How we cite our quotes: All quotations are from Apocalypse Now.
Quote #4
WILLARD: (reading) "There has been a new development regarding your mission which we must now communicate to you. Months ago a man was ordered on a mission which was identical to yours. We have reason to believe that he is now operating with Kurtz. Saigon was carrying him MIA for his family's sake. They assumed he was dead. Then they intercepted a letter he tried to send his wife: SELL THE HOUSE. SELL THE CAR. SELL THE KIDS. FIND SOMEONE ELSE. FORGET IT. I'M NEVER COMING BACK. FORGET IT."
Captain Richard Colby—he was with Kurtz.
Captain Colby's apparently drunk the Kool-Aid. He saw something in the jungle and in Kurtz that made him throw his life away. When Willard sees the man he assumes is Colby, he looks emotionally dead, expressionless. He looks just like the kind of man Kurtz wants: one who can kill without emotion or judgment.
Quote #5
WILLARD: Could we, uh...talk to Colonel Kurtz?
PHOTOJOURNALIST: Hey, man, you don't talk to the Colonel. You listen to him. The man's enlarged my mind. He's a poet warrior in the classic sense. I mean sometimes he'll...uh...well, you'll say "hello" to him, right? And he'll just walk right by you. He won't even notice you. And suddenly he'll grab you, and he'll throw you in a corner, and he'll say, "Do you know that 'if' is the middle word in life? 'If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you' ...I mean I'm...no, I can't...I'm a little man, I'm a little man, he's...he's a great man! 'I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas...'"
We're guessing that this babbling photojournalist is pretty hopped up on some kind of jungle pharmaceuticals, but being a witness to Kurtz's brutal little community in the jungle probably hasn't helped much. The lines beginning with "If you can keep your head" and "I should have been a pair of ragged claws" are from Rudyard Kipling's "If" and T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," respectively. As we learn, Kurtz is a huge poetry fan.
Quote #6
WILLARD: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.
KURTZ: Are my methods unsound?
WILLARD: I don't see any method at all, sir.
Kurtz has gone off the deep end, into a world where there are no rules. Just the rein of brutality and ruthlessness. Or has he? This is one of the film's central questions. Kurtz's actions seem completely unhinged, but he has a very clear idea of why he's doing what he's doing. Willard sees no method, but Kurtz later lays it out in detail.