Oh Warfather on high,
I am calling you from the battlefield
And as I take my last breath
I call for the mightiest of miracles.
For none but the brave, be he king or a slave
With a pounding heart in his chest
Will be worthy to rise and with the Valkyries fly
And ride to the ancient Valhalla.
Oh Warfather on high
Listen to my prayer
I lived my life by your rules
Oh let death cover me now.
For none but the brave, be he king or a slave
With a pounding heart in his chest
Will be worthy to rise and with the Valkyries fly
And ride to Valhalla of old.
[Chorus]
With the Valkyries, ride over the battlefield
Ride your horses and come to me
I'm waiting for you to take my soul, high in the sky to
Valhalla of old.
Valkyries, ride over the battlefield
I'm dying and glad to bleed
Because I know today I will take my place with the heroes
in Valhalla of old
For none but the brave, be he king or a slave
With a pounding heart in his chest
Will be worthy to rise and with the Valkyries fly
And ride to Valhalla of old.
[Chorus]
With the Valkyries, ride over the battlefield
Ride your horses and come to me
I'm waiting for you to take my soul, high in the sky to
Valhalla of old.
Valkyries, ride over the battlefield
I'm dying and glad to bleed
Because I know today I will take my place with the heroes
in Valhalla of old.
In The Halls of Valhalla I finally take my place
With my sword and my shield I enter Odin's realm
I'm an immortal spirit now with a heart made of steel
With the gods on high forever I will live and laugh at the
fears of man. |
|---|
|
| Apocalypse Now |
|---|
 |
| Squadron Formation Enroute |
|---|
 |
| Rocket Strikes On Target |
|---|
 |
| Approaching The Target |
|---|
|
The theme music accompanied in the movie Apocalypse Now, "The Ride of
the Valkyries" is from "Die Walküre", composed by by Richard Wagner
during the mid-19th century. THe prelude to the third act of Die
Walküre has become one of Wagner's most famous works.
The most powerful use of the music, "The Ride of the Valkyries" is in
the cinematic sequences of Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 "Apocalypse
Now". During the rocket attack of the Viet Cong village, Wagner's
chilling music blasted from large stero peakers, suspended from the
frame of the helicopters, to "scare the hell out of the Vietnamese
peasants below"
View "Apocalypse Now" Helicopter Attack
|
|
|---|
| "Apocalypse Now" accompanied by Ride of the Valkyries |
|---|
Movie Plot
Apocalypse Now opens in Saigon in 1968. Army captain and special
intelligence agent Benjamin Willard is holed up in a hotel room,
heavily intoxicated and desperate to get back into action. He has
completed one tour of duty in Vietnam, only to go home a changed man,
miserable amid the confines of civilization. After agreeing to a
divorce, he has returned to Vietnam for a second tour and now waits
restlessly for a mission.
Two officers arrive to escort Willard to Nha Trang, where he meets
with two military superiors and a CIA operative, who brief him on a
rogue Green Beret colonel named Walter E. Kurtz. Willard is ordered to
find and “terminate” Kurtz, who has become unhinged and committed
murder with the help of a native Montagnard army. Kurtz currently is
stationed at an outpost in Cambodia with the Montagnards, who treat
him as a god. Kurtz is insane, the officers say, and his methods are
"unsound."
To reach Kurtz, Willard joins the crew of a Navy Patrol Boat River
(PBR) who are to ferry him up the (fictional) Nung River to Cambodia.
The crew of the boat consists of four men: Chief, Chef, Lance, and
Clean. With Willard on board, the crew makes its rendezvous with the
Ninth Air Cavalry, who are to escort the PBR to the mouth of the
river.
The crew members find themselves in the middle of a B-52 bomber
strike. Willard encounters the commanding officer of the Cavalry,
Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, who assures Willard his cavalry will
set the PBR safely at the mouth of the river.
Kilgore orders his men to saddle up in the morning to capture the town
and the nearby beach areas at the mouth of the river, and one of the
film's most memorable sequences begins with a fleet of UH-1 Huey
Iroquios helicopters accompanied by OH-6s Cayuse scout
helicopters riding high above the coast. As the helicopters approach
the beach with Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" blasting
through stero speakers, suspended from the frame of the helicopters,
to frighten the Vietnamese. Kilgore launches the attack on the beach
and the swarm of helicopters swoop down over the village and
demolishes all visible signs of resistance. During the intense air
strike, a Huey, carrying the PBR in a cargo sling, successfully
loweres it into the river. The scene ends with the soldiers surfing
on the waves of the barely claimed beach amid skirmishes between
infantry and VC. A giant napalm strike in the nearby jungle
dramatically marks the climax of the battle.
