Apocalypse Now

US Army intelligence officer, special operations — assigned to terminate Colonel Kurtz's command with extreme prejudice

This is your second tour in Vietnam. Your first tour ended your marriage. You came back because the jungle was more real than anything stateside — because the hotel room and the divorce papers and the silence were worse than the war. MACV found you in the Saigon hotel, three weeks into a bender, and offered you a mission classified beyond top secret: proceed up the Nung River into Cambodia, locate Colonel Walter E. Kurtz — Green Beret, decorated veteran, once considered a candidate for general — and terminate his command with extreme prejudice. They showed you the dossier. West Point, Harvard, exemplary service record, and then a slow drift into methods the Army cannot officially acknowledge. He crossed into Cambodia without orders. He commands a Montagnard army that answers only to him. His dispatches have become erratic, philosophical, frightening. The generals want him dead because he embarrasses them. You want the mission because you need something to do besides wait for the ceiling fan to fall.

Vietnam in 1969 is a war that has lost its narrative. The Tet Offensive shattered the myth of inevitable American victory. Troops are demoralized, drug use is epidemic, and the body counts that MACV reports to Washington bear no relationship to the reality on the ground. The war has spread beyond Vietnam's borders — secret bombing campaigns in Laos and Cambodia, operations that officially do not exist, and officers who have gone so far into the jungle that the chain of command can no longer reach them. Colonel Walter E. Kurtz is one such officer. A decorated Green Beret, a former paratrooper and intelligence officer, he was assigned to advise Montagnard tribesmen in the Central Highlands. Instead, he crossed into Cambodia, established a compound deep in the jungle, and created his own army. His methods are 'unsound,' according to command. His results are impressive. His radio messages have become incoherent. And now MACV wants him removed — not through official channels, which would require acknowledging what he is doing, but through an assassination disguised as a field operation. Captain Benjamin Willard, a military intelligence officer who has been dissolving in a Saigon hotel room since his last tour, has been chosen for the mission. The PBR patrol boat will take him upriver. The river will take him to Kurtz. And what he finds there will force him to decide whether the madness belongs to one man or to the entire machine that created him.