The End

  The movie Apocalypse Now gives a completely new perspective of O'Brien and Komenyaka's themes of soldiers psychological well being. The movie starts out with a vivid flashback of fire and explosions in the jungle with the haunting tune "The End", by The Doors playing in the background gives the ominous feeling of fear and despair. Images of helicopters and flames flash behind Captain Willard's face as if they are stuck behind his eyes and every time he blinks its as if he travels back to the terror and fear. This transparency is similar to Komenyakas poem in which the narrator is taken back to his memories of Vietnam simplify by seeing his reflection  in the black granite or by even touching on of the many name. It throws him, like it does Captain Willard in the movie, into a whirlwind of emotion. Many who experience flashbacks like this in public are able to handle themselves, but as the film simulates, when they are in private not all soldiers can hold it together. It begins though with the contradiction though of the Capt. not wanting to be in the safe city but the dangerous jungles of Vietnam. This is a startling thing that is hard to understand, but it simulates they contradictions O'Brien uses for war and soldiers in "The Things They Carried." O'Brien says. "Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn't", which is showing how many soldiers who come back have either trouble retelling their experiences or that their deeds in war have somehow become more important. So important that they feel they are the only deeds that matter and the only place they fit in.

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.

Ideologies

Apocalypse Now attempts to straddle the line between Dr. Strangelove and a real propaganda film: American Sniper. To use a well-known idiom, Director Francis Ford Coppola appears to be trying to have his cake and eat it too. There are some fun moments in which the fourth wall is broken—when Coppola makes a cameo. He’s filming the soldiers while pretending to be an “On the Ground” news-reporter. At the end of the day, for all the film tries to tear down and the void it attempts to get us to look into, it still has the effect of lionizing the soldiers. Enjoyment of the sheer military might goes hand and hand with the guilt of destruction and loss of human life. The two things are intertwined. The ideology is here and the shame, but Coppola is still out to make a fun film—it’s his job. One can only admire, how the comforts of home—in the form of canned alcohol beverages—surfing, and pornography are made readily accessible. There is a phrase that goes something like, “an army runs on its stomach,” but if this is true, why wasn’t the Vietnam War a sure victory? Coppola film appears to be making some kind of statement—how this is a generation that so surrounded by omnipresent and readily made available comforts it doesn’t know that there is a very real world waiting for them in Vietnam.

In contrast, Tim O’Brien’s story attempts to humanize the war. To talk of it in some random chaotic way. He weeds through the crudity, but eventually buries the entire story under in a deep quagmire. It works because O’Brien is a writer. While O’Brien’s narrative probably the most authentic of these, it feels impure somehow—because one cannot be certain of what is true and what is not. O’Brien’s stories aren’t fun and anyone that reads them subjects themselves to the kind penance. He is anti-ideology—and O’Brien spends so much time trying to disentangle himself from it.

Coppola gives the audience what we want, while O’Brien is giving us what he thinks we need.

Yusef Komunyakaa approach is probably my favorite, because he achieves tonally what the other two do not. Komunyakaa’s poems are the cleanest thing we’ve discussed in the class. His approach is also probably the most thoroughly digestible for a reason—it encases provocative imagery without explicitly mentioning any of the horror.

Breaking points -

     It's an interesting thing they speak of, when the characters are talking about breaking points. They talk about how every man has one. They also talk about things get confused out in war. Some of the things they get confused in war according to the characters were morality, and human nature. Morality is something that Tim O'Brien talks about in The Things They Carry. For instance on the rainy river, the protagonist is conflicted by weather or not he should flee to Canada or if he should go to war. It's a tough decision for anyone to make. It's a moral decision that someone has to make too. Do they believe in the war? Do they think it's wrong to flee? Do they think it's right to go? All of these questions are questions Tim O'Brien talks about. War is not an easy thing to be absolute about. I think no one can be absolute about war. That's what makes it confusing. In addition, when they are describing the rogue officer sort of reminded me of Mary Anne and the greenies in Sweetheart of Tra Sa Bong. Mary Anne had gone off to fight like a savage, following no real army, or nation in a way. I think the common theme between the rogue in Apocalypse Now  and Mary Anne is that they have started fighting the war for themselves. They stopped fighting the war for the usual reasons people go to war such as for their nation or the good of the world or for resources. They talk about how every man has a breaking point, as I mentioned. Perhaps it is not a breaking point with Mary Anne and the rogue officer. Perhaps, it is more of a freeing point. A point where they can be their own person, where they have some control of the surroundings, but at the same time no control. Apocalypse Now for me sort of reinforces, and validates a lot of the ideas in The Things They Carry. It's not that I do not believe the ideas in The Things They Carry, but it's nice to see someone reinforce them and make it that much more real.

