David Morrell - Rambo 1 - First Blood Introduction In the summer of 1968, I was 25, a graduate student at Penn State University. Specializing in American literature, I'd finished my M.A. thesis on Ernest Hemingway and was starting my doctoral dissertation on John Earth. But in my heart, what I wanted to be was a novelist. I knew that few novelists made a living at it, so I'd decided to become a literature professor, an occupation in which I'd be surrounded by books and allowed time to write. A Penn State faculty member, Philip Klass, whose science-fiction pseudonym is William Tenn, had given me generous instruction in the techniques of fiction writing. Still, as Klass had pointed out, 'I can teach you how to write but not what to write about.' What would I write about? By chance, I watched a television program that changed my life. The program was The CBS Evening News, and on that sultry August evening, Walter Cronkite contrasted two stories whose friction flashed like lightning through my mind. The first story showed a fire fight in Vietnam. Sweaty American soldiers crouched in the jungle, shooting bursts from M-16s to repel an enemy attack. Incoming bullets kicked up dirt and shredded leaves. Medics scrambled to assist the wounded. An officer barked coordinates into a two-way radio, demanding air support. The fatigue, determination, and fear on the faces of the soldiers were dismayingly vivid. The second story showed a different sort of battle. That steamy summer, the inner cities of America had erupted into violence. In nightmarish images, National Guardsmen clutched M-16s and stalked along the rubble of burning streets, dodging rocks, wary of snipers among devastated vehicles and gutted buildings. Each news story, distressing enough on its own, became doubly so when paired with the other. It occurred to me that, if I'd turned down the sound, if I hadn't heard each story's reporter explain what I was watching, I might have thought that both film clips were two aspects of one horror. A fire fight outside Saigon, a riot within it. A riot within an American city, a fire fight outside it. Vietnam and America. What if? I thought. Those magic words are the seed of all fiction. What if I wrote a book in which the Vietnam war literally came home to America? There hadn't been a war on American soil since the end of the Civil War in 1865. With America splitting apart because of Vietnam, maybe it was time to write a novel that dramatized the philosophical division in our society, that shoved the brutality of war right under our noses. I decided my catalytic character would be a Vietnam veteran, a Green Beret who, after many harrowing missions, had been captured by the enemy, escaped, and returned home to be given America's highest distinction, the Congressional Medal of Honor. But he would bring something back with him from Southeast Asia, what we now call posttrauma stress syndrome. Haunted by nightmares about what he had done in the war, embittered by civilian indifference and sometimes hostility toward the sacrifice he had made for his country, he would drop out of society to wander the backroads of the nation he loved. He would let his hair grow long, stop shaving, carry his few possessions in a rolled-up sleeping bag slung over his shoulder, and look like what we then called a hippie. In what I loosely thought of as an allegory, he would represent the disaffected. His name would be. I am asked about his name more than anything else. One of my graduate school languages was French, and on an autumn afternoon, as I read a course assignment, I was struck by the difference between the look and the pronunciation of the name of the author I was reading, Rimbaud. An hour later, my wife came home from buying groceries. She mentioned that she'd bought some apples of a type she'd never heard about before. Rambo. A French author's name and the name of an apple collided, and I recognized the sound of force. While Rambo represented the disaffected, I needed someone to embody the establishment. Another news report, this time in print, aroused my indignation. In a Southwestern American town, a group of hitchhiking hippies had been picked up by the local police, stripped, hosed, and shaved - not just their beards but their hair. The hippies had then been given back their clothes and driven to a desert road, where they were abandoned to walk to the next town, thirty miles away. I remembered the harassment that my own recently grown mustache and long hair had caused me. 