In composing my post on the battle for the Korengal Valley and the fact that the insurgents were quite willing to put women and children at risk in their fights with U.S. troops, I remembered a relevant snippet of dialogue from Apocalypse Now Redux.

The screenplay was written by John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola.

In this scene, towards the very end of this surreal Vietnam War epic, Col.Walter E. Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando) is holding forth, and Capt. Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen) is his captive audience -- and I mean that literally. In his mind, Willard says, "I've never seen a man look so broken up and ripped apart."

They are at the renegade Kurtz's temple compound somewhere in Cambodia -- a no-go zone for American soldiers during the war. Kurtz has live Montagnard tribesmen as his warrior followers, but there are dead bodies everywhere. Willard, of course, has been sent by the U.S. Army to kill Kurtz ("terminate his command ... with extreme prejudice," in the film's milspeak), who instinctively knows his time is drawing to a close:

I've seen the horrors. The horrors that you've seen.

But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have the right to kill me. You have a right to do that. But you have no right to judge me.

It's impossible for words to describe what is ... necessary, to those who do not know what "horror" means.

Horror.

Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror.

Horror and moral terror are your friends. It they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.

I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We'd 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 say. We went back 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 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 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, that  they were stronger than we. Because they could stand it.

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 the strength, the strength ... to do that.

If I had 10 divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral, and at the same time, who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion. Without judgment. Without Judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us.

Here's a YouTube clip of that scene: