famous last words???

Below is the 45 minute long monologue Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando) gave upon his mortal wounding by Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen). Brando stated it was one of the best performances of his career.

It never made it to the final cut.

...Oh, the horror! The horror....

(Deep breathes)

...I...I...I had...I had immense plans. I was on the threshold of great things. And what you hacked here to the ground like a tree is not the end of it. No, you've only shaken the seeds from that tree. And I will take root in you. I will sprout. I will be nourished by your violence. Nothing. Nothing. To look into the abyss without drawing away is everything. The highest...the highest of honors. To approach the horizon of endurable anguish and to pass it, you must have eyes without eyelids, for if you blink once, you will incinerate.

We are winning this war. We are winning it. And you will...you will help to win it. And just beneath the surface is your strength. Just below your skin are vital forms, your vital forces running like eternal springs. Wild. Restless. They will guide you, and give you counsel.

And when they call you murderer, and when they judge you, then turn on them, hang them, all of them, by their lying jaws on meathooks till they soil themselves and ask forgiveness.. The bloodlust. The bloodlust--you don't think of it. You don't think of the bloodlust--you experience it. Masses...people--any people--they will go anywhere, do anything, as long as the ring of faith...the ring of faith is in their noses. Yes. Put the ring in their nose. Call it God. And country. And mother. Then you run a slim cord through the rings of all of them--ten million, a hundred million or more--and herd them wherever you will.

The human animal has no limits. He will generate a force to overcome the gravitational pull of society and fling himself into outer space to find a new orbit around Jupiter or the Sun, determined by greater forces. And the instinct to submission, the longing to obey, to be ruled by the strong, the will to submission, is stronger than the will to power...Eichman...Eichman...six million Jews jumped into their graves...Dusseldorf...Bremen...Wounded Knee...Coventry...Nagasaki ...ten-year-old boys carrying...carrying grenades in baskets of fruit. And pregnant women, nursing women, carrying explosives in their vaginas---inside their vaginas, crossing beyond our checkpoints.

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice...No....No vice...No vice.

This war will never be won by the priests of misery, the Rand Corporation and not in the Situation Rooms in Washington. The people here, those yellow and white who lie in the muck and who can stand the rain and no food, the stink and the rot of dying...people who get sick and wake up numb and still have the will to fight. They're the ones who will stand it. And the ones...the ones who will win...None other...None other...They just need the will, the guns, and the grace of God. The enemy, well-trained, experience, no fear. VC gun...NVA..no fear in their gun...not in their gun. Their minds. Have fear of their minds. You hack them to pieces and they say nothing. They only inspire respect. God help you if you..God help you. The strong...the strongest leaders don't want to lose this war to little yellow men in black pajamas, so they lie. Presidents, all of them, all the presidents, want to retain power, so they lie. Congressmen, our...lies. Lies. Magazines...lies.

This is not a war of people and freedom and rights and self- determination. Lies. Only oil, power, manganese, cobalt, geopolitics, staying in office...must have these...we must have these..lies. Remain strong, remain free. regret...regret...never saw a flower being pushed into the end of a AK-47 muzzle. Children put their flowers where I can see them. I'd like to see their faces if they'd put the flowers in Vc guns. The top of their heads would come off.... forbidden to kill...slay animals...across the centuries....lies, lies.

They are right. They are right. we should not intervene. No intervention here. Civil war. Their war. No intervention. They are right. Not intervene, but to invade, inundate all of southeast Asia with fire enough to eliminate...eliminate our intentions for 2 centuries. They don't want my mission to succeed because they would be wrong, and they would rather be dead...dead than wrong.

No. Stay with the primitive here. Stay with these people. Stay with them. They're small feathers in this hurricane of change, this whirlwind. But they know, they understand, they're made of the earth. They live without fear. They do not hide in masks of guilt. Platinum... platinum. There are some things, some things which I cannot, I dare not speak.

To raise a stench, a stench so strong as to break the stride of...of a pack of jackals. To be as familiar with death as maggots are with manure. The world needs us now, and we will stay here until mushrooms grow out of our faces. These men, these tired ticks that crawl across...across the anvil of history. a time for giants, and they send us pygmies armed with chalk, computers, tennis rackets. Santa Monica hotlines to human misery. The eager students of suffering and violence. the sick and twisted hippies, long haired hypocrites, rotting with decay. In every powerful civilization for the past 35 centuries, violence still stirs those inner ancient passions, that primordial slime that lies in the bottom of our minds waiting for eons and eons to be ...only to be stirred and--what? And the silkworms...the silkworms writing those fawning reports of victories while we die out here like blind martins. the experts, the air-conditioned priests, who only look for the break point in human misery. McNamara...Bunker...Rostow... Bunker...Bundy...Bunker...Bunker...Johnson...


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