"[While flying in a helicopter with Air Cavalry soldiers]
Chef: Why do all you guys sit on your helmets?
Soldier: So we don't get our balls shot off.
Captain Benjamin L. Willard: Saigon, shit, I'm still only in Saigon. Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back in the jungle.
Captain Benjamin L. Willard: I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to a divorce.
Captain Benjamin L. Willard: When I was here, I wanted to be there, when I was there all I could think of was getting back into the jungle.
Captain Benjamin L. Willard: Been here a week now, waiting for a mission, getting softer. Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger.
Colonel Walter E. Kurtz: I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream. That's my nightmare. Crawling, swiftly, along the edge of a straight... razor... and surviving.
Captain Benjamin L. Willard: I was going to the worst place in the world and I didn't even know it yet. Weeks away and hundreds of miles up a river that snaked through the war like a main circuit cable - plugged straight into Kurtz. It was no accident that I got to be the caretaker of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz's memory - anymore than being back in Saigon was an accident. There is no way to tell his story without telling my own. And if his story really is a confession, then so is mine.
Captain Benjamin L. Willard: How many people had I already killed? There was those six that I know about for sure. Close enough to blow their last breath in my face. But this time it was an American and an officer. That wasn't supposed to make any difference to me, but it did. Shit...charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy 500. I took the mission. What the hell else was I gonna do?
Col. Kurtz: What do you call assassins who accuse assassins?
Captain Benjamin L. Willard: If that's how Kilgore fought the war I began to wonder what they really had against Kurtz. It wasn't just insanity and murder, there was enough of that to go around for everyone.
Captain Benjamin L. Willard: Oh man, the shit piled up so fast in Vietnam you needed wings to stay above it.
Captain Benjamin L. Willard: No wonder Kurtz put a weed up Command's ass. The war was being run by a bunch of four star clowns who were gonna end up giving the whole circus away.
Captain Benjamin L. Willard: It's a way we had over here with living with ourselves. We cut 'em in half with a machine gun and give'em a Band-Aid. It was a lie. And the more I saw them, the more I hated lies.
Lance: Disneyland. Fuck, man, this is better than Disneyland.
Chef: I used to think if I died in an evil place then my soul wouldn't make it to heaven. Well, fuck. I don't care where it goes as long it ain't here.
Colonel Walter E. Kurtz: Are you an assassin?
Captain Benjamin L. Willard: I'm a soldier.
Colonel Walter E. Kurtz: You're neither. You're an errand boy... sent by grocery clerks... to collect the bill.
Willard: He came from some South Bronx shit-hole, and I think the light and space of Vietnam really put the zap on his brain.
Chief: One look at you and I know it's gonna be hot.
Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore: You either surf or you fight.
Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore: If I say it's safe to surf this beach, it's safe to surf this beach!
Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore: I love the smell of napalm in the morning... Smells like victory.
Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore: Some day this war's gonna end.
Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore: Charlie don't surf!
Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore: We do a lot of surfing here. I like to finish operations early.
[Radio announcer]
Zack Johnson: And now here's another blast from the past coming out to Big Cind, all alone in the mantle room out there with the First Battalion Thirty-fifth Infantry, and dedicated by the fire team at Ang Cape to their groupie CO Fred the Head: The Rolling Stones' Satisfaction.
Documentary filmmaker: Don't look at the cameras! Don't look at the cameras! Just keep going! Go on! Go on! Keep going! Don't look at the cameras! Don't look at the cameras! Just go by like you're fighting, like you're fighting! Don't look at the cameras! It's for television! Just go through! Go through!
Captain Benjamin L. Willard: Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I never wanted another.
Captain Benjamin L. Willard: Never get out of the boat. Absolutely god damn right. Unless you were goin' all the way. Kurtz got off the boat. He split from the whole fuckin' program.
Captain Benjamin L. Willard: They were gonna make me a major for this, and I wasn't even in their fuckin' army anymore.
Captain Benjamin L. Willard: Charley didn't get much USO. He was dug in too deep or moving too fast. His idea of great R&R was cold rice and a little rat meat. He had only two ways home: death, or victory.
Freelance Photographer: One through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions. You can't travel in space, you can't go out into space, you know, without, like, you know, uh, with fractions--what are you going to land on--one-quarter, three-eighths? What are you going to do when you go from here to Venus or something? That's dialectic physics.
Colonel Walter E. Kurtz: We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because? It's obscene!
Colonel Walter E. Kurtz: Did they say why, Willard? Why they wanted to terminate my command? Did they tell you
Captain Benjamin L. Willard: They told me you had gone totally insane and, uh....., that your methods were unsound.
Colonel Walter E. Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?
Captain Benjamin L. Willard: I don't see ... any method ... at all.
Freelance Photographer: There's mines over there, there's mines over there, and watch out those goddam monkeys bite, I'll tell ya.