Watching Apocalypse
Now reveals the intense and almost incomprehensible nature of the soldiers.
Reading about the unending sleep/wake cycles, the constant flashbacks, the
random, domestic memory triggers from Tim O’Brien is one thing, but watching
these play out on film takes it to another level of reality. Apocalypse Now shows how the high
intensity and the extreme danger of war really wreaks havoc on a person’s mind.
When the soldiers in the boat left to get mangoes, something that should have
been handled with care and stealth ( the sight of the tiger ) caused that
soldier to have a mental breakdown. When he returned to the boat with his
commanding officer, he was screaming that he was never leaving the boat. There are
many problems with this declaration, but to his irrational mind this was the
ONLY solution. This movie really shows how someone’s mind can just snap at any
moment. It reveals how the perception of each viewer can differ in extremes;
one person can have no reaction while another can have his entire life
shattered.
The some shared
themes shared by O’Brien and Komenyaka are how the common civilian can never
understand all that is or was war and Vietnam. The older woman in O’Brien’s
story didn’t like how Rat Kiley decimated the baby water buffalo. The mom in
Komenyaka’s poem, Facing It, had no
respect for the terrible majesty of the wall as she absently brushed her son’s
hair. These women did not understand that this war was the tragedy that maimed
these veterans’ lives. The small triggers that bring on the remembrance of war
happens across all three mediums. The fact that these men cannot separate their
present from their pasts is, to me, the most devastating effect of the war.
Their lives are forever laced with battles that are happening and no longer happening
at the same time.
I absolutely agree that that the shared theme in Tim O'Brien's and Komenyaka's works is that the average person/civilian will never truly understand or feel what war does to a person, even after the fact. It seems that to veterans, the war is everywhere they go, and in everything they see.
ReplyDeleteThe incident with the tiger certainly reveals how a person can be desensitized to terror and violence. Chef and the other boys of the PBR retain a certain amount of their youth and naïveté, while Willard bears the gravity of his more prolonged experience in Vietnam. Thus, while Chef perhaps "ought to" have acted with more restraint, I found it even more unsettling that Willard was hardly jarred by the encounter. Rather than fear, his face reveals something more like exhilaration after the chase. Chef is traumatized because the attack was traumatic; Willard is unaffected because he's had other traumas to bear. This film illustrates how the oppressive proximity to terror and death inevitably fuels an insatiable hunger for barbarism. Kurtz's experiences are so nightmarish that he has devolved into a nightmare himself, and Willard in turn acts in accordance with his inner demons. Chef, however reckless, reacted as a human being, not as war machine.
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