How was the film Apocalypse Now taken by veterans of Vietnam? Considering it's literary roots of the film, I was wondering if vets would have been interested in the comparison to Heart of Darkness or if they would resent that the war was being used for a contemporary retelling of Heart of Darkness.
A couple of interesting first hand accounts on it.
Infantry veteran Tom Hain wrote:
I also thought that the war movies about Vietnam hurt our credibility too. I wanted more realism. Apocalypse Now was close, Green Berets was not.
Another veteran, B.G. Burkett, said this when asked about the popular movie portrayls about Vietnam (It's important to note that it appears that he was answering a broad question about multiple movies and not just Apocalypse Now):
The popular perception of Vietnam veterans as victims tortured by memories - drug-abusers, criminals, homeless bums or psychotic losers about to go berserk in a post office with an AK-47 - did not fit me or anybody I knew who had served in Vietnam, even those who had been horribly wounded or captured and tortured by the enemy. Certainly their lives were not always perfect, but their problems could not be attributed to their experiences in Vietnam. I brushed off the negative caricatures thinking, ‘That's not reality.’
Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans by Wallace Terry (1984) is a collection of interviews with vets. At least one of the interviewees said he hated Apocalypse Now because of all the inaccuracies. He felt that the movie made no effort to depict the Vietnam War in a realistic fashion. This experience made him feel even more sharply his alienation from ordinary Americans.
I realize that this single anecdote doesn't do much to help with your question, but it strikes me that oral histories might be the best places to look for an answer.