Authors: Otto Penzler
Meanwhile, some returning veterans enrolled at Penn State. A half dozen of them were assigned to one of my composition courses, where they had major problems accepting me as an authority figure. We were the same age, but they’d been risking their lives in a far-off jungle. As far as they were concerned, I was a draft dodger. Their hostility was strong enough that I asked for an after-class meeting. There, I explained my unique circumstances and won their trust enough to persuade them to tell me about themselves. I learned about how they had nightmares and broke out in spontaneous sweats and dove behind cover whenever an unexpected loud noise sounded like a gunshot. I learned about their anger, their frustration, and their fears. These days, we have a term for what they were enduring—post-traumatic stress disorder. But back then, the only description I could think of dated back to World War I: shell shock.
Across the United States, the antiwar protests became more frequent and more extreme. In early 1968, the government’s insistence that there was a light at the end of the tunnel lost credibility during Tet, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year celebration, when eighty thousand North Vietnamese guerrilla fighters attacked more than a hundred strategic targets in South Vietnam, including nearly all the provincial capitals and Saigon itself.
But my wife and I didn’t need to pay attention to the news to realize that the war wasn’t getting better. In those days, Penn State was on a quarterly system. Four times a year, after classes ended, Donna and I packed suitcases, secured our daughter in a car seat, and drove our Volkswagen Beetle north to visit our relatives in Canada. There wasn’t a direct route. We often took back roads through small towns suffering hard economic times. During our back-and-forth trips in 1966, we passed cemeteries that had occasional American flags on graves, signifying soldiers who had died in Vietnam. In 1967, there were more flags. In 1968, the percentage had increased so dramatically that we wondered if the casualty reports the government released were understated.
Nineteen sixty-eight: Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated that year. So was Bobby Kennedy. At Columbia University, student protests escalated to the point that five buildings were occupied and the university was shut down. I watched the CBS Evening News and was struck by two back-to-back stories. The first showed American soldiers during a firefight in Vietnam. The second showed American National Guardsmen patrolling a riot-devastated street in a burned-out inner city of America. I can no longer recall which riot it was. There were so many. Within days of the King assassination, for example, there had been 110 of them, including one in Washington, DC, ten blocks from the White House. While these were race riots, they had relevance to Vietnam because, compared to whites, a disproportionate number of blacks from inner cities were being drafted due to their poverty and lack of education. It occurred to me that if the television sound were turned down, the two stories might seem like aspects of a single story. The devastated street might appear to be in Vietnam and the firefight might appear to be in the United States.
Watching another television news broadcast, I was stunned by the violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. War protesters marching toward the convention were greeted by almost twelve thousand Chicago police officers, who waged a riot of their own, assaulting anyone in their path, including reporters. These police rioters were so out of control that they didn’t care if their violence was broadcast for hours on network television. It suddenly occurred to me: What if one of those protesters was like those angry veterans I’d encountered in the classes I taught? What if one of those veterans was a man with exceptional combat skills, a former member of a Special Forces team, an escaped POW, and a recipient of the Medal of Honor? What if he’d decided the war was wrong and believed that he’d earned the right to protest it without seeming to be unpatriotic? What if he was furious to begin with, and a police club striking his skull now filled him with an absolutely destructive rage?
In that fashion, the idea for First Blood began growing in me. I recalled a newspaper item about a group of hippies who’d been arrested in a southwestern town. Their beards and hair had been forcibly shaved off, after which they’d been driven out of town, left among the sun-baked yucca plants at the side of the road, and told to keep going. What if one of them had been my imaginary Special Forces veteran, whose experiences in Vietnam had so disturbed him that he’d dropped out of society? How would he have reacted to a policeman coming at him with a razor?
The violent polarization of America became so intense that many of my fellow students feared that the country was headed toward a civil war. I wondered if that could be the subject of a novel. I didn’t know how to dramatize a countrywide civil war, but perhaps I could invent one in miniature. Or perhaps I could invent a small version of the Vietnam War itself, but this private war would take place in the United States.
The question was, how to tell the story. I started thinking about the person who’d made me want to be a writer in the first place: Stirling Silliphant. After Route 66 had gone off the air in 1964, he’d become a much-in-demand screenwriter, eventually receiving an Academy Award for his 1967 adaptation of John Ball’s novel In the Heat of the Night. That story is about a black homicide detective from Philadelphia who travels via train to visit his mother in Mississippi. A change of trains requires him to spend a few hours in a town where a prominent industrialist has just been murdered. The local police seize this black outsider as a likely suspect, only to discover that not only is he innocent but his professional skills can be an asset to them, something the murdered industrialist’s widow insists upon. As the black detective and the southern police chief tensely assess each other, it becomes obvious that the movie is actually a civil-rights story masquerading as a murder mystery.
