Background Information
ApocalypseNow is a 1979 American epic war film directed,produced and co-written by Francis Ford Coppola. It was co-written by John Milius withnarration written by Michael Herr. It stars Marlon Brando,Robert Duvall, Martin Sheen, Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Sam Bottoms, Larry Fishburne, and Dennis Hopper. The screenplay,written by Milius, adapts the story of Joseph Conrad's novella Heart ofDarkness changingits setting from late 1800'sCongoto the Vietnam War. It draws from Herr's Dispatches, and Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972). The film revolves around CaptainBenjamin L. Willard (Sheen) on a secret mission to assassinate Colonel Kurtz, a renegade whois presumed insane.
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War (Vietnamese: Chiến tranhViệt Nam),also known as the Second Indochina War, and known in Vietnam as Resistance War Against America (Vietnamese: Kháng chiếnchống Mỹ) orsimply the American War, was a war that occurredin Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall ofSaigon on 30 April1975. It was the second of the IndochinaWars and wasofficially fought between North Vietnamandthe government of South Vietnam.The North Vietnamese army was supported by the Soviet Union,Chinaand other communist allies and the SouthVietnamese army was supported by theUnited States,South Korea,Australia,Thailandandother anti-communist allies. Thewar is therefore considered a Cold War-era proxy war.
The Viet Cong (also known as the National LiberationFront, or NLF), a South Vietnamese communist common front aided by the North, fought a guerrilla war against anti-communist forces in theregion, while the People's Army of Vietnam, also known asthe North Vietnamese Army (NVA), engaged in more conventional warfare, at times committinglarge units to battle. As the war continued, the military actions of the VietCong decreased as the role and engagement of the NVA grew. U.S. and SouthVietnamese forces relied on airsuperiority andoverwhelming firepower to conduct search and destroy operations, involving ground forces, artillery,and airstrikes.In the course of the war, theU.S.conducted a large-scale strategicbombing campaignagainstNorth Vietnam.
The North Vietnamesegovernment and the Viet Cong were fighting to reunifyVietnam. Theyviewed the conflict as a colonial waranda continuation of the First Indochina War against forces fromFranceand later on theUnited States.TheU.S.government viewedits involvement in the war as a way to prevent a communist takeover ofSouth Vietnam.This was part of the domino theory of a wider containment policy, with the stated aim ofstopping the spread of communism worldwide.
Beginning in 1950, American militaryadvisors arrived inwhat was then FrenchIndochina. U.S.involvement escalated in the early 1960s, with troop levels tripling in 1961and again in 1962. U.S.involvement escalated further following the1964Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which aU.S.destroyer clashed with North Vietnamesefast attack craft, which was followed by the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave theU.S.president authorization to increaseU.S.militarypresence. RegularU.S.combat units were deployed beginning in 1965.Operations crossed international borders: bordering areas ofLaosandCambodiawere heavily bombed byU.S.forces as American involvement in the war peaked in 1968, the same year thatthe communist side launched the Tet Offensive.The Tet Offensive failed in its goal of overthrowing the South Vietnamesegovernment, but became the turning point in the war, as it persuaded a largesegment of theU.S.population that its government's claims of progress toward winning the war wereillusory despite many years of massiveU.S.military aid toSouth Vietnam.
Gradual withdrawal ofU.S.groundforces began as part of "Vietnamization",which aimed to end American involvement in the war while transferring the taskof fighting the communists to the South Vietnamese themselves. Despite the Paris Peace Accord, which was signed by allparties in January 1973, the fighting continued. In theU.S.and theWestern world, a large anti-VietnamWar movement developedas part of a larger counterculture. The war changed thedynamics between the Easternand Western Blocs,and altered North–South relations.
DirectU.S.militaryinvolvement ended on 15 August 1973. Thecapture ofSaigon by the NorthVietnamese Army in April 1975 marked the end of the war, and North andSouth Vietnamwere reunified the following year. The war exacted a huge human cost in termsof fatalities (see Vietnam War casualties). Estimates of thenumber of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed vary from 966,000 to 3.8 million. Some 240,000–300,000Cambodians, 20,000–62,000 Laotians, and 58,220U.S.service members also died inthe conflict, and a further 1,626 remain missing in action.