War is Hell: The brutal ‘Apocalypse Now’ scene based on actual events
War is hell. Apocalypse Now did a better job of portraying that than most movies. In fact, the production became a battleground of its own. The 16-month shoot was initially intended to conclude in just six weeks, but it was more than mere delays that blighted Francis Ford Coppola’s masterful Vietnam War odyssey.
Throughout the course of the filming, Martin Sheen almost died twice, drugs ran rampant on-set, stars were fired, Marlon Brando turned up overweight and underprepared, the whole crew were temporarily arrested after it turned out apparent prop corpses had actually been dug up from local graves, storms battered the studio camps, and actual war broke out surrounding the sets in the Philippines.
The only factor that stopped the plug from being pulled on the whole thing was Coppola’s steely determination to make it perfectly clear that war is, indeed, hell—a truth that veterans like Kurt Vonnegut had claimed movies sorely missed by various degrees of glorifying grotesqueness over the years. So, the director not only looked to channel The Heart of Darkness, the impressionist Joseph Conrad novel from 1899, into his war narrative but also dropped in a few scenes that actually unfurled in the fields of Vietnam.
One of these just so happens to be among the most harrowing in the entire bloody movie. Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore, expertly played by Robert Duvall, parades around a buzzing battlefield as though he is protected by immortality. All around him, hellish upheaval unfurls. Then, he happens upon the curious sight of a few of his men surrounding an injured Viet Cong fighter. He sternly inquires about the situation.
The men callously inform him that the man is badly injured. He has been fighting for days, is barely alive, and pleading for water. Kilgore shoves his men around, scorning them, and immediately demands that someone hands him his own canteen. Kilgore then shares his water with the enemy fighter and proclaims, “Any man brave enough to fight with his guts strapped to him can drink from my canteen any day.”
As it happens, the real line was, “Any soldier who can fight for three days with his insides out can drink from my canteen any time!” Photojournalist Philip Jones Griffiths captured the real incident. In the middle of the ‘Batlle of Saigon,’ the experienced snapper happened upon a sight that portrayed the many multitudes of war.
The caption with which he subsequently logged this image tells its own story. It read: “VIETNAM. The battle for Saigon. American GI’s often showed compassion toward the Vietcong. This sprang from a soldierly admiration for their dedication and bravery, qualities difficult to discern in the average government soldier. This VC had fought for three days with his intestines in a cooking bowl strapped onto his stomach. 1968.”
Griffiths then reported that the soldier uttered the famed line as he cradled the dying man’s head. At that moment, they were not opposing sides but the same flesh and blood cast into the same diabolical mess, attempting to help each other get through it. The fidelity to such details is what makes Apocalypse Now a startling masterpiece.
