boling

Slide Presentation

• DOMINO THEORY – one country falls to communism, we all fall to communism

  • Used as justification for US involvement in foreign affairs

• Ngo Dinh Diem (anti-commie) – American influence 

  • dictator previously selected by France

  • Promised free elections never held 

  • America stepping in where France had left off – imperialism – Eisenhower didn't want to lose flow of natural resources (tin & tungsten)

• LBJ – turned the war into one for “freedom for humanity”

  • Initially: didn’t want to send American boys to do what “asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”

  • Tonkin Gulf Incident – used as justification to increase troop numbers (many lies)

• SURPRISE TET OFFENSIVE

  • Well-coordinated VC attacks across South Vietnam – made US govt & military look incompetent & dishonest

  • “Light at the end of the tunnel”

  • Hurt American confidence in the war at home

• MY LAI MASSACRE – dehumanization of Vietnamese

  • Hundreds of women, children, elderly – brutally murdered/mutilated – evidence of rape & abuse

  • Only one lieutenant charged & convicted of murder, served 3 years, pardoned by Nixon

• 1968 – the worst year

  • Assassinations: Robert Kennedy & MLK

  • Americans realize war cannot be won – Tet Offensive

  • Protests widespread & intensified

    • Democratic Party Convention – huge demonstration outside → police riot, dozens brutally beaten & arrested

• COUNTER ARGUMENTS

  • America could have won the Vietnam War if the military had been allowed to invade North Vietnam. 

    • We learned from the Korean War not to – China joined when the US invaded N. Korea

  • Popular opinion about the war changed not because of protests, but because we could not or would not win it. 

    • Military stalemates & political decisions played a role, BUT, public protests shaped American perception. The anti-war movement amplified skepticism, influenced media coverage, and pressured politicians. Visible dissent (college campus protests, draft card burnings) galvanized national debate, forced the war’s moral and strategic issues into public consciousness

  • As the U.S. economy weakened, the American public grew tired of supporting an expensive foreign war that two presidents had lied about.

    • Economic concerns & political distrust were amplified by the anti-war movement & investigative journalism. The public’s awareness of presidential deception (Pentagon Papers) exposed & emphasized through protests and media pressure. Protesters linked economic grievances (inflation, spending cuts at home) with the war effort—policy AND moral issue. Resistance movements challenged the justification for the war, not just cost, pushed Americans to question Cold War logic.

• VIETNAM WAR MEMORIAL

  • Paid for by families/relatives that had lost someone in the war

  • Encourages viewers to touch it

  • In order – grows in order of death toll (starts smaller and gets larger)

Apocalypse Now

• RATIONALITY/IRRATIONALITY IN CINEMATIC TECHNIQUES

  • reflected in alternating light/dark in shots of Kurt, embodying literally his shifting between the “light” (rational) and the “dark” (irrational/savage) side

• THE RIVER JOURNEY

  • back to primitive society, pagan gods, religious imagery and symbols – reflected a journey to irrationality, to hell

  • A journey into the unconscious–an area in the mind with deep irrational drives, and into achieving the heart of darkness—moral corruption, capacity for evil (to kill with no emotion)

  • Idea of wanting to become a god – Kurtz treated like a pagan god, because associated w sacrifice, blood, death

  • Army sacrifices the kurt and the ppl sacrifice the calf

  • The jungle = the unconscious mind – The river = the journey inward – Kurtz = the confrontation with the “self” stripped of illusion

• LANCE

  •  drugged constantly, represents a childlike innocence & is no threat to anyone is Kurtz’s compound (a childlike detachment – afraid, would escape through drugs, didn’t know what was going on really, so not a threat)

  • Surfer guy – last one standing with willard in the jungle

• KURTZ BALANCING TWO SIDES

  •  unsuccessfully tries to find a balance between being a passionate, intelligent human being and the wild savagery of the crazed killer. (As Kurtz recognizes this in himself, he sees that Willard can balance the two extremes.)

  • Intention to end the war, but with brutal methods, ending up losing himself – willard understands his horror, but hasn't yet been broken yet by it or taken by either side yet

• “The man is clear in his mind, but his soul is mad.” The photojournalist’s summation of Kurtz’s split between rational and irrational.

  • Idea that they moved into more primitive tendencies – trauma creates a fight or flight response in the amygdala of the brain – becomes a struggle for survival – mind is clear, trying to respond (survive), souls gone mad through trauma

  • Kurtz – want to end war, but lost himself 

  • Poetry readings and monologues – clear, philosophical, calm, but drenched in horror

  • His madness comes from seeing the war stripped of delusion (clear), not delusions

• THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE 

  • Kill or be killed – no politics

  • Willard: “I’d never seen a man so broken up and torn apart” (Snail/razor image)

  • “Even the jungle wanted him dead, and that’s really who he took his orders from anyway.”

• “DROP THE BOMB, EXTERMINATE THEM ALL.”

