Horror. Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and mortal terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces-it seems a thousand centuries ago-we went into a camp to inoculate it. The children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us, and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile-a pile of little arms. And I remember-I-I-I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it, I never want to forget. And then I realized-like I was shot -like I was shot with a diamond- a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, “My God, the genius of that, the genius, the will to do that.” Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they could stand that-these were not monsters, these were men, trained cadres, these men who fought with their hearts, who have families, who have children, who are filled with love-that they had this strength, the strength to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly.
Colonel Kurtz / Marlon Brando / Apocalypse Now by Francis Coppola
