I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn’t find one of ’em, not one stinkin' dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like victory.
The most famous lines from Apocalypse Now, are the first and last sentences shown above in context, were spoken by Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) at the end of an intense battle scene.
This is how Jacob Shelton, a Los Angeles based writer, describes the Kilgore character in a February, 2019 essay on the Groovy History website:
But Kilgore, as protagonist and narrator Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) observes, has that x-factor that makes some men thrive in the midst of the chaos of Vietnam. "He was just one of those guys with that weird light around him," Willard tells us. "He just knew he wasn't gonna get so much as a scratch here." While Kilgore's fondness for the death-dealing combustible shocks us, his bulletproof competence and confidence inspires at least a bit of envy.
That's why we say it when we wake up with chaos swarming all around, a day of hell laid out before us. We want to get the day's job done without sweating the existential threats crashing all around us -- we summon our own inner Kilgore: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning. ... It smells like victory."
Time Magazine called the movie as “one of the most important and celebrated movies about the Vietnam War ever made, but also a timeless—and grim and sweeping and psychedelic—meditation on the depths to which humans can sink.”
In 1999 Roger Ebert described the lessons that the Marlon Brando character Col. Kutz who “created a jungle sanctuary upriver inside enemy territory, and rules Montagnard tribesmen as his private army” learned from trying to defeat the Viet Cong:
He tells Willard about a day when his Special Forces men inoculated the children of a village against polio: "This old man came running after us and he was crying, he couldn't see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile, a pile of little arms. . . .
"What Kurtz learned is that the Viet Cong were willing to go to greater lengths to win: "Then I realized they were stronger than we. They have the strength, the strength to do that. If I had 10 divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgment." This is the "horror" that Kurtz has found, and it threatens to envelop Willard, too.
The whole movie is a journey toward Willard's understanding of how Kurtz, one of the Army's best soldiers, penetrated the reality of war to such a depth that he could not look any longer without madness and despair.
Donald Trump, in his delusional demented mind, came up with his versions of napalm: Lysol, light, and heat or, on the other hand, hydroxychloroquine (which he just stopped taking) for Covid-19 .
Who knows, perhaps he was somehow channeling a Kilgore-like fictional character, or a George Patton, envisioning a military strike like the napalm attack incinerating the enemy (depicted in the video above) and burning the hell out of Covid-19
In one way Trump would love to be able to take credit for saving the world from Covid-19, but really with the reality of his low standing in the polls finally sinking in what he really wants to do is lavish praise on himself for saving the members of his base. After all, neither Trump nor his base gives two shits about what happens to anyone not wearing the MAGA hat, let alone to them damn foreigners.
There’s no way that Trump has the capacity to come even close to understanding the message of Apocalypse Now which Col. Kutz learned.
For him the is no “we” in we are at war with the virus. Trump believes he is at war with the virus.
Haven’t seen the movie or want to watch it again:
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