Sunday, August 25, 2019
Captain Willard tossed the blood-soaked machete onto the ground of the stone temple. The sound was startlingly loud, reverberating off the many stone walls as well as Buddhist and Hindu effigies in what was once a Khmer temple, and most recently, the base of operations for Colonel Walter E. Kurtz.
Having completed his mission of killing Colonel Kurtz in what turned out to be an uncontested assassination, Captain Willard’s adrenaline began to recede, slowly bringing him back to the reality of his surroundings. There he stood, elevated about twenty feet off the jungle floor, where at least a couple hundred of Colonel Kurtz’s montagnard followers had ceased their sacrificial quartering of a large water buffalo in order to pay heed to what had just transpired atop the ancient Khmer temple.
Captain Willard was not sure what would happen next. His initial assumption was that they would attack him for killing the man whom they appeared to be following, and perhaps even worshipping in a god-like manner. Willard stood there. The silence was deafening and the tension palpable. Hundreds of faces were looking up at him. Willard had no idea as to their specific ethnicity, but they were mostly Stieng tribesmen. The Americans, following the lead of the French, refer to them and all other indigenous peoples of Vietnam and Cambodia as montagard or mountain people, having been driven up to the highlands hundreds of years ago by many different conquering and colonizing peoples, including southerly migrating Chinese, as well as those emigrating from the Indian sub-continent. The Stieng were different from many of their indigenous brethren of Southeast Asia, beginning with the fact that they do not live in the highlands, but rather the low, swampy area along the southernmost border between Cambodia and South Vietnam. Their skin is darker than the other indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia, and they wear their hair longer. But what really distinguished them was that they regularly cover themselves with a kind of red and black war paint, made from a combination of soot, water, blood, and the extractions from various fruits and plants. They smear or streak these colorful concoctions on their faces, arms, legs and bear torsos. It is part celebration, as well as an indication that they are at war. The Stieng are a fierce, serious people, who live as if their very survival is on the line every minute of each day, because it is, and has been for hundreds of years now.
For his part, Captain Willard was wearing green and black camouflage paint on his face. He is at war too. And like the Stieng, the captain believed his very survival was on the line, never more so than at that very moment. He had been in Kurtz’s camp for only a few days, both as a prisoner and as a free man. But in that time, he came to consider the Stieng to be unpredictable, dangerous, ruthless, brutal, and even savage. If they all suddenly leapt up and began to devour him with their bare hands he would be none too surprised. In fact, he kind of expected it. And there would be no way he could stop them. His M-16 rifle was back in the boat. And Lance, his only remaining crew-member, was so high on a mixture of LSD, marijuana, the rice alcohol given him by the Stieng, as well as the personal freedom he found out in the Cambodian jungle, that he would be of no help, not to mention that Lance had integrated with the Stieng to the point he now considered himself one of them.
Captain Willard looked over at Lance. The young surfer from California was seemingly out of his mind. Covered with the blood/ash/mud combination, he was gazing upward as if entranced and perhaps even mesmerized by the fact that a light rain had begun to fall from the black sky, illuminated only slightly by the various ceremonial fires lit around the camp. Being the soldier that he is, one trained not only to kill but to survive, Captain Willard considered for a moment how he might live through this situation, that is, how he would get to the boat and begin making his way up river, back to Nha Trang.
There was very little sound emanating from the jungle. No birds. No animals. Nothing, which only added to the surreal, eerie and ominous nature of the moment. Then suddenly, in the blink of an eye the excruciating tautness permeating what had been the basecamp of the now deceased Colonel Walter E. Kurtz was relaxed. In unison, the hundred-or-so Stieng went down on either one or both knees, many bowing their heads in the direction of Captain Willard. In the ensuing first few seconds, the expression on the face of Captain Willard changed very little. He was still in survival mode, unsure as to the meaning of the knee bending and head bowing gesture. Willard knew it was better than the alternative scenario he imagined of being rushed and ripped to pieces by an angry mob of Kurtz’s montagnard followers, but he was still uncertain as to what would transpire next.
