The Kurtz Papers
This text is quintessential. In the movie, Willard skips parts of it. Unduly.
Personal Notes : 11/05/2012 I have started writing a collection of papers by Col Kurtz. A fascinating venture that allows me to further articulate his own conceptions.
JOURNAL OF SE ASIAN AFFAIRS, Vol II, April 7th 1965.
Commitment and Counter-Insurgency by Col Walter E. Kurtz
As long as our officers and troups perform tours of duty limited to one year, they will remain dilletantes in war and tourists in Vietnam. As long as cold beer, hot food, rock and roll and all the other amenities remain the expected norm, our conduct of the war will gain only impotence. The wholesale and indiscriminate use of firepower will only increase the effectiveness of the enemy and strengthen their resolve to prove the superiority of an agrarian culture against the world's greatest technocracy...
At present we are building a strategy that is suited only to our national temperament but to nothing else, least of all the realities of the terrain. Our posture in such a war should be essentially offensive since we have virtually nothing to defend. (for offens***) seek and destroy"; long, loud, clumsy ***
Our relience on large bases and installations grows with each ***, and the bases themselves are a waste, of mis-spent ***, they suck on our energies and resources generate nothing but waste and keep us from ***. Even in combat the ground we choose to *** hold us, *** is invariably *** usually suggested to use by the enemy himself, where a regiment keeping whole divisions in place as we are hypnotized by our own strategic rethoric.
...The central tragedy of our effort in this conflict has been the confusion of sophisticated technology with human commitment. Our bombs may in time destroy the geography, but they will never win the war...
...We need fewer men, and better; if they were committed, this war could be won with a fourth of our present force......as weak in commitment as we are great in arms...