  • after willard kills kurtz he reads typed manuscript: represents order, intellect, and rationality

  • Red scrawl: emotional, impulsive, almost frenzied — violently contradicts: irrational, emotional, and extreme, revealing how far Kurtz has descended into madness.

  • In war, the line between civilization and savagery, reason and madness, is razor-thin – hence snail and razor scene

• “MAKING FRIENDS WITH HORROR.”

  • Making friends with horror to be able to kill with no emotion, to be unaffected by horror

  • Kurtz wanted men who had moral rationality, but could kill without feeling/passion/judgement

  • To win, cannot be afraid – Kurtz applauds and acknowledges Viet Cong in their savagery/will to survive

On the Rainy River – diction, paradox, irony, simile/metaphor

• PARADOX EXAMPLES

  • “I was a coward. I went to the war.”

  • “I would go to the war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to.” 

  • “I would not swim away from my hometown and my country and my life. I would not be brave. “

• “THE SIGHT OF BLOOD MAKES ME QUEASY.”

  • Irony: meat packing plant job – watergun blood clots off pigs

• Does O’Brien plan his escape to Canada? What triggers his departure? Why does he spend time describing objects and appliances in his house?

  • Not planned, more impulsive, but thought about it for a while

  • He “cracked”

  • Trying to remember his old life

• HOW THE OLD MAN SAVED THE NARRATOR

  • Didn’t ask questions, just was a presence 

  • Gave him time to reflect about his dilemma in a safe space

• SURREALISM

  • conflicted about jumping off the boat to Canada, or going back to fight in the war 

  • He hallucinates his past self, his relatives, his township, Abraham Lincoln, people from his past and future 

  • “A hallucination, I suppose, but it was as real as anything I would ever feel.”

• “I WAS A COWARD, I WENT TO THE WAR.”

  • he went out of fear: fear of shame, judgment, and rejection by his family, friends, and country

  • true courage would’ve been following his conscience and fleeing to Canada to avoid fighting in a war he believed was morally wrong.

  • CONNECTIONS: “Shooting an Elephant” – shot the elephant because embarrassed not to – felt pressured by the locals (the victims of imperialism)

A Rumor of War

Caputo reflects on the disillusionment of young American soldiers who entered the Vietnam War with patriotic idealism, only to be hardened by its brutality, moral ambiguity, and psychological toll. The memoir explores themes of lost innocence, the dehumanizing effects of war, and the complex nature of violence—showing how ordinary men, shaped by circumstance and survival, could become capable of extraordinary cruelty. Ultimately, Caputo suggests that war strips away illusions and exposes the fragile boundaries of morality under extreme pressure.

• MISSIONARY IDEALISM

  • He and other young Americans were going to Vietnam to do something noble—defend freedom, defeat evil, spread democracy.

  • thought they were serving a righteous cause (missionaries spreading faith) — War was not just political, but moral & sacred

  • Shift from idealism to disillusionment & a fight for basic survival – Faced a brutal, confusing war where the enemy was hard to identify, victories were unclear, and friends died for seemingly nothing. 

  • Also no true knowledge of the war, Kennedy urging them to “ask what you can do for your country”

• MANIC ECSTASY

  • “Manic ecstasy” combines joy and chaos, which seems strange when describing war. 

  • the intense emotional release soldiers felt during combat after weeks of tension and fear. 

  • The war warped their emotions—making even violence feel like relief or excitement in contrast to constant dread.

• AMERICA'S CHANGING VIEW OF VIETNAM WAR

  • Many Americans at home also grew skeptical of the war’s purpose, even as the government continued to send troops—national loss of confidence in the war’s morality and effectiveness.

• VIETNAM WAR’S DIFFERENCE

  • confusing, guerrilla-style conflict without clear battles or victories—unlike World War II’s dramatic, decisive campaigns. 

  • fought in jungles with ambushes, booby traps, and no front lines

  • Soldiers felt stuck in a cycle of waiting and random violence, while citizens back home couldn’t easily understand or support a war without progress, clear goals, or a visible enemy

• YOUNG SHOULDERS, OLD HEADS

  • They were still physically young, but emotionally and mentally aged by trauma. They returned home changed—older than their years–lost innocence

  • Peculiar creatures: come back different due to traumas they don’t understand, experience alienation and feel not the same (can’t fit back into society due to experiencing horrors)

• WHY DID AMERICAN SOLDIERS ACT THAT WAY?

• racist theory: that American soldiers killed Vietnamese civilians because they saw Asians as less than human. 

• frontier-heritage theory: American culture has always glorified violence, and war gave soldiers an outlet. 

• Caputo acknowledges some truth in both but rejects them as oversimplified. He argues that the real cause was the brutal environment of the war, which stripped men of morality and mercy. 

  • His argument is convincing because it focuses on human psychology under extreme stress, showing how ordinary people can change when pushed beyond their limits – and he has firsthand experience