What mission is Captain Benjamin Willard given in Apocalypse Now?

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Francis Ford Coppola, with a beard, sits on a camera dolly surrounded by crew and actors on the set of The Godfather: Part II, with storefronts in the background. — Francis Ford Coppola American filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola won the Oscar for best director for *The Godfather: Part II* (1974).

In the film Apocalypse Now, Captain Benjamin Willard is tasked by military and CIA officials with a highly classified mission: to travel up the Nung River into Cambodia to locate and assassinate Colonel Walter Kurtz, a renegade Green Beret officer.1

The officials inform Willard that Kurtz has gone insane, citing his unsanctioned murder of four suspected South Vietnamese double agents and his decision to act outside the bounds of acceptable human behavior while ruling over the Montagnard people from his jungle compound. Willard is explicitly ordered "to terminate [Kurtz] with extreme prejudice".1