The 9th cavalry escorts Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) to the mouth of the river that leads him to Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). Blaring Wagner’s 'Flight of the Valkyries', the swarm of helicopters drench a remote village with rockets, bullets and napalm that kills both innocents and enemy combatants alike. It’s chaotic and senseless, demonstrating the immorality and absurdity of the Vietnam War, embodied by Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall), who lands and commands his men to start surfing the break while bombs drop.
It’s also one of the most striking and iconic scenes in cinema history, and when Kilgore kneels among the hellish, orange mist engulfing the landscape, he delivers one of the most iconic lines in cinema history: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