The nest episode takes place in the jungle. Chef's craving for
mangoes leads him and Willard to disembark and explore the jungle.
Amid mammoth trees and dense vegetation, a tiger lunges out at them
from the shadows. Chef and Willard run back to the boat. Chef has a
nervous breakdown as the rest of the crew shoots blindly at the
jungle, assuming the danger is Vietcong. Chef's breakdown darkens the
mood of the crew.
Further up the river, the crew meets a US base supply depot. They dock
and collect fuel, cigarettes, and other supplies, then join the throng
of men in an amphitheater that has been erected by the river. Soon, a
helicopter arrives and drops three Playboy Playmates onto the stage to
perform in an United Service Organization (USO) show. The Playmates
perform to Flash Cadillac's song "Suzie Q" and taunt the sex-starved
troops with seductive shimmies and bump-and-grind moves. When some of
the soldiers run onto stage in a frenzy, the show is cut short and the
Playmates are quickly evacuated.
The crew returns to the PBR, and the boat soon meets other patrol
boats coming in the opposite direction, with whom they engage in mock
warfare. As the crew continues on and tempers flare up more
frequently, Willard obsessively reviews Kurtz's dossier. Lance and
Chef are continually under the influence of drugs, and Lance in
particular becomes withdrawn, smearing his face with camouflage paint
and saying little.
One day, Chief insists on stopping a sampan (a small boat) carrying
several Vietnamese peasants and supplies downriver. At Chief's
command, Chef boards the sampan and searches it. Chief orders Chef to
look inside a rusty yellow can that a peasant woman on the sampan was
sitting on. When Chef does, the woman makes a sudden move toward the
can. Clean starts shooting at random, killing all the civilians on
board except the woman. Once the shooting subsides, Chef looks inside
the can and finds only a small puppy. Noticing the woman is still
alive, Chief orders Chef to bring her on board, saying the crew will
take her to a "friendly" hospital nearby.
Willard steps forward, points his gun at the woman’s chest, and fires,
killing her so that his mission can proceed without a detour. The
rest of the crew begins to see him in a different light. Continuing
upriver, the shaken crew reaches an army outpost under fire in a
gunfight for an American-held bridge - the last military outpost
before the Cambodian border. Willard is unable to find a commanding
officer onshore but is given a packet of mail for the boat. One of the
letters in the packet informs Willard that the US military previously
sent another man on the same mission to retrieve Kurtz but that the
man is now operating with Kurtz. As Clean listens to an audiotape
letter from his mother, the PBR comes under a surprise attack by
Vietcong, and Clean is shot fatally.
The boat continues upriver, only to meet another surprise attack.
Primitive natives onshore shoot a storm of arrows at the PBR. Chief is
impaled with a spear and dies. With two men gone, the survivors at
last reach Kurtz’s camp, a macabre site in which countless dead bodies
and severed heads are strewn about seemingly at random. A hyperactive
American photojournalist, unabashed in his worship of Kurtz, greets
the boat.
Willard and Lance disembark to find Kurtz, leaving Chef with
instructions to call in an air strike if they are not back at the boat
by a specified time. The natives under Kurtz’s control drag Willard
through the mud and grant him an audience with Kurtz, who imprisons
Willard in a cramped tiger cage. During the night, Kurtz throws Chef's
severed head into Willard’s lap. Willard is freed the next day and
given freedom to roam Kurtz’s compound. He listens to Kurtz's
philosophizing for several days.
In split scenes, Kurtz's natives perform a ritual sacrifice of a
caribou, while the film intercuts with images of Willard emerging from
the river and approaching Kurtz's quarters. As the caribou is
ritualistically slaughtered, Willard slaughters Kurtz with a machete.
Kurtz's last words are "the horror, the horror." When Willard emerges,
the natives acknowledge him as their new leader and god. He throws
down his machete, finds Lance amidst the Montagnard, and returns to
the boat. Willard shuts off the radio, and he and Lance pull away from
shore as rain begins to fall. Kurtz's last words are echoed again as
the film fades to black.
The Valkyries were the beautiful, fearless, immortal and winged
handmaiden warriors of Odin, God of War, who rode their horses across
the skies above the battlefields of the earth. They carried out the
will of Odin to determine the victors and in gathering the souls of
dying warriors who had fought valiantly and found deserving of
afterlife in Valhalla.
Return To The Host URL Of This Link