Captain Willard glanced again over at Lance, who remained oblivious as to the seriousness and potential dangers of the situation. He was still looking up at the night sky, giving the impression he was peering into a world other than the one he was currently living in. Feelings of contempt permeated the thoughts of the captain, who had observed the lack of discipline and immaturity of Lance and the other young draftees aboard the PBR throughout the two-week mission. The other two were dead, and Captain Willard could not understand why Lance, easily the dumbest of the draftees, was still alive. Within the first hour of the first day he grew tired of the school-boy antics of the three teenagers, kids who were just putting their time in so they could go home. Captain Willard, on the other hand, was a professional soldier, an assassin to be more specific. He did not understand why he had been burdened with having to bring them along in the first place, playing the role of referee and even babysitter the entire trip down the river. On several different occasions, he considered killing any one of the draftees, believing that nobody would know, much less care, as long as his mission of killing Colonel Kurtz was carried out. Now, with the other two draftees and the captain of the boat dead, and in the midst of a couple hundred Stieng whose loyalties lie with the man he just killed, Captain Willard was glad to have at least one member of his crew still alive, even though he did not seem capable of offering any sort of assistance, physical or strategic.
Throwing caution to the wind, Captain Willard walked over to Lance, grabbed him by the wrist and began leading him back to the boat, much like a father would a child. For their part, the Stieng, again in unison, rose to their feet and backed up, allowing the two Americans a comfortable space in which to pass through as if royalty, perhaps gods, or simply out of fear. They starred hard at the two strangers, trying to decipher what and who they were. Captain Willard tried hard not to make eye-contact, lest the montagnards discern his trepidation.
Once back inside the boat, the incessant squawks of “PBR Street gang, this is Almighty. Do you copy?” coming through the boat’s radio from the command center in Nha Trang were silenced as Captain Willard shut off the radio. Even before donning the camouflage paint and picking up the machete he would use to kill Kurtz, Willard acknowledged to himself that he was not in the United States Army anymore, and was no longer following orders, but rather doing Colonel Kurtz a favor by killing him. Like Colonel Kurtz, and perhaps because of him, Captain Willard has come to understand the hypocrisy of the American involvement in Vietnam, and perhaps even the hypocrisy of the entire American enterprise for that matter.
Having seen the boat’s captain, a man they called Chief, do it many times, Captain Willard proceeded to start the boat’s engine and slowly pull away from what was Colonel Kurtz’s Cambodian outpost, one littered with decapitated heads and numerous corpses—the carnage and outward manifestations of his apparent madness.
“The horror, the horror”, were the final words of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz just before he expired on the damp, dirty floor of the Khmer temple, which served as a kind of headquarters-bungalow for the renegade colonel. These words were still reverberating in the mind of Captain Willard, becoming more pronounced as he looked around the dimly-lit camp while the PBR exited the murky river channel that served as both entrance to, and exit from, the colonel’s compound. Even though Colonel Kurtz was able to enlighten and convince him of certain things, there was still a lot Captain Willard did not understand about the colonel and what he was doing or trying to accomplish so deep in the Cambodian jungle. Captain Willard was not able to untangle all that he had seen, heard, and experienced while in Kurtz’s camp, and was not sure if he ever would.
A million thoughts were racing through Captain Willard’s mind, including the things said to him during his meeting with certain military officials back in Nha Trang just a couple weeks earlier.
“And quite obviously, he has gone insane,” pointed out General Corman in an attempt to sell the mission to Captain Willard, words that resonated with him, perhaps more now that he has heard and seen the colonel for himself. Everything Willard saw in the Kurtz compound, and most of what Colonel Kurtz said to him, told Captain Willard that the colonel had in fact gone insane. But yet, there was a lot of evidence indicating to him that there was much more going on here than a man losing his mind during the middle of a war.
As he looked back at the Kurtz compound, Willard could see that many of the Stieng had moved to the riverbank to get a better look at the departing boat, while still others were going so far as to wade into the water as if trying to beckon the boat and its two crew members back. They seemed like children to Captain Willard, now abandoned, lost and alone. And in effect they were. Their god-man had been killed. And the man who killed him, and who by default as per their unwritten primordial code of divine-king succession had now become their new god-man, appeared to be forsaking them. In contrast, Captain Willard looked back at them with disinterest. It was Colonel Kurtz whom he was interested in, even though he was dead, a man who had risen through the ranks of what was perhaps the greatest military in what was arguably the most powerful empire the world had ever seen. And yet he gave it all up to live out in the jungle with a people whom by the standards of his culture would be considered ‘primitive savages’.
