The madness of war

Now due to the fact that my schedule has been completely hectic lately, I was only able to focus in on certain parts of the movie, most likely being that I starting watching it around 5:00 in the morning, so I will try my best to answer this!  Apocalypse Now, as we all know, is a movie about the Vietnam War and the effects it has on the soldiers and veterans who partook in it.  Much of the movie is seen from the perspective of Captain Willard who (as we are shown from square one) has become a desensitized shell of what he used to be, lonely longing for nothing but to return to the jungle where he “learned” to become what he was, a real soldier.  However, as we see in this movie, the term “real soldier” comes with its costs.  The true soldier we see Willard as is actually his former self brought to madness, as easily shown in one of the first scenes of the movie where he strips naked in his hotel room, breaks his mirror, and lathers his own blood all over his bed and body.  And that’s not where the madness ends either.  We also see this madness depicted in Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore, from the first moments we see him in the movie we can tell there’s SOMETHING slightly off about him.  Could it be the casual cowboy hat he wears amongst the maze of combat helmets?  It certainly could be.  Or could another reason be that he is crazed out of his mind.  What we see in Colonel Kilgore is also a hardened shell of a former man, much like Willard.  He treats even the most severe situations like they’re nothing and even wants to leave his mark on the bodies that he more than likely hadn’t killed single-handedly.  The connections to this movie and The Things They Carried, I believe, extend just slight beyond the content itself.  I think that the themes shared between the movie and the book speak out more than the events themselves.  For example, in this movie (bear with me here), one of my favorite things to watch in the movie is that decayed state of mind the soldiers begin to grow to and the severity of the events that usually follow.  I feel this movie was able to capture a majority of what Tim O’Brien was trying to go for in his writing; and that is being able to show the severity and horror that war brings to the soldiers who fight in it.