Although he hit the jungle as an officer and came from a privileged background, he had enough sense to listen to his enlisted men's tactical advice for a good long while before really assuming command.
This, he told me, is how he managed to stay alive.
He was a very conservative fellow but in a non ideological way (he routinely praised Marx's insights long before it was fashionable for the likes of “Economist” writers to do so). Perhaps this is why he became close to the only two lefties in his class, me and my friend C, a young man who'd volunteered to carry an AK47 on a school bus in Nicaragua for a year during the U.S.'s proxy terror war against the Nicaraguan people.
He once told us that unlike his other students, who were bright and sunny and full of youthful cheer about a boundless future, the two of us saw “the wolf's teeth behind smiling faces.” Well, I guess so. The idea of swift death via gunfire was not unknown to me and C, well C didn't want to talk about all that he saw or did in Nicaragua.
...
I don't remember how this came up but I asked him, one evening in a school lounge, for his opinion about pop culture treatments of the war. You know, the TV shows of my kid years that featured wild eyed Vietnam vets in cam jackets taking hostages in Midwestern banks; films such as “Platoon”, “Deer Hunter” and so on.
He took a good long breath and looked off somewhere. I could tell he was going to answer – he was the kind of man who would say, Bartleby-like, 'I don't want to do that', if he wasn't going to answer and he didn't say that.
So there was going to be an answer.
“Well,” he said “only Apocalypse Now.”
It was Kurtz's going “off the ranch” that stayed with him about that film.
“Never get out of the boat. Absolutely god damn right. Unless you were goin' all the way”
Sheen's character says that at some point as a whispered voice over. Dr. G. quoted it to me as we sat in a student lounge surrounded by laughing kids. “You see young man,” he said “there are layers and layers of bad action, okay? At one layer there's just shooting at people and fighting in a war. Some of the time you might even mean well but terrible things seem to keep right on the fuck happening because bullets don't care. And then there's a deeper layer, the Kurtz layer. That's when you leave the whole thing – the whole structure – in the dust and become something else...crazy, dangerous to everyone but your family and your family is now your fellow crazies not the folks you left behind. You've gone 'all the way' see?
And the fact that Coppola put that shit on film blew me the hell away when I first saw it. Still does.”
I never could view “Apocalypse Now” or Dr. G. in the same way after that little chat. He was telling me something that night: I've done some terrible things; I've seen some terrible things. I understand how terrible things happen.
...
When I read about these Marines in Haditha (what should we call them, feral? I don't know) I think about Dr. G (who's still alive and well – I just sent him an email to ask for his thoughts) and Coppola and Sheen's raspy voice warning about going “all the way”.
A great whirlpool of madness.
.d.
--------- Necessitas ultimum et maximum telum est.
Livy