'Why don't you get a haircut? What the hell are you, a man or a woman?' I wondered what Rambo's reaction would be if he were subjected to the insults those hippies had received. In my novel, the establishment's representative became a police chief, Wilfred Teasle. Wary of stereotypes, I wanted him as complex as the action would allow. I made Teasle old enough to be Rambo's father. That created a generation gap, with the added dimension that Teasle wishes he had a son. Next, I decided that Teasle would be a Korean War hero, his Distinguished Service Cross second only to Rambo's Congressional Medal of Honor. There were many other facets to his character, and in each case, the intention was to make him as motivated and sympathetic as Rambo, because the viewpoints that divided America came from deep, well-meant convictions. To empathize their polarity, I structured the novel so that a scene from Rambo's perspective would be followed by one from Teasle's, the subsequent scene from Rambo's, the next scene again from Teasle's. That tactic, I hoped, would make the reader identify with each character and at the same time feel ambivalent about them. Who was the hero, who the villain, or were both men heroes, both men villains? The final confrontation between Rambo and Teasle would show that in this microcosmic version of the Vietnam war and American attitudes about it, escalating force results in disaster. Nobody wins. Due to the rigors of graduate school, I didn't complete First Blood until after I'd graduated from Penn State in 1970 and taught at the University of Iowa for a year. Following the novel's publication in 1972, it was translated into eighteen languages and eventually became the basis for a well-known 1982 film. If you're familiar only with the movie, you'll find a startling surprise at the end of the novel, but the film company changed that conclusion and, as a consequence, was able to produce two Rambo sequels. I wasn't involved with those films. However, I did write a novelization for each of them in an effort to supply the characterization that the latter movies omitted. Not that I object to the movies. They're spectacular in terms of their action. At the same time, I'm aware of the controversy they caused and think it's ironic that a novel about political polarization in America (for and against the Vietnam war) resulted in films that generated similar polarization (for and against Ronald Reagan) a decade after the novel was written. Sometimes I compare the Rambo books and movies to trains that are similar but headed in different directions. Sometimes I think of Rambo as a son who grew up and out of his father's control. Sometimes I read or hear Rambo's name in a newspaper, a magazine, on the radio, on television - in reference to politicians, financiers, athletes, whomever - used as a noun, an adjective, or a verb, whatever - and it takes me a moment before I remind myself that if not for the CBS Evening News, if not for Rimbaud, my wife, and the name of an apple, if not for Philip Klass and my determination to be a fiction writer, the new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary wouldn't have cited this novel as the source for the creation of a word. Rambo. Complicated, troubled, indeed haunted, too often misunderstood. If you've heard about him but haven't met him before, he's about to surprise you. David Morrell PART ONE 1 His name was Rambo, and he was just some nothing kid for all anybody knew, standing by the pump of a gas station at the outskirts of Madison, Kentucky. He had a long heavy beard, and his hair was hanging down over his ears to his neck, and he had his hand out trying to thumb a ride from a car that was stopped at the pump. To see him there, leaning on one hip, a Coke bottle in his hand and a rolled-up sleeping bag near his boots on the tar pavement, you could never have guessed that on Tuesday, a day later, most of the police in Basalt County would be hunting him down. Certainly you could not have guessed that by Thursday he would be running from the Kentucky National Guard and the police of six counties and a good many private citizens who liked to shoot. But then from just seeing him there ragged and dusty by the pump of the gas station, you could never have figured the kind of kid Rambo was, or what was about to make it all begin. Rambo knew there was going to be trouble, though. Big trouble, if somebody didn't watch out. The car he was trying to thumb a ride with nearly ran him over when it left the pump. The station attendant crammed a charge slip and a book of trade stamps into his pocket and grinned at the tire marks on the hot tar close to Rambo's feet. Then the police car pulled out of traffic toward him and he recognized the start of the pattern again and stiffened. 'No, by God. Not this time. This time I won't be pushed.' The cruiser was marked CHIEF OF POLICE, MADISON. It stopped next to Rambo, its radio antenna swaying, and the policeman inside leaned across the front seat, opening the passenger door. He stared at the mud-crusted boots, the rumpled jeans ripped at the cuffs and patched on one thigh, the blue sweat shirt speckled with what looked like dry blood, the buckskin jacket. He lingered over the beard and the long hair. No, that's not what was bothering him. It was something else, and he couldn't quite put his finger on it. 'Well then, hop in,' he said. But Rambo did not move. 'I said hop in,' the man repeated. 'Must be awful hot out there in that jacket.' But Rambo just sipped his Coke, glanced up and down the street at the cars passing, looked down at the policeman in the cruiser, and stayed where he was. 'Something wrong with your hearing?' the policeman said. 'Get in here before you make me sore.' Rambo studied him just as he himself had been studied: short and chunky behind the wheel, wrinkles around his eyes and shallow pockmarks in his cheeks that gave them a grain like weathered board. 