Madness

           In the opening scene of Apocalypse Now you can see the major theme of the movie, destruction of something peaceful.  It follows by a clip of Captain Willard in his room while on rest time from the war.  While he aimlessly walks about his room, you hear his voice say, "When I was there all I could think about was not being there, and when I was there all I could think about was getting back to the war."  At this point in the movie you can already notice the psychological strain the war has put on Captain Willard.  The madness yet to be revealed seems to be the mission Captain is sent on to arrest(kill) a fellow American Captain who has gone AWOL.  Captain goes on to say, "Soldiers sent after soldiers who go crazy, how many people have I killed, this time an American.  Charging a man with murder in this place is like trying to give a speeding ticket at Indy 500."  This is where you can see the correlations between O'Brien's writing and the movie, a true war story is one that when heard can't be believed.  War is misconception.
     A soldier of madness Captain comes across can be seen when assaulting a beach so that Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore can surf.  As they fly in by helicopters LC starts playing classical music to psychologically attack the small enemy force held up on a wooden post city on the river.  The town is obliterated and soldiers, along with innocent civilians are killed.  He evens goes as far as calling in an airstrike to napalm the village, he afterwards says, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning."  Just so the LC and a few others could surf.  The sheer insanity of war can be seen as Captain Willard embarks on his journey of madness, meeting progressively madder people as he nears the maddest of them all, Colonel Kurtz, all the while becoming more and more mad himself.

Guilt and pride

Inner Voices

Three stories with a common theme are “Friends,” “Enemies” and “Dentist.” These are all stories about the bizarre ways that people perceive themselves—and in turn, how they attempt to control the ways in which others perceive them.

“Dentist” is the most significant example of this. Curt Lemon is terrified of the dentist. One initially feels some sort of pity for him—perhaps that incident, in some respect, led to his sadistic tendencies. What exactly the nature of his abuse was, we are not permitted to know. Instead, we see how Lemon has learned to cope with this. He feels that he must somehow compensate for his unmanly activity of fainting by suffering some sort of completely unnecessary pain—a penance of sorts. This sort of twisted reasoning process seems to be further indicative of some kind of abuse. We see that it is fulfilled for him in masochism—he asks the dentist to yank out a perfectly fine tooth. Lemon’s smile the next day seems to indicate brightly to all those around, “Look, you have nothing on me. You can no longer call me a coward.” No one was calling him a coward in the first place, but perhaps, for Lemon, this self-torture seems to quiet an inner voice.

In “Enemies,” Strunk steals a knife from Jensen. The audience isn’t permitted to know this until the end—when, by that point, it becomes a framing device: the punch line of an enormous joke. O’Brien chooses to situate us after the action has already happened so that we know only about as much as the author does while the fight breaks out between the two men. After Jensen breaks Strunk’s nose, he thinks that the latter is coming for him to visit some sort of vengeance on him. Jensen eventually breaks his own nose—once again, it is a case of being ruled by inner voices. Unbeknownst to Jensen, Strunk thinks that he deserved the initial punishment—or at least that it was warranted in some way—because he really did commit the crime against Jensen.

 In “Friends,” the aforementioned incident seems to bring together Strunk and Jensen. The two become a kind of comrades-in-arms and make a promise that one will kill the other if one sustains an injury that will surely kill them. Perhaps it seems like some sort of honorable thing—like a living will. Things change though—in the moment in which a mortar gravely injures Strunk. The injury makes Strunk cling all the more desperately to life. For this reason the promise Jensen initially makes to Strunk cannot be fulfilled. When he dies in the hospital, Jensen feels like his oath has not been broken. For some reason, it seems like whether or not he breaks the oath weighs more heavily on him than Strunk’s actual death.