Colonal Kurtz (Final)

Colonel Kurtz is a character in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Coppola. He plays the part of an American colonel in the Vietnam War, driven insane by combat to the point that he has gone AWOL and taken command of a group of natives. These native people worship him and fight under him so vehemently that the American and Vietcong forces will not go near his "territory". 
In the movie, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is ordered to take down Kurtz by any means necessary. The story follows his trek through Vietnam, as the conflict grows more and more out of hand the farther into the jungle he goes. At the front lines, leadership is almost nonexistent, and battle between forces is chaotic at best. Graphic scenes of war and a few sub-plot elements ensue during his journey, but eventually he reaches the fortress Kurtz has established. 
Willard is soon taken captive and his team killed. Kurtz tells him his story of how he became involved in the war, and his steady decline into madness, which he describes as a loss of self-control to the point where he believes that senseless killing and brutality is the only way to win the war. Willard realizes that Kurtz wants to be killed, because he cannot control his own madness. In the end, Willard kills Kurtz with a machete, and the native forces try to take Willard as their new leader, but he refuses and leaves, which signals the end of the film.
War in general is a great interest of mine, and I spend much of my free time watching films and reading books on the subject. Apocalypse Now is an extremely dramatisized film, but at some points it very much shows the mindset and the environment of Vietnam during the war. I hadn’t seen the film before reading Calamity Physics, but watched it after I did the original post on the character of Kurtz, and liked it. The fictional mind of Colonel Kurtz is an exaggerated but acceptable view of what the rigors of jungle warfare are capable of doing to the human psyche.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Kurtz