'Don't stare at me,' the policeman said. But Rambo kept on studying him: the gray uniform, top button of his shirt open, tie loose, the front of his shirt soaked dark with sweat. Rambo looked but could not see what kind his handgun was. The policeman had it holstered to the left away from the passenger side. 'I'm telling you,' the policeman said. 'I don't like being stared at.' 'Who does?' Rambo glanced around once more, then picked up his sleeping bag. As he got into the cruiser, he set the bag between himself and the policeman. 'Been waiting long?' the policeman asked. 'An hour. Since I came.' 'You could have waited a lot longer than that. People around here don't generally stop for a hitchhiker. Especially if he looks like you. It's against the law.' 'Looking like me?' 'Don't be smart. I mean hitchhiking's against the law. Too many people stop for a kid on the road, and next thing they're robbed or maybe dead. Close your door.' Rambo took a slow sip of Coke before he did what he was told. He looked over at the gas station attendant who was still at the pump grinning as the policeman pulled the cruiser into traffic and headed downtown. 'No need to worry,' Rambo told the policeman. 'I won't try to rob you.' 'That's very funny. In case you missed the sign on the door, I'm the Chief of Police. Teasle. Wilfred Teasle. But then I don't guess there's much point in telling you my name.' He drove on through a main intersection where the light was turning orange. Far down both sides of the street were stores squeezed together - a drug store, a pool hall, a gun and tackle shop, dozens more. Over the top of them, far back on the horizon, mountains rose up, tall and green, touched here and there with red and yellow where the leaves had begun to die. Rambo watched a cloud shadow slip across the mountains. 'Where you headed?' he heard Teasle ask. 'Does it matter?' 'No. Come to think of it, I don't guess there's much point in knowing that either. Just the same - where you headed?' 'Maybe Louisville.' 'And maybe not.' 'That's right.' 'Where did you sleep? In the woods?' 'That's right.' 'It's safe enough now, I suppose. The nights are getting colder, and the snakes like to hole up instead of going out to hunt. Still, one of these times you might find yourself with a bed partner who's just crazy about your body heat.' They passed a car wash, an A&P, a hamburger drive-in with a big Dr. Pepper sign in the window. 'Just look at that eyesore drive-in,' Teasle said. 'They put that thing here on the main street, and ever since, all we've had is kids parked, beeping their horns, throwing crap on the sidewalk.' Rambo sipped his Coke. 'Somebody from town give you a ride in?' Teasle asked. 'I walked. I've been walking since after dawn.' 'Sure am sorry to hear that. Least this ride will help some, won't it?' Rambo did not answer. He knew what was coming. They drove over a bridge and a stream into the town square, an old stone courthouse at the right end, more shops squeezed together down both sides. 'Yeah, the police station is right up there by the courthouse,' Teasle said. But he drove right on through the square and down the street until there were only houses, first neat and prosperous, then gray cracked wooden shacks with children playing in the dirt in front. He went up a rise in the road between two cliffs to a level where there were no houses at all, only fields of stunted corn turning brown in the sun. And just after a sign that read YOU ARE NOW LEAVING MADISON. DRIVE SAFELY, he pulled off the pavement onto the gravel shoulder. 'Take care,' he said. 'And keep out of trouble,' Rambo answered. 'Isn't that how it goes?' 'That's good. You've been this route before. Now I don't need to waste time explaining how guys who look like you have this habit of being a disturbance.' He lifted the sleeping bag from where Rambo had put it between them, set it on Rambo's lap, and leaned across Rambo to open the passenger door. 'Take good care now.' Rambo got slowly out of the car. 'I'll be seeing you,' he said and flipped the door shut. 'No,' Teasle answered through the open passenger window. 'I guess you won't.' He drove the cruiser up the road, made a U turn, and headed back toward town, sounding his car horn as he passed. Rambo watched the cruiser disappear down the road between the two cliffs. He sipped the last of his Coke, tossed the bottle in a ditch, and with his sleeping bag slung by its rope around his shoulder, he started back to town. 2 The air was sticky with frying grease. Rambo watched the old lady behind the counter peer out the bottom of her bifocal glasses at his clothes and hair and beard. 'Two hamburgers and a Coke,' he told her. 'Make that to go,' he heard from behind. He looked at the reflection in the mirror behind the counter and saw Teasle braced in the front doorway, holding the screen door open, letting it slam shut with a whack. 'And make that a rush job, will you, Merle?' Teasle said. 