‘There was a map of Vietnam on the wall of my apartment in Saigon and some nights, coming back late to the city, I'd lie out on my bed and look at it, too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off. That map was a marvel, especially now that it wasn't real anymore.’1The opening lines of Michael Herr's Dispatches (1977) – among the most influential narratives of the war in Vietnam – suggest a fascination with the act of mapping, even in the knowledge of its historical contingency and fundamental inadequacy as an epistemological tool. While the mention of these limitations may be a counterintuitive place to start from, for a monograph intent on its own kind of charting, Herr's reference to the allure of the cartographer's work brings to mind a more famous recollection of the enthralling power of maps – Charlie Marlow's memory of the seductive power of the ‘many blank spaces on the earth’ in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), a canonical thematization of the ineffable enchantment that comes from the perception of alien lands as mysterious places waiting to be explored and deciphered, or conquered. Beckoning from the depths of Africa, on whose map – what used to be the biggest blank of all – it stands out as an ‘immense snake uncoiled’, the river Congo casts its spell on Marlow, and his audience: ‘The snake had charmed me’ (22). I am keen to start – as I will end, in much greater detail – with an allusion to Conrad's novella for a number of reasons. To begin with, given its thought-provoking treatment of the challenges inherent in the encounter – or rather, the clash – between different cultures, as well as in the articulation of such an experience and, more generally, in the investigation of the human potential for savagery, Heart of Darkness has played a considerable role in setting the place of the Vietnam war in our collective imagination and has had an enduring impact on American representations of the conflict, most notably, of course, through the mediation of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979).