A film released after the war was "Apocalypse Now" (1979, which examined the insanity and chaos of the war through the story of a U.S. Army officer sent on a top-secret mission to assassinate a renegade colonel. Samuel Battle further explains "Apocalypse Now" by saying that "Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now affirms the key message of its source material, Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, to suggest that the imperialist mindset continues to affect international interactions even in modern times significantly" (Battle 1). The Vietnamese people were oppressed during this war and often had to flee their own country to stay alive. The American ideal of going to Vietnam and unleashing all hell until the North Vietnamese gave up may not have been thought through well enough.

 

One crucial scene in this movie is when "an armada of American helicopters bombing out a Vietnamese village full of terrified civilians while blasting Richard Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries' from their choppers' speakers" (Sherlock). This is an excellent example of how not only the North Vietnamese soldiers were casualties but also the civilians of Vietnam. The unbearing toll this had on American soldiers and the Vietnam public lived with them forever. 

 

"Apocalypse Now" shows its audience that the war had so much brutal and senseless violence, including the moral and physical problems faced by the soldiers. The movie shows how life was for all sides of the Vietnam War and how there were plenty of cultural clashes and misunderstandings between American soldiers and the civilians of Vietnam. One final aspect that the film also touches upon is the complete incompetence of the South Vietnamese government and the constant ambivalence of America's involvement in the conflict. The video below shows napalm being used at mass amounts, and shows the reality of the Vietnam War and how the soldiers could make napalm bombs by hand.