'This kid's in a powerful hurry.' Only a few customers were in the place, sitting at the counter and in some of the booths. Rambo watched their reflection in the mirror as they quit chewing and looked over at him. But then Teasle leaned against the juke box by the door, and it seemed like nothing serious was going to happen, so they went back to work on their food. The old lady behind the counter had her white head cocked to one side, puzzled. 'Oh yeah, Merle, and while you're fixing that stuff, how about a fast coffee,' Teasle said. 'Whatever you like, Wilfred,' she said, still puzzled, and went to pour the coffee. That left Rambo looking at the mirror at Teasle looking at him. Teasle had an American Legion pin opposite the badge on his shirt. I wonder which war, Rambo thought. You're just a bit young for the second one. He swung round on his stool and faced him. 'Korea?' he said, pointing at the pin. 'That's right,' Teasle said flatly. And they went on watching each other. Rambo shifted his eyes down to Teasle's left side and the handgun he wore. It was a surprise, not the standard police revolver but a semi-automatic pistol, and from the big handle Rambo decided it was a Browning 9 millimeter. He had used a Browning once himself. The handle was big because it held a clip of thirteen bullets instead of the seven or eight that most pistols held. You couldn't slam a man flat on his back with one shot from it, but you could sure hurt him bad, and two more would finish him, and you still had ten more shots for anybody else around. Rambo had to admit that Teasle carried it awfully well, too. Teasle was five foot six, maybe seven, and for a smallish man that big pistol ought to have hung awkward, but it didn't. You have to be pretty large to get a grip on that big handle though, Rambo thought. And then he looked at Teasle's hands, amazed at the size of them. 'I warned you about that staring,' Teasle said. Leaning against the juke box, he unstuck his wet shirt from his chest. Left-handed, he took a cigarette from a pack in his shirt pocket, lit it, snapping the wood match he had used in half, then snickered, shaking his head in amusement as he walked over to the counter and smiled strangely down at Rambo on the stool. 'Well, you sure put one over on me, didn't you?' he said. 'I wasn't trying to.' 'Of course not. Of course you weren't. But you sure put one over on me just the same, didn't you?' The old lady set Teasle's coffee down and faced Rambo. 'How do you want your burgers? Plain or dragged through the garden?' 'What?' 'Plain or with fixings?' 'With lots of onion.' 'Whatever you like.' She went off to fry the hamburgers. 'Yeah, you really did,' Teasle said to him and smiled strangely again. 'You really put one over.' He frowned at the dirty cotton bulging from a rip in the stool next to Rambo and sat reluctantly. 'I mean, you act like you're smart. And you talk like you're smart, so I naturally assumed you got the idea. But then you come dragging back here and fool me, and that's enough to make a man wonder if maybe you're not smart at all. Is there something wrong with you? Is that what it is?' 'I'm hungry.' 'Well, that just doesn't interest me at all,' Teasle said, drawing on his cigarette. It had no filter and after he exhaled, he picked off bits of tobacco that were stuck to his lips and tongue. 'A fellow like you, he ought to have brains to carry a lunch with him. You know, for when he has some emergency, like you have now.' He lifted the cream pitcher to pour into his coffee, but then he noticed the bottom of the pitcher, and his mouth went sour at the yellow curds that were clinging there. 'You need a job?' he asked quietly. 'No.' Then you already got a job.' 'No, I don't have a job either. I don't want a job.' 'That's called being a vagrant.' 'Call it whatever the hell you want.' Teasle's hand slammed like a shot on the counter. 'You watch your mouth!' Everyone in the place jerked his head toward Teasle. He looked around at them, and smiled as if he had said something funny, and leaned close to the counter to sip his coffee. 'That'll give them something to talk about.' He smiled and took another draw on his cigarette, picking more specks of tobacco off his tongue. The joke was over. 'Listen, I don't get it. That rig of yours, the clothes and hair and all. Didn't you know when you came back down the main street out there you'd stand out like some black man? My crew radioed in about you five minutes after you got back.' 'What took them so long?' 'The mouth,' Teasle said. 'I warned you.' He looked like he was ready to say more, but then the old lady brought Rambo a half-full paper bag and said, 'Buck thirty-one.' 'For what? For that little bit?' 'You said you wanted the fixings.' 'Just pay her,' Teasle said. She held onto the bag until Rambo gave her the money. 'O.K., let's go,' Teasle said. 'Where?' 'Where I take you.' He emptied his cup in four quick swallows and put down a quarter. Thanks, Merle.' Everybody looked at the two of them as they walked to the door. 'Almost forgot,' Teasle said. 'Hey, Merle, one more thing. How about cleaning the bottom on that cream pitcher.' 3 The cruiser was directly outside. 'Get in,' Teasle said, tugging at his sweaty shirt. 'Damn, for the first of October it sure is hot. I don't know how you tolerate wearing that hot jacket.' 