| Capt. Willard's (played by Martin Sheen) Opening Narration from Apocalypse Now
"Saigon, shit. I'm still only in Saigon. Every time I think I'm going to
wake up back in the jungle. When I was home after my first tour,
it was worse. I'd wake up and there'd be nothing...
I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to a divorce.
When I was here I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I
could think of was getting back into the jungle.
I've 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.
Each time I look around the walls move in a little tighter.
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. "
Colonel Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando) from Apocalypse Now
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 the 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.
Photojournalist (played by Dennis Hopper) from Apocalypse Now
"Hey, man, you don't talk to the Colonel. You listen to him. The
man's enlarged my mind. He's a poet-warrior in the classic
sense. I mean sometimes he'll, uh, well, you'll say hello to
him, right? And he'll just walk right by you, and he won't even
notice you. And suddenly he'll grab you, and he'll throw you in
a corner, and he'll say do you know that if is the middle
word in life? If you can keep your head when all about you are
losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when
all men doubt you -- I mean I'm no, I can't -- I'm a little man, I'm a little
man, he's, he's a great man. I should have been a pair of ragged claws
scuttling across floors of silent seas -- I mean --" |
