Quotes from
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[While flying in a helicopter with Air Cavalry soldiers] 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. Captain Benjamin L. Willard: I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to a divorce. 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. 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. Kurtz: We must kill them. We must incinerate them. Pig after pig. Cow after cow. Village after village. Army after army. 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! Photographer: Did you know that "if" is the middle of the word "life"? Colonel 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. 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. 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? Col. Kurtz: What do you call assassins who accuse assassins? Captain Benjamin L. Willard: If that's how Kilgore fought the war I began to wonder what they really had against Kurtz. It wasn't just insanity and murder, there was enough of that to go around for everyone. Captain Benjamin L. Willard: Oh man, the shit piled up so fast in Vietnam you needed wings to stay above it. 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. 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. Lance: Disneyland. Fuck, man, this is better than Disneyland. Chef: He's worse than crazy, he's evil! Chef: I used to think if I died in an evil place then my soul wouldn't make it to heaven. Well, fuck. I don't care where it goes as long it ain't here. Freelance Photographer: He likes you because you're still alive. 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. Chief: One look at you and I know it's gonna be hot. Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore: You either surf or you fight. Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore: If I say it's safe to surf this beach, it's safe to surf this beach! Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore: Charlie don't surf! [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. 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. Captain Benjamin L. Willard: Never get out of the boat. Absolutely goddamn right. Unless you were goin' all the way. Kurtz got off the boat. He split from the whole fuckin' program. Captain Benjamin L. Willard: They were gonna make me a major for this, and I wasn't even in their fuckin' army anymore. 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. 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. Colonel Walter E. Kurtz: We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene! Freelance Photographer: There's mines over there, there's mines over there, and watch out those goddamn monkeys bite, I'll tell ya. Colonel Lucas: Your mission is to proceed up the Nung River in a Navy patrol boat. Pick up Colonel 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. 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] 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. [His last words] Colonel Walter E. Kurtz: The horror. The horror. Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore: What the hell do you know about surfing? You're from goddamned New Jersey. The Photojournalist: This is the way the fucking world ends. Look at this fucking shit we're in man. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. And with a whimper, I'm fucking splitting, Jack. 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.  Main Page...or Look at some Movie Pics |