'I don't sweat.' Teasle looked at him. 'Sure you don't.' He dropped his cigarette down a manhole grate by the curb, and they got into the cruiser. Rambo watched the traffic and the people going past. In the bright sun after the dark lunch counter, his eyes hurt. One man walking by the cruiser waved to Teasle, and Teasle waved back, then pulled away from the curb into a break in traffic. He was driving fast this time. They went down past a hardware store and a used car lot and old men smoking cigars on benches and women pushing children in strollers. 'Look at those women,' Teasle said. 'A hot day like this and they don't have the sense to keep their kids indoors.' Rambo did not bother looking. He just closed his eyes and leaned back. When he opened them, the cruiser was speeding up the road between the two cliffs, up onto the level where the stunted corn drooped in the fields, past the YOU ARE NOW LEAVING MADISON sign. Teasle stopped the car abruptly on the gravel shoulder and turned to him. 'Now get it clear,' he said. 'I don't want a kid who looks like you and doesn't have a job in my town. First thing I know, a bunch of your friends will show up, mooching food, maybe stealing, maybe pushing drugs. As it is, I've half a notion to lock you up for the inconvenience you've caused me. But the way I see it, a kid like you, he's entitled to a mistake. It's like your judgment's not as developed as an older man's and I have to make allowances. But you come back again and I'll fix you so you won't know whether your asshole's bored, bunched, or pecked out by crows. Is that plain enough for you to understand? Is that clear?' Rambo grabbed hold of the lunch sack and his sleeping bag and got out of the car. 'I asked you a question,' Teasle said out the open passenger door. 'I want to know if you heard me tell you not to come back.' 'I heard you,' Rambo said, flipping the door shut. 'Then dammit, do what you hear you're told!' Teasle stomped on the gas pedal and the cruiser lurched off the road shoulder, gravel flying, onto the smooth hot pavement. He made a severe U-turn, tires squealing, and sped back toward town. This time he did not sound his car horn going past. Rambo watched the cruiser get smaller and disappear down the hill between the two cliffs, and when he could no longer see it, he glanced around at the fields of corn and the mountains in the distance and the white sun in [?missing page 15?] and then he was decided. He grabbed the rope on his sleeping bag, slung it around his shoulder and started hiking into Madison again. At the bottom of the hill into town, trees lined the road, half-green, half-red, the red leaves always on the branches that hung over the road. From exhaust fumes, he thought. Exhaust fumes kill them early. Dead animals lay here and there along the roadside, likely hit by cars, bloated and speckled with flies in the sun. First a cat, tiger-striped - looked like it had been a nice cat too - next a cocker spaniel, then a rabbit, then a squirrel. That was another thing the war had given him. He noticed dead things more. Not in horror. Just in curiosity of how they had come to end. He walked past them down the right side of the road, thumb out for a ride. His clothes were filmed yellow with dust, his long hair and beard were matted dirty, and all the people driving by took a look at him, and nobody stopped. So why don't you clean up your act? he thought. Shave and get a haircut. Fix up your clothes. You'll get your rides that way. Because. A razor's just one more thing to slow you down, and haircuts waste money you can spend on food, and where would you shave anyhow; you can't sleep in the woods and come out looking like some kind of prince. Then why walk around like this, sleeping in the woods? And with that, his mind moved in a circle and he was back to the war. Think about something else, he told himself. Why not turn around and go? Why come back to this town? It's nothing special. Because, I have a right to decide for myself whether I'll stay in it or not. I won't have somebody decide that for me. But this cop is friendlier than the rest were. More reasonable. Why bug him? Do what he says. Just because somebody smiles when he hands me a bag of shit, that doesn't mean I have to take it. I don't give a damn how friendly he is. It's what he does that matters. But you do look a little rough, as if you might cause trouble. He has a point. So do I. In fifteen goddamn towns this has happened to me. This is the last. I won't be fucking shoved anymore. Why not explain that to him, clean yourself up a bit? Or do you want this trouble that's coming? You're hungry for some action, is that it? So you can show him your stuff? I don't have to explain myself to him or anybody else. After what I've been through, I have a right without explanation. At least tell him about your medal, what it cost you. Too late to stop his mind from completing the circle. Once again he returned to the war. 4 Teasle was waiting for him. As soon as he drove past the kid, he had glanced up at his rearview mirror, and there the kid had been, reflected small and clear. But the kid was not moving. He was just standing there at the side of the road where