Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, portrayed by Marlon Brando, is a fictional character and the main antagonist of Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now.

Walter Kurtz was a career officer in the United States Army; he was a third-generation West Point graduate who had risen through the ranks and was seen to be destined for a top post within the Pentagon.

A dossier read by the narrator, Captain Willard, implies that Kurtz saw action in the Korean War after receiving a master's degree in history from Harvard University.

His overtly critical report, dated March 3, 1964, was not what was expected and was immediately restricted for the Joint Chiefs and President Lyndon B. Johnson only.

In late 1967, after Kurtz failed to respond to MACV's repeated orders to return to Da Nang and resign his command after he ordered the summary execution of four South Vietnamese intelligence agents whom he suspected of being double agents for the Viet Cong, the MACV sent a Green Beret Captain named Richard Colby to bring Kurtz back from Cambodia.

With Colby's failure, MACV then selected Captain Benjamin L. Willard, a paratrooper and Army intelligence officer, to journey up the Nung river and kill Kurtz.

When he rose to power as the "God-King" of the Montagnards, Kurtz was treated like a Deity, using his extensive military training to form an army of followers and soldiers around him, eventually becoming a philosopher of war, reading poetry and quotes from the Holy Bible, leading him to be seen as truly insane.

[2] Poe was known to drop severed heads into enemy-controlled villages as a form of psychological warfare and to use human ears to record the number of enemies his indigenous troops had killed.

He maintains the character was loosely based on Special Forces Colonel Robert B. Rheault, whose 1969 arrest for the murder of a suspected double agent generated substantial news coverage.

[5] By early 1976, Francis Ford Coppola had persuaded Marlon Brando to play Colonel Walter E. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1979), for a fee of $2 million for a month's work on location in September 1976.

[8] When Brando showed up for filming he had put on about 40 pounds (18 kg) and forced Coppola to shoot him above the waist, making it appear that Kurtz was a 6-foot 6-inch (198 cm) giant.