In this raw, vulnerable moment, Captain Willard was torn. Part of him could relate to Colonel Kurtz, while the other part of him wanted to simply dismiss the colonel as some kind of confused old man who succumbed to the pressure, and had ‘gone native’ as it is called back in the Western world, which is simply a non-clinical way of saying someone has gone insane, when in reality they have abandoned certain Western sensibilities in favor of their primordial instincts.
During his ‘captivity’ in the Kurtz compound, Captain Willard would go from being intrigued, to embarrassed for the man, back to being intrigued, the cycle repeating itself over and over again. And for a brief moment, Captain Willard was unsure if he was going to carry out his mission and kill Colonel Kurtz. He was not enamored enough, though, nor did he buy into what Colonel Kurtz was saying to the point that he ever considered joining the colonel like Captain Colby apparently did before him, a man sent on a similar mission prior to Captain Willard. Instead, Willard carried out his mission, which was to kill Colonel Kurtz. But it was more complicated than that. Captain Willard killed Colonel Kurtz, not because he was some kind of threat to the American mission in Vietnam, but rather as a kind of mercy killing. As he saw it, Colonel Kurtz was like a crippled or wounded animal who needed to be put out of his misery.
Colonel Kurtz was a man who stared too deep into himself, and for too long, eventually recoiling violently at what he saw, causing the army officer to charge hard in the opposite direction and run too far away to ever be brought back into the fold. With mighty abandon, Walter Kurtz fled the Western, Judeo-Christian religious, political, and philosophical tradition holding his mind and body captive. And while somewhat fearful of the unknown, what he knew for certain was that he could never return to that cage of conformance even if he wanted to. Colonel Kurtz was not completely comfortable walking out of his restrictive, albeit comfortable, societal pen, nor with the freedom of the open space that stood in front of him, either. The cage would have been tolerable had he not seen what existed outside of it. But once he did, he could never go back and live within its confines ever again.
* * *
Captain Willard listened to the distant sounds of thunder as he and Lance continued to make their way out of the Kurtz compound by following a narrow channel which would take them to the river’s main vein. He looked back and could see the orange glow of the many ceremonial fires still burning amidst the ancient Khmer ruins and the subsequent smoke billowing upwards. The night, the jungle, as well as what was the Kurtz compound were still deathly silent. Willard could no longer see the montagnards, but he could feel their stare, perhaps a few hundred of them, wondering where the mysterious man who killed their father was going. Captain Willard did not care, however. They were not his problem. They were a backward people from the other side of the world, living in a manner his own ancestors had not lived for thousands of years. They followed and worshipped a man whom the United States army determined to be insane. Captain Willard did not believe Colonel Kurtz was insane, nor did he believe him to be a god either, despite the fact that the U.S. military, as well as hundreds of indigenous people living deep in the Cambodian jungle, had both taken firm, albeit antithetical, positions on this matter.
Captain Willard did not have any idea what he was going to do, or where he was going to go. Colonel Kurtz, the river, and the jungle had all got to him, to the point that he no longer considered himself a soldier in the United States Army, an entity that has given him an identity and a purpose for the past decade or so. He thought about turning the radio back on, but knew he would only hear the urgent inquiries from headquarters in Nha Trang, wondering if he had carried out his mission. But Captain Willard was not yet ready to deal with the realities and politics of the American military machine, and so the radio would stay off. He knew they did not have enough fuel to get them all the way back to Nha Trang anyway, or any other South Vietnamese outpost for that matter. They were deep inside Cambodia, low on fuel, food and ammunition. And without the help of Nha Trang, they would probably remain there.
Because Cambodia was officially neutral and off-limits to U.S. military operations, the very word Cambodiapossessed a kind of ominous ring for many Americans, whether they were military or civilian, including Captain Willard. It may have been a place restricted to the Americans and the North Vietnamese, but ironically it was where the war was being won and lost. It was a land already bloated with thousands of years of its own history that it had not yet digested, only to have America’s Cold War paranoia and subsequent policy of ‘containment’ shoved down its gullet. Cambodia is a country thick with jungle foliage, as well as a vast array of different peoples and ethnic groups, many whom have fought, warred, and conspired against one another for thousands of years, but has for the most part remained unsullied by the Western world.
