"I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor."

The Times obit says that Col. David Hackworth, who died on Wednesday in Tijuana, was the model for Col. Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now." But to me, it sounds like he was a composite of the Kurtz and Kilgore characters.

In Vietnam, he became an almost mythical figure, arriving in 1965 with the first group of American paratroopers and going on to command the helicopter unit that was later immortalized in the movie "Apocalypse Now." He drove his men so hard, he later wrote, that they put a $3,500 bounty on his head. Early in the war he wrote a primer on how best to fight the Vietcong.

His combat successes included wiping out 2,500 North Vietnamese soldiers while his troops suffered just 25 casualties.

In a 1971 interview with Nick Proffit of Newsweek, Gen. Creighton Abrams, a top commander in Vietnam, called Colonel Hackworth "the best battalion commander I ever saw in the United States Army."

General Abrams spoke shortly after Colonel Hackworth appeared on the ABC television program "Issues and Answers" and harshly criticized the conduct of the Vietnam War, saying it could not be won. He called the training inadequate and accused fellow officers of not understanding guerrilla warfare.

A report by the inspector general of the Army responded that Colonel Hackworth was derelict in his duties and had "acted without honor." General Abrams and other top officers moved to court-martial him, but eventually allowed him to resign with an honorable discharge.

[...]

Long before the United States was visibly involved in Vietnam, he served there with the Special Forces. By April 1965 he was a confirmed career soldier and went back with the paratroopers, ready to fight a new kind of war. He commanded a Blackhawk "Air Cavalry" brigade in which pilots wore Civil War campaign hats and flew in helicopters with crossed swords painted on them.

"We were a wild bunch," he said in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 1989.

He became more and more independent, even rebellious, once threatening to take his troops to Canada if commanders persisted in talking about the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam. He ran a bordello and a massage parlor to keep his men happy and relatively protected from a virulent strain of syphilis.

That is, if it's possible for a real-life character to be a composite of two fictional characters.

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!

Kilgore: You smell that? Do you smell that?... Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for twelve hours. When it was all over I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like... victory. Someday this war's gonna end...
[walks off unhappily]