Quote 3
Willard: “It
was the way we had over here of living with ourselves. We’d cut
them in half with a machine gun and give them a Band-Aid. It was
a lie—and the more I saw of them, the more I hated lies.”
Willard narrates these words after fatally
shooting the Vietnamese peasant woman on the sampan. With this act,
he makes himself complicit in the atrocities of war and aligns himself
more closely with Kurtz. In his narration, Willard details the hypocrisy
of the U.S. military: just before Willard shoots the woman, Clean
senselessly and without provocation opens fire on Vietnamese peasants. Although
Clean kills several innocent civilians with no consequences, Chief
makes no mention of it but instead makes a big deal of following
orders by trying to take the woman to a nearby hospital. Willard
shoots her, because he does not want to waste more time and because
he reasons that she likely would have died before receiving medical
attention anyway. After all, the other peasants have been killed,
so why spare this woman’s life when it interferes with his mission?
Willard’s action and subsequent reflection upon it possess a disturbing
logic that makes sense only in the morally skewed frame of war.
Yet, although his crew members are also complicit in the atrocity,
they see him differently after the shooting. Whether or not U.S.
military protocol makes sense, it’s the only way they know how to
live. Willard, on the other hand, has breached the code, and the
other soldiers cannot condone such a breach. Willard’s Kurtzlike
transformation accelerates as a result of this incident.