“That’s Cambodia, captain!”announced Chief to Captain Willard about a week prior upon coming to realize where the captain’s mission was going to take him and his boat. “And now he’s crossed into Cambodia, with his montagnard army,” said Colonel Lucas back in Nha Trang when they were trying to sell the mission to Captain Willard.
For all intents and purposes, Cambodia was just as much at war as was Vietnam. But whereas the Vietnam War was being fought on television sets all across the United States and reported on by every major and most minor news outlets across America, the war in Cambodia was a shadow war, fought covertly and secretly, hidden away from the camera’s eye. Most of the rural peasantry out in the jungle and rice paddies, as well as the educated middle-class living in the capital city of Phnom Penh, wanted the prime minister, Prince Sihanouk, deposed. Many considered him more of a king than an elected official. He did not distance himself far enough from the old ways of the monarchy in the opinion of many Cambodians, nor did he embrace it enough for still others. Sihanouk did not do enough in the way of opposing the French when they were the colonial overlords of what they called Indochina, nor did he show enough support for the Japanese when they showed up in Cambodia during their takeover of East Asia during World War II. He was not nationalistic enough for the Cambodians, not anti-Western enough, not anti-communist enough, not anti-Thai, anti-Laotian, and anti-Vietnamese enough. Yet, in what has been one of the world’s colonial, as well as communist battlegrounds, Prince Sihanouk somehow managed to keep Cambodia free of the atrocities and annihilation befalling many other East Asian countries before and during the Cold War. There were many nationalist, ideological and political groups plotting his overthrow, amassing themselves throughout the Cambodian countryside and jungle, waiting to move on the prime minister. The Americans were there, too, mainly their napalm and other chemical exfoliates, used to devour its jungle vegetation. Erstwhile, the many and varied indigenous peoples were in the highlands and lowlands, scratching and clawing just to survive, doing the things their ancestors did for thousands of years, and were still common-place in their cultures, but a savage and primitive abhorrence to all who have come to this part of Southeast Asia throughout the centuries to conquer and exploit the Cambodian countryside, marginalizing and even slaughtering those who already lived there.
Captain Willard saw Cambodia as a dark and evil place, its deception, blood lust and savagery concealed from the world behind a façade of ancient mystique and physical beauty. Whereas the sins and transgressions of Vietnamese society were very visible and transparent to the world, Cambodia was not what it appeared to be. Its top layer is gorgeous, a veritable tropical paradise. There were no American or Vietnamese soldiers walking its city streets. There was very little in the way of bomb craters or any other kind of overt destruction. This could have been said about Vietnam before the coming of the French, Japanese, and now the Americans. Vietnam is like an old prostitute, standing on a street corner under a flashing neon light. She is past her prime, wearing too much make-up in an attempt to hide her advanced age, but to no avail. Her well-tread exterior shines brightly in its polluted streets, overflowing with the trappings and perils of Western capitalism. But if Vietnam is an overt and unapologetic whore, then Cambodia is a reluctant one, still able to conceal its true self to the world, but whose thin veneer of ancient validity, overt beauty, and false innocence are quickly wearing away.
As Captain Willard continued to carefully navigate the small river boat away from Kurtz’s compound he could feel, smell, even taste Cambodia’s rich history. He may have been ignorant as to its details, but he felt it wrapping itself around him, permeating and filling his every pore, much like the intense humidity.
“We’re almost out of fuel,” announced Lance, showing signs of life. Captain Willard gave him a steely stare and then returned his attention to what was in front of him.
“How are we going to make it back?” Lance asked. He received no answer so he asked again. “How are we going to make it back? We don’t have enough fuel.”
“I don’t know,” replied the captain in a manner indicating he was not all that concerned. Lance looked at him as if he were crazy, scared to ask him any more questions.
Lance’s inquiry did force the captain to consider his next move, however. Willard’s adrenaline was beginning to subside. He had killed Colonel Kurtz, and the potential danger of the Stieng appeared to be over. It was very dark out and there would not be light for another eight hours. Captain Willard surmised that they had enough fuel for only a few more miles, certainly not enough to get them back up river.
“Let’s call headquarters and let them know where we are.”
Lance was sounding more and more like the eighteen-year old surfer kid from Los Angeles than he did the psychedelic gone-native jungle tripper he evolved into while going down river.
