ARMY OF SHADOWS [FrenCH: L’ARMÉE DES OMBRES] 11
Capt. Willard and Col. Kurtz are based on the central characters in Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness but Coppola has admitted that Kurtz was also loosely based on
Col. Robert B. Rheault (1925–2013), 5th Special Forces Group, whose 1969 arrest
over the murder of suspected double agent Thai Khac Chuyen in Nha Trang gen-
erated a scandal known as the “Green Beret Affair.” The Nùng [Viet nam ese for
“Hot”] River is fictional but seems to correspond to either the Tonle- Sap River or
the Mekong River (or its tributary, the Bassac River). These are the only rivers that
run though Cambodia into Vietnam before they empty into the South China Sea in
South Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. The Viet Cong– held village at “Charlie’s Point”
would therefore have to be located in the Delta, an area controlled by Army of the
Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and U.S. forces, which would preclude its existence
by definition. The U.S. base supply depot at Hau Phat is also fictional, as is the Lo
Dung Bridge. As for the film’s depiction of U.S. military operations in Vietnam,
combat veteran Reginald “Malik” Edwards (Pfc., U.S. Marines) delivered a scath-
ing judgment on the film’s gross historical inaccuracies in Wallace Terry’s Bloods:
An Oral History of the Vietnam War (1984): “Apocalypse Now didn’t tell the truth. It
wasn’t real. I guess it was a great thing for the country to get off on, but it didn’t
remind me of anything I saw. I can’t understand how you would have a bridge lit
up like a Christmas tree. A USO show at night? Guys attacking the women on
stage. That made no sense. I never saw us reach a point where no one was in
charge of a unit... If you don’t know anything you know the chain of command.
And the he li cop ter attack on the village? F—in’ ridicu lous. You couldn’t hear
music coming out of a he li cop ter. And attacking a beach in he li cop ters was just
out of the question. The planes and napalm would go in first. Then, the he li cop-
ters would be eased in after the fact... By making us look insane the people who
made that movie [ were] somehow relieving themselves of what they asked us to
do over there. But we were not insane... We were not ignorant. We knew what
we were doing. I mean, we were crazy but it’s built into the culture.” Coppola and
Milius were well intentioned in trying to characterize the Vietnam War as insan-
ity, but as Edwards rightly notes, the filmmakers erroneously characterize the
combatants themselves— not their overlords—as epitomizing the geopo liti cal
psychosis that was Vietnam: simple- minded hyperbole that makes for gripping
allegorical cinema but obscures deeper truths regarding American imperialism
and cultural hubris.
ARMY OF SHADOWS [FRENCH: L’ARMÉE DES
OMBRES] (1969)
Synopsis
Army of Shadows is a French film directed by Jean- Pierre Melville that is a cine-
matic adaptation of Joseph Kessel’s 1943 book of the same title, which blends Kes-
sel’s own experiences as a member of the French Re sis tance (called the Maquis in
rural areas) with fictionalized material. The film follows a small group of heroic
Re sis tance fighters on and between covert hit- and- run missions as they attempt to
evade the capture and likely execution by the Germans.