Movie Of The Vietnam Experience example essay topic

Apocalypse Now is a movie of the Vietnam experience. Not as much the war as the experience, the thing that made this war personal for each soldier. US Army Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) receives orders to infiltrate renegade special forces Colonel Kurtz's troops and terminate his command. "Terminate with extreme prejudice". Reports tell of Kurtz having gone insane, and using "unsound" methods while running his own private army in the jungle in Cambodia.

Willard makes his way to Kurtz with the help of a patrol boat and its diverse crew, and a manic commander. War -- any war -- is a traumatic experience. It puts a man's sanity to the test. Emotions run unbelievably high, up to its extents and beyond.

The undeniable fear, hatred, loss, guilt. Adrenaline courses through your body, messes with the mind. The human body wasn't meant to experience such intense and forceful emotions all at once. There's no control over it and you have no better options anyway, just a differing of horrifying situations. There's no starting over. There's no escape -- except for one.

What to do? What can you do? What are you doing there? Can you do it? Who or what are you fighting? Why you?

Why? Why? SYSTEM OVERLOAD. Things aren't the same anymore, and won't ever be again.

Some people became homicidal, some suicidal, some retreated into themselves, and some saw things clearer than before. Lance retreated into himself. He became a dazed and childlike self. He was still a kid, really. He wants to surf, to watch television, to socialize with girls.

Before the war that's who he was. Innocent Lance, not Lance Johnson, Soldier. When he couldn't handle it anymore he hid in himself and embraced his innocence, his days of happiness. In one scene a small boat of Vietnamese are all shot out of panic when the girl tries to protect something in a basket, which turns out to be a puppy.

The puppy was adopted by Lance as his symbol of innocence. Another theme in this movie was morals. When your day-to-day situation become drastic, moral norms change. In war, killing is no longer murder, but instead a casualty of war. Kurtz believed that in order to survive you " ve got to act without moral judgment. The "good choices" become impossible.

There are now only lesser degrees of evil, and decisions that will get the job done quickly and efficiently. In war there can be little kindness, little pity. Brutal wars such as Vietnam requires you to forget the ethics that you " ve been taught; resort now to effective solutions. When you come down to it, it's all just a point of view.

Evil is a point of view. There is life, and there is death, and there is what you have to do to keep you and your own alive. The movie made me want to annihilate the entire world just to prevent anything like this from happening. Movies like this one also make me annoyed when I hear people talking about how war is good; they have all the wrong reasons for it. It was a good movie, but not good to watch at 3 a.m. in the morning.