“Why won’t you fucken answer me?”
Captain Willard looked over at Lance. The green and black camouflage paint was still on both their faces, but now smeared and smudged.
“We’re not calling headquarters,” he said in a matter-of-fact sort of way.
“Why not?” Lance shot back.
Captain Willard hesitated. He had his reasons, but he really did not want to have to explain them to Lance, someone he considered a bit of a half-wit.
“Why not?” again asked Lance upon receiving no response the first time.
“Why? You want to know why?” screamed Captain Willard as if Lance should already know the answer. “If we call headquarters, they will more than likely just drop a bomb on our ass. We’re not supposed to be here, Lance. I was told back in Nha Trang that this mission does not exist, and so neither do we, making it very easy for I-core to just kill us.”
Captain Willard believed it possible that I-core would in fact simply have them killed once they learned of their location, but what he really thought would happen is that the army would send a rescue helicopter to come and airlift them out of the river and back to Nha Trang, and Captain Willard really did not want that. He figured that I-core would want to debrief him on Colonel Kurtz’s Cambodian operation, which would in effect guarantee that I-core would try to assist them in their return to Nha Trang. But the reason he told Lance that I-core would have them killed is because he did not know what he wanted to do yet. Things have changed for him, as they usually do after he kills or assassinates someone. Captain Willard was not sure if he even wanted to go back. He knows there is nothing there for him. The captain is more concerned about the now-deceased Colonel Kurtz, and is having a certain amount of regret about killing him. In fact, he is now beginning to wonder if staying in the Kurtz compound would have been the best course of action, at least in the interim.
It was nighttime. They were low on food, fuel, and ammunition. And they were down to two men. The crew had been ambushed on its way down the river. More than likely they would be hit again. Proceeding up river seemed the worst of their options.
“I’m going to pull over for the night,” announced the captain as he veered the slow-moving boat off to the right side of the river bank.
Lance wanted to radio headquarters, but was afraid to bring up the idea again, considering how upset the captain got when he did so earlier. Lance was nervous that Captain Willard would simply shoot him. He saw how he so callously shot an injured Vietnamese woman on their way down river when Chief wanted to take her to an ARVIN. Captain Willard would have none of it, shooting the woman with as much ease and indifference as taking his next breath. The men were scared of him. He was violent, yet always with a kind of Zen-like repose. But now that his mission was over, Lance did not find him any less intimidating.
“Okay,” said Lance, standing up and looking toward the riverbank, anticipating having to leap onto the muddy shoreline in order to position the boat. Once the boat was located in some tall reeds in order to both secure and camouflage it, Lance began scrounging around the small vessel for food while Captain Willard looked for booze. The captain was more successful than was the private in his quest. Captain Willard proceeded to take a couple swigs from a whiskey bottle he had stashed away deep down in the boat’s hull before they entered the Kurtz compound. He could immediately feel it take the edge off, making his receding adrenaline subside even more.
“I’m hungry,” complained Lance. “I’m hungry,” he said again after getting no response.
“Look down below for some MREs,” yelled an annoyed Captain Willard. He wanted to settle in and read some of Colonel Kurtz’ documents, and not have to have to deal with any more adolescent nonsense. Captain Willard needed very little in the way of creature comports. He actually felt better when hungry and tired and unsure of his physical safety.
“I don’t think there’s any left.”
Captain Willard closed the makeshift curtain he installed early in the mission to give himself some privacy from the antics of the draftees. Lance noticed this and knew it meant that he wanted to be left alone. He stopped talking to the captain, but did not stop talking altogether. Lance began ransacking the boat in an attempt to find something to eat while at the same time complaining out loud that he was not finding anything. Captain Willard appeared from the other side of his curtain to give Lance the same steely stare he gave Colonel Kurtz before hacking him to death with a machete. The captain waited for Lance to notice him before speaking.
“This part of the jungle is full of montagnards and VC,” he said in a very calm, yet authoritative manner. “You keep yelling like that and someone will find us before the sun comes up. Now if you want to live to see morning I suggest you shut the fuck up and go to sleep. Do you understand me?”
