw, would they still want me to kill him? More than ever probably.
And what would his people back home want if they ever learned just how far from
them he'd really gone? He broke from them, and then he broke from himself. I'd
never seen a man so broken up and ripped apart.
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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.
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Colonel Walter E. 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.
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Colonel Walter E. Kurtz: I worry that my son might not understand what I've
tried to be. And if I were to be killed, Willard, I would want someone to go
to my home and tell my son everything. Everything I did, everything you saw,
because there's nothing that I detest more than the stench of lies. And if you
understand me Willard, you will do this for me.
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Captain Benjamin L. Willard: Everybody wanted me to do it, him most of all.
I felt like he was up there, waiting for me to take the pain away. He just wanted
to go out like a soldier, standing up, not like some poor, wasted, rag-assed
renegade. Even the jungle wanted him dead, and that's who he really took his
orders from anyway.
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[His last words]
Colonel Walter E. Kurtz: The horror. The horror.
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Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore: What the hell do you know about surfing? You're
from goddamned New Jersey.
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The Photojournalist: This is the way the F---ing world ends. Look at this F---ing
shit we're in man. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. And with a whimper,
I'm F---ing splitting, Jack.
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Radio Announcer: And now here's another blast from the past coming out to Big
Cind, all alone in the mantle room out there with the First Battalion Thirty-fifth
Infantry, and dedicated by the fire team at An Khe to their groupie CO Fred
the Head: The Rolling Stones' Satisfaction.
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