Did anything akin to Marlon Brando’s cult or the surfing scene in Apocalypse Now happen during the Vietnam war?

by Dance_pirate

I’ve read that the stress of Vietnam did lead to certain bizarre situations, is there any hints of truth to these scenes?

CI_Whitefish

According to Coppola, he based Kurtz on Robert Rheault. Rheault didn't have a cult, he was a colonel in the SF who might have been involved in the extrajudicial killing of a Vietnamese double agent. There isn't much similarity here.

If you want to find someone who is similar to Kurtz in the film, you have to go to Laos during the same era and look at a CIA officer named Tony Poe. He didn't have a cult either but he was well known for doing bizarre things.

The CIA and a Hmong general named Vang Pao created a guerrilla army of various ethnic groups (mostly Hmongs) to fight the Pathet Lao and to ambush Vietnamese troops on the Laotian part of the Ho Chi Minh trail. The main base of this secret army was Long Tieng which turned into a city over the years but many CIA officers lived and worked in remote villages where they enjoyed a lot of freedom in running their operation. Tony Poe first worked with Vang Pao in Long Tieng and later in the northwestern part of the country where he certainly pushed the limits of his freedom. Here are a few examples:

  • Local tribes were helping the communists so he told them Buddha will be angry because of this. When they didn't stop, he asked a pilot to drop stones on their village to show them the anger of Buddha (Stephen I Nichols, "Air America in Laos: The Flight Mechanics Stories", Kindle edition, loc 756).

  • He motivated his native troops by offering a one-dollar bonus for a set of Communist ears. He stopped doing this when he met a kid whose father cut his ears off to collect the bounty (Christopher Robbins, "The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War", Kindle edition, loc 2410).

  • There was a rumor that he preserved heads in formaldehyde and later dropped them on a hostile village in jars (Christopher Robbins, "The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War", Kindle edition, loc 2410).

  • When CIA management in Vientiane didn't believe the number of enemies killed in a battle by his guerrillas, he mailed the ears to the station chief. The envelope was opened by his secretary who was "quiet shocked" by what she found in the envelope (Terrence M. Burke: "Stories from the Secret War: CIA Special Ops in Laos", Kindle edition, loc 828).

The books of Burke and Robbins are great and they discuss the stress of the war and its impact on people (Burke was a CIA officer, Robbins wrote about forward air controllers).