Lance understood the captain’s words to be a threat as much as it was a warning. He looked to see if the captain was holding his pistol. There was no gun in his hand, but Lance took his captain’s words no less serious. Without saying anything he went off to the other side of the boat to lie down. Captain Willard went back behind the curtain to have a closer look into the heart, mind, and soul of the man whom he killed no more than an hour earlier.
* * *
When looking through Colonel Kurtz’s writings, Captain Willard felt as if he was reviewing official military documents. They were meticulously typed, some of them on official U.S. Army stationary, until Kurtz apparently ran out and then began using plain white paper. Colonel Kurtz talked at length about his frustration with the American war effort in Vietnam, and how the United States did not have the stomach for the kind of war being fought there. Kurtz distinguished the war in Vietnam as one different from World War I, Korea, and World War II, mainly because of all the video and still-pictures appearing on America’s television screens, and in its newspapers and magazines. He talked at length about how during the previous twentieth-century wars, much of the battlefield butchery and slaughter never made it into print, much less on televised evening news broadcasts. Kurtz argued that this made America’s military and political leaders squeamish, paralyzing them from carrying out the things necessary in order to win a war, much of it now deemed too horrific for public consumption via television news, newspapers, and magazines, lest it turn the American people against the war in Vietnam.
There were pages upon pages of this kind of stuff. Much of it went on and on with Colonel Kurtz veering off course and rambling on about everything from his childhood, to the idiosyncrasies of the montagnards. Captain Willard was not searching for tidbits of intelligence pertaining to the North Vietnamese, or anything that would help with the war effort, per se. What he was looking for was any kind of hint, clue, or advice, perhaps, as to what he should do next. Captain Willard could not see himself back in the fold of the United States Army, nor simply as an American civilian. He tried that a couple of times now. Neither went well. In both instances, he craved the freedom and danger he had left behind. Captain Willard did not know if it was just the war, or the combination of war and jungle that he missed. He felt comfortable in the jungle and could not imagine being in a war in an urban or city setting. He loved the palm trees and others kinds of green fauna and foliage, none of which he could name. It was beautiful yet at the same time foreboding. Both war and the jungle gave him an incredible adrenaline rush. Willard needed an element of danger in his life. He believed that without the army he would have been living a life of crime, and perhaps even be in jail now. Willard was not all that patriotic. He only pretended to be for the consumption of the commanding officers who could send him on the dangerous missions he so desperately needed.
Captain Willard had the kind of qualities the military looked for in a soldier; he was unflappable and remorseless. Willard was assigned to Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group, or MACV-SOG, soon after finishing Airborne Ranger school, where he was immediately utilized as an assassin, killing six people and promoted to captain before getting called in by General Corman and his crew in Nha Trang during the summer of 1969.
“I watched a snail…,” began the nasally audio taped voice of Colonel Kurtz, speaking from his Cambodian outpost, “…crawling along the edge of a straight razor, and surviving.”
Captain Willard did not quite understand what the mysterious man was trying to say, or why a United States Army general and his assistants were playing it for him. Willard wanted them to get to the point. He did not like abstractions, or when people tried to put things in philosophic terms. Willard liked things laid out and explained in a very straight-forward manner. He wanted his world to be clear-cut, and his military training only reinforced this.
“This is my dream. This is my nightmare.”
With fidgety fingers, Colonel Lucas shut off the tape player. He, as well as General Corman and the CIA agent, identified only as “Jerry”, wore looks of disgust on their faces as if Walter Kurtz had just burned an American flag on the steps of Capital Hill. Captain Willard looked around for clues on how he was supposed to react to these words, because he did not understand what he had just heard. General Corman would first wax poetically for a couple minutes, none of which Captain Willard understood either, mainly because his mind was exhausted from too much booze and lack of sleep, eventually concluding with the tell-tale words.
“And very obviously, he has gone insane.”
Again, Captain Willard looked around the room. Everyone was stone-faced. He sensed that they were waiting for his reaction, for him to agree with General Corman’s assessment.
“Yes, sir. Very much so, sir. Obviously insane,” replied Willard.
