Madness Comes With Adaptation

Something that the movie “Apocalypse Now” reveals about the psychology of soldiers is that madness comes with adaptation. What this means is that a prolonged exposure to a mad, wild, and hostile environment is very likely to cause a similar effect in your behavior, this is because humans are adaptable by nature. Thus, when soldiers are exposed to the constant danger of being in the edge between life and death, killing, watching others die, torturing, feeling tortured, coming to realize that human life holds a rather low value in comparison to being back home, and adding other secondary factors like Vietnam´s heat, dirt, mud, and rainy weather; then they adapt, and madness becomes a result of such adaptation, as it is that reckless behavior with complete disregard for your own or others´ lives what would allow you to keep going, to keep yourself alive in such environment. Examples include Captain Willard´s unstable behavior, such as when he punched a mirror while drinking vast amounts of alcohol, while stating that he had spent time in the jungle (Vietnam), and sometimes would wish to wake up back in it, and when (After killing his objective) he would silently walk away covered in dirt, camouflage, and blood, between some natives just to leave the area, leaving us to wonder just how unstable his mind would be by then. A soldier named Lance B. Johnson also happened to experience a peculiar change in behavior during his time in Vietnam, as he is portrayed at first as a young soldier who probably didn´t even know how to use a gun properly, but by the end of the movie viewers could perceive that he wasn´t quite all sane; he had killed many people, and most of his partners died, at the end he had become part of a Vietnamese tribe and felt like one of them, only to be pulled away by Captain Willard.

One theme that echoes from O´Brien´s writings in this film is the idea that there is no moral in a war story. Soldiers followed orders, they didn´t know why, but they carried them anyways. Willard was sent to kill a Colonel whose services were no longer required by the army, he didn´t know why, and the reasons given to him (Madness and murder) did not make enough sense either. After accomplishing his objective, we find no moral, no real satisfaction, and no real purpose. The things soldiers did were not ethical, and did not seem to carry much purpose. Despite being a movie about the U.S. Army made by Americans, there was no bias to support the army or the war. If anything, the Vietnamese seemed completely overwhelmed and outmatched, they seemed like victims, so what was the moral? Like O´Brien often pointed out… there wasn´t one.