“Saigon … shit; I’m still only in Saigon … Every time I think I’m gonna 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’m 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.”
Welcome back to Vietnam! How topical that we’re dealing with Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried this week, because there’s one chapter in that book that reminded me quite a lot of Apocalypse Now, what was probably my favorite chapter in the book. It’s called “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” and the story goes something like this: A soldier was able to smuggle his girlfriend into a camp in Vietnam by the village of Tra Bong. Their camp was primarily a medical facility, but next to it was a detachment of the mysterious Green Berets, elite soldiers who mostly keep to themselves. Over time, the girl came to enjoy the vigor of danger, becoming more and more acclimated to her surroundings until eventually she started disappearing randomly, nowhere to be found. Eventually they discover she was going out with the Green Berets on long missions, lying out at night in the jungle with camouflage on, building weird shrines with necklaces of human tongues. The soldier is disgusted with himself: the war changed her too.
So what’s the point of this story? Well, if Tim O’Brien is to be believed, war stories don’t really have a moral, but I’m a little more romantic than that. Similar to Apocalypse Now, a story in which a rogue American colonel becomes a tribal leader for primitive natives who consider him a god, it’s as though the very land itself corrupts people. Once a brilliant man, top of his class at West Point, groomed to belong among the top brass of the American military, Walter E. Kurtz gave up his position and accolades to become something native, a perversion of his former self. The original inspiration for this narrative was Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a very similar tale about an ivory trader named Kurtz who becomes a tribal chieftain.
Kurtz in Apocalypse Now
Looking at all these three narratives, it’s hard not to notice the common threads among them: located in Vietnam, involve a modern person “going native,” and take place from the perspective of a “civilized” person observing the degradation of others. Heart of Darkness gave us the backdrop of colonial Africa in the 19th-century, whereas both of the latter stories replace it with the Vietnam war, an interesting juxtaposition. In Conrad’s work, the metaphorical “heart” of darkness is not only a spot on a map, down a mysterious African river, but an inherent darkness in the human heart, ready at all times to come out. The idea is that humans aren’t as removed from savagery as the auspices and traditions of civilization would suggest, a point that the pseudo-civilization of colonialism, and the sanguinary horrors of war, bring out quite well. As my frequent readers (all one of you) will note, Spec Ops: The Line was also inspired to a great degree by Heart of Darkness. I guess I’m just a big Conrad fan!
At any rate, combative situations can allow people to indulge their Freudian thanatos, or appetite for destruction, in a societally acceptable manner. This can be considered a kind of regression to a more primitive, less-civilized state, or as a simple acknowledgment of what was always there to begin with. Where Conrad stopped with the sense of inherent savagery in the human race, Francis Ford Coppola (director of Apocalypse Now) takes this notion even further with regard to the Vietnam War. Kurtz explains it like this:
“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.” and “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.”
Heavy stuff, right? Kurtz’s horrifying experiences in Vietnam told him that the very reason the U.S. Army was doomed to fail against the Viet Cong was that they would not surrender their notions of civilization, utilize their “primordial instincts” the way the Viet Cong could. And this sort of critical history may be on to something. After all, the material superiority of the U.S. could not have been doubted, but the restraint that kept the campaign away from wholesale slaughter prevented it from overcoming the guerrilla tactics it was faced with. While I’m certainly not advocating for something like that (and I don’t think Ford Coppola was either), there is a certain brutal strength in disregarding our notions of ethics in wartime. In fact, it may even be necessary to those who want to win the kind of protracted, bloody, stalemate conflict that Vietnam became.
