I have always been a big fan of the film Apocalypse Now, so I was pleasantly surprised when I came across an off-hand remark about the adventures of Col. John Stockman in Col. Hal Moore’s book, We Were Soldier’s Once...And Young. Hal Moore was a battalion commander in one of the original helicopter-borne units in Vietnam, the First Cavalry Division. The First Cavalry pioneered airmobile tactics and Moore’s book was adapted into a very good war movie starring Mel Gibson in 2002.
Col. John Stockman commanded another battalion in the First Cavalry, the First Battalion, 9th Cavalry, otherwise known as the first of the ninth. Stockman was known as an unconventional loose cannon by the brass, but who was loved by ‘his boys’ for dramatic gestures such as introducing Civil War era paraphernalia into his unit, like trumpets and Union cavalry hats. Sounds familiar? It should, if you have seen Apocalypse Now.
So, I thought: are there any other characters in the movie based on real-life interesting people? It turns out there are.
Take Col Walter E. Kurtz, played by Marlin Brando. He was obviously based on the literary character Kurtz, from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. But it turns out he was also based on an historical character as well: Tony Poe. Tony Poe was a Marine veteran of Iwo Jima. After the war, he joined the CIA and organized Korean refugees for sabotage work behind enemy lines in the Korean War. From there, he did similar, behind-the-front-lines work in Burma, Indonesia, and Laos, where, according to Wikipedia:
“He paid Hmong fighters to bring him the ears of dead enemy soldiers... He dropped severed heads onto enemy locations twice in a grisly form of psy-ops. Although his orders were only to train forces, he also went into battle with them and was wounded several times by shrapnel.”
After Vietnam, he went native, as the British used to say, and married a Hmong woman with whom he lived in Thailand until 1990. When he moved back to the States he helped Hmong war veterans settle in the US. What an interesting guy!
The trouble is, as I read further, both Poe and Coppola denied that he was the basis of Kurtz, despite the obvious similarities. Coppola claimed Kurtz was inspired by Special Forces Col. Robert Rheault, who was considered a brilliant officer by everybody who knew him and whose predicted rise to the top ranks of the Pentagon was halted when he was charged with murdering a South Vietnamese double agent while a green beret in Nam. More similarities and another interesting character.
And the interesting real-life characters don’t stop there. Take the photojournalist portrayed by Dennis Hopper. Again, he is obviously based on another literary character from Heart of Darkness, this time the Harlequin. But again, he was also based on an historical character: Sean Flynn, actor Errol Flynn’s son! In addition to being the son of a famous Hollywood actor and starring in a movie at age 15, he was a maniac, freelance photojournalist who went to Vietnam on his own initiative and spent a lot of time on the front lines (and behind it), travelling with the 101st Airborne Division and the Special Forces. He went missing while travelling by motorcycle in Cambodia in 1970. He was never heard from again and his remains have never been found.
After reading all this, it occurred to me that Stockman, Poe, Rheault and Flynn were interesting men in their own right who deserved far more than to be remembered by history as movie caricatures (though Robert Duvall and Dennis Hopper did superb jobs caricaturing them). All of them inspire films of their own that could be marketed as quasi-spin-offs of Apocalypse Now.
Great idea or what!
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