Laurence Fishburne wears an unidentified watch

On the gunboat pushing upriver, a teenager in a red bandana and sunglasses works the boat's gun, cocky and bored at once. This is Mr. Clean, the youngest of the crew carrying Willard toward Kurtz, and the actor playing him was younger still. Laurence Fishburne auditioned claiming to be sixteen, a year under the character's seventeen. He was actually fourteen. Years later, Fishburne said he was fairly sure they had known all along, that he was not fooling anybody. By the time the film reached theaters in 1979, after a shoot that ran more than a year through typhoons and Martin Sheen's heart attack, he had caught up to Clean and turned seventeen.

On his left wrist, plain in the frame, is a watch, and unlike almost everything else in Apocalypse Now it has never been identified. The film is a catalog of named watches. Martin Sheen's Captain Willard wears the Seiko 6105 that collectors call the Willard. Marlon Brando's Kurtz wears a Rolex GMT-Master 1675 with the bezel removed. Clean's is a round, pale-dialed watch on a light strap, and no one has ever credibly put a name to it.

Clean does not last the trip. He is shot in a riverbank ambush, killed mid-sentence, while a cassette from his mother plays on, her voice telling him to stay out of trouble and come home.