<P> Coppola argues that many episodes in the film--the spear and arrow attack on the boat, for example--respect the spirit of the novella and in particular its critique of the concepts of civilization and progress . Other episodes adapted by Coppola, the Playboy Playmates' (Sirens) exit, the lost souls, "take me home" attempting to reach the boat and Kurtz's tribe of (white - faced) natives parting the canoes (gates of Hell) for Willard, (with Chef and Lance) to enter the camp are likened to Virgil and "The Inferno" (Divine Comedy) by Dante . While Coppola replaced European colonialism with American interventionism, the message of Conrad's book is still clear . </P> <P> Coppola's interpretation of the Kurtz character is often speculated to have been modeled after Tony Poe, a highly decorated Vietnam - era paramilitary officer from the CIA's Special Activities Division . Poe's actions in Vietnam and in the' Secret War' in neighbouring Laos, in particular his highly unorthodox and often savage methods of waging war, show many similarities to those of the fictional Kurtz; for example, Poe was known to drop severed heads into enemy - controlled villages as a form of psychological warfare and use human ears to record the number of enemies his indigenous troops had killed . He would send these ears back to his superiors as proof of the efficacy of his operations deep inside Laos . Coppola denies that Poe was a primary influence and says the character was loosely based on Special Forces Colonel Robert B. Rheault, who was the actual head of 5th Special Forces Group (May to July 1969), and whose 1969 arrest over the murder of suspected double agent Thai Khac Chuyen in Nha Trang generated substantial contemporary news coverage, in the Green Beret Affair, including making public the phrase "terminate with extreme prejudice", which was used prominently in the movie . </P> <P> In the film, shortly before Colonel Kurtz dies, he recites part of T.S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men". The poem is preceded in printed editions by the epigraph "Mistah Kurtz--he dead", a quotation from Conrad's Heart of Darkness . </P> <P> Two books seen opened on Kurtz's desk in the film are From Ritual to Romance by Jessie Weston and The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer, the two books that Eliot cited as the chief sources and inspiration for his poem "The Waste Land". Eliot's original epigraph for "The Waste Land" was this passage from Heart of Darkness, which ends with Kurtz's final words: </P>

What is the meaning of the journey up the river in apocalypse now