Great Character: Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (“Apocalypse Now”)

A mythical figure who lives up to and exceeds the myth, Colonel Walter Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando in the stunning Vietnam 1979 movie Apocalypse Now [written by John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola] is one of the most memorable characters in cinema history.

Here is a plot summary from IMDB:

During the on-going Vietnam War, Captain Willard is sent on a dangerous mission into Cambodia to assassinate a renegade Green Beret who has set himself up as a god among a local tribe.

Here is a Wikipedia biography of Walter Kurtz:

Walter Kurtz was a regular army officer in the United States Army; he had risen through the ranks and was seen to be destined for a top post within the Pentagon. In his first tour of Vietnam in 1964, he was sent by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to compile a report on the failings of the current military policies. His report was not what was expected and was immediately restricted for the joint chiefs and President Lyndon B. Johnson only.

Not long after, Kurtz applied for the 5th Special Forces Group, which was denied to him out of hand because of his advanced age of 38 for the basic training. Kurtz continued with his ambition and even threatened to quit the armed forces, when finally his wish was granted and he was allowed to take the airborne course. Kurtz graduated in a class where he was nearly twice the age of the other trainees, and was accepted into the 5th Special Forces Group.

Kurtz returned to Vietnam in 1966 with the “Green Berets” and was part of the hearts and minds campaign which also included fortifying hamlets. On his next tour, Kurtz was assigned to the Gamma Project, in which he was to raise an army of Montagnards in and around the Vietnamese–Cambodian border to strike at the Viet Cong and N.V.A. Kurtz located his army, including their wives and children, at a remote abandoned Cambodian temple which they fortified. From their base, Kurtz led attacks on the local V.C. and the regular N.V.A. in the region.

Kurtz employed barbaric methods not only to defeat his enemy but also to send fear. At first MACV didn’t object to Kurtz’s tactics, especially as they proved successful, but this soon changed when Kurtz allowed photographs of his atrocities to be released to the world. In late 1968, when Kurtz failed to respond to MACV’s repeated orders to return to Da Nang and resign his command after he ordered the summary execution of four South Vietnamese intelligence agents whom he suspected of being double agents for the Viet Cong, the MACV sent a “Green Beret” Captain named Richard Colby to bring Kurtz back from Cambodia. Colby joined up with Kurtz instead of bringing him back to Da Nang, either because he was brainwashed or because he felt a sympathy to Kurtz’s cause.

With Colby’s failure, MACV then selected Captain Benjamin L. Willard, a former paratrooper and now a CIA assassin, to journey up the Nung river and kill Kurtz. Willard succeeds with his mission only because Kurtz, himself broken mentally by the savage war he wages, wants Willard to kill him and release him from his own suffering. Before Willard kills him, Kurtz asks Willard to find Kurtz’s wife and son and explain truthfully what he’d done in the war.

The real story, of course, is about Captain Benjamin L. Willard [played by Martin Sheen]. Compare his appearance here when he learns about his mission:

http://static.movieclips.com/embedplayer.swf?shortid=WYKX2

To here at end of his chaotic hero’s journey, one definitely into the heart of darkness:

http://static.movieclips.com/embedplayer.swf?shortid=vWqb

Here is a glimpse into the world view of Walter Kurtz:

I’ve seen 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. 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! I remember when I was with Special Forces… seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember… I… I… I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn’t know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it… I never want to forget. And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God… the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men… trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love… but they had the strength… the strength… to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, 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.

But then this warrior, this beast, this demigod, this supposed Nemesis reveals once and for all his true nature: Trickster. Symbolized perfectly by not resisting, but yielding unto death, leading to the last lines of the movie: “The horror… the horror…”

Colonel Walter E. Kurtz: Great character. 

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