The irony was that Captain Willard had been questioning his own sanity, back in the states in-between missions, and the last few weeks spent drunk and out of his mind in a Saigon hotel room. His wife seemed like an alien to him. He could no longer relate to her, nor to civilian life. Initially, Willard could not wait to get back home to his wife after his first tour of duty in Vietnam. But he was happy only until he finished having sex with her his first night back. He no more than caught his breath when he realized that he could not stay there. Willard felt like a caged animal in their bed and immediately got up and drank a half bottle of whiskey before passing out on the couch. For the next several weeks he laid around hungover all day while staying out getting drunk all night. He rarely even talked to his wife and eventually she filed for divorce. Willard could not have cared less. He would have done it himself, but in reality, he no longer believed in its sanctity, nor its legal bind.
“Terminate the colonel’s command!”announced Colonel Lucas.
“Terminate the colonel?”replied Captain Willard, which was more of a confirmation of what he had just heard than it was a question.
They wanted him to kill an American, and an officer. Captain Willard could not believe his ears. But after the initial shock he settled into assassin mode and proceeded to carry out his task, “with extreme prejudice,” as the CIA operative advised him.
* * *
Captain Willard was lost in a kind of malaise in the hours after the death of Colonel Kurtz. The past, present and even the future all seemed to blur together. He could not get the words of Colonel Kurtz out of his head. For days he had in effect been forced to listen to the colonel speak about everything from his childhood, to his admiration for the Vietnamese, to his frustrations with the American war effort. After a while Captain Willard began to actually enjoy listening to the colonel speak on such a full range of issues. He was not given much food to eat and he never really slept all that well, putting him in a kind of hazy, meditative state, which the captain found conducive to listening to long monologues.
Captain Willard dutifully played the role of brainwashed, ignorant errand boy to that of Kurtz’s enlightened sage. Willard knew that the estranged colonel was trying to justify, perhaps to both of them, what he was doing there in the Cambodian jungle, and that he was preparing his would-be assassin to in effect set the record straight for all who were judging him.
Colonel Kurtz did in fact open up Willard’s eyes to a lot of things he had never thought about before, and now the captain saw the heads and other signs of brutality strewn along the riverbank, intended to intimidate and horrify all who encroached upon the Kurtz compound, in a different light. Coming back through, Willard would not see these things as a sign of the horrors to come in Colonel Kurtz’s compound, but rather a symptom of the maladies that lie back up river, in the direction of the American enterprise in South Vietnam, and beyond.
The following morning, Captain Willard slowly maneuvered the PBR away from the reed bed holding it up against the shore. As the two men approached the spot where they were ambushed on their way down river, the place where Clean was killed, Willard sped the boat up while Lance stood at the ready behind the big sixty-caliber machine gun. This time nothing would happen. Captain Willard slowed the boat’s engine. Memories of the three lost members of his crew began to run through Willard’s mind. He shuddered at the sight of Chief impaled with a spear, in the moment it happened, as well as now when thinking about it. Willard could not believe that in such a high-tech war, he would actually see a man killed by a spear. But then again, he used a machete to kill Colonel Kurtz. Willard always thought he would simply shoot the colonel, not quarter him with cold steel.
In addition to certain memories of their two-week trip down river en route to the Kurtz compound, Willard and Lance revisited many of the bizarre and horrible sights, as well as a few they did not notice the first time through. Some of them were simply the remnants of mechanical or operational mishaps, while others the end result of various small-scale skirmishes that had not yet been cleaned up, nor the dead bodies removed, and probably never will be considering the fact they are so deep in the Cambodian jungle, a place off-limits to all combatants, living or dead, in what the Americans were referring to as the Vietnam War. There were downed helicopters, American and Vietnamese corpses, and even a large cargo plane that was three-quarters submerged in the river. These kinds of things were common-place in any war zone, and no one in the crew was too shocked to see them. There were, however, certain sights and scenes not so common or reminiscent of a conventional war. For example, initially, on their way down the river and the closer they got to the Kurtz compound, Captain Willard and his crew saw signs of ritualistic slaughter and bodily desecration in the form of hundreds of human heads stuck on pikes, strewn about the river’s edge, as well as whole bodies, dead, bloodied and hanging from tree branches by ropes or vines. On the way into the Kurtz compound, the sight of the heads and bodies made Captain Willard understand that he was sent to assassinate a madman more than hearing Kurtz’s voice on audio tape ever could. However, having listened to the colonel talk for hours on-end in person, and now heading back in the direction from whence he came, Willard felt as if these same heads and bodies were portending a madness coming from up river as well.
Monday, August 12, 2019
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