In creative-writing classes, you often hear that there are only five kinds of stories: a human being against another human being, against nature, against him- or herself, against society, or against God. I’ve never understood how these classifications are helpful, but there they are. Maybe there are only two classifications, however. They’re very powerful and consistent with the theories in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a book I was reading in 1968 when I began thinking about First Blood. Someone goes on a journey, or else a stranger comes to town.
A stranger comes to town. Eight years after Route 66 premiered, making me want to be a writer, Silliphant inspired me to write a quite different version of the stranger who comes to town.
His name was Rambo, and he was just some nothing kid for all anybody knew, standing by the pump of a gas station, on 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. 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.
It took me months of false attempts before I could write that first paragraph. Originally, the plot was a massive, sprawling investigation of a town’s hostility toward a stranger whose looks the residents don’t care for and their too-late discovery that he’s the last man they should anger. But I eventually realized that the story’s focus was Rambo and the police chief, Teasle, who confronts him. The result was that I cut every scene in which Rambo or Teasle wasn’t a viewpoint character and ended with a lean A-B, A-B structure based on scenes that alternated between them.
As for the manhunt aspects of the story, they are based on an actual incident that occurred in central Pennsylvania a few months before I arrived there in 1966. A man named William Hollenbaugh had kidnapped a seventeen-year-old girl and dragged her into the mountains. For the next eight days, state police, FBI agents, local police officers, tracking dogs, and helicopters searched those mountains in what became the largest manhunt in Pennsylvania history and ended with the girl’s rescue and Hollenbaugh’s death.
Locals were still talking about that manhunt in 1968, and although there aren’t any parallels between Rambo and Hollenbaugh, I used details from what became known as “the Shade Gap incident” to make the hunt for Rambo as realistic as I could. I set the book in Kentucky because I wanted a slight southern flavor and because that state has a wilderness area that some people call the Grand Canyon of the East, a dramatic setting for the manhunt in my novel. But essentially, the book has a central Pennsylvania locale, to the point that Bellefonte, a town near State College, is the model for the town of Madison in First Blood.
I hadn’t yet decided on a name for my angry Vietnam veteran. I knew that it had to give the impression of a force of nature, but nothing I tried seemed effective until one afternoon my wife made a big difference by coming home from grocery shopping. She had stopped at a roadside stand that sold apples and had been so impressed by the taste that she bought some.
“You’ve got to try one,” Donna said. “They’re delicious.”
Hunched over my typewriter in search of a name, I was hardly interested in apples, but I figured if I tasted one, I could get back to work, so I took a bite and was so surprisingly impressed that I asked for the apple’s name.
“Rambo,” she said.
“What?” I was stunned by what I was hearing. I thought she was saying “Rimbaud,” the French poet whose A Season in Hell had a big influence on me.
“Rambo,” Donna repeated, and spelled it.
I suppose my jaw dropped. If ever a name sounded like a force of nature, that was it.
art
At Penn State, one of the texts I was required to teach to freshmen was The Last Days of Socrates. In it, Socrates says that no one commits evil intentionally. I’m not sure he’s right about that, but he makes a good point. Most of us have a rationale for our behavior. I might be appalled by what someone else does, but that other person will provide all sorts of reasons for what he or she considers a justifiable act.
That was the logic of First Blood. Rambo is a radicalized Vietnam War hero who comes into conflict with a police chief who is a war hero from Korea’s Chosin Reservoir. In addition, the chief is an Eisenhower Republican who is old enough to be Rambo’s father and whose ideas about warfare are based on conventional tactics as opposed to the guerrilla tactics that are Rambo’s specialty. They are opposites representing the divisions in American culture that led to the violent protests against the war. Rambo and the police chief are so different that they can’t possibly understand each other. In angry frustration, they keep escalating their hostility until they and the town are destroyed.
It’s an allegory of sorts. At one point, the police chief decides that “the kid’s a better fighter, but I’m a better organizer.” He sends for the man who supervised Rambo’s training, Colonel Sam Trautman. The “Sam” is important. He’s “Uncle Sam.” He’s the system that created Rambo, and inevitably that system must destroy Rambo. As the private war ends, Rambo kills the police chief, and then Uncle Sam kills Rambo.
It’s an anti–Vietnam War novel that’s also about bullheaded escalation and the obstinate refusal to see things from someone else’s point of view. It’s about the anger of student protesters who saw older people, especially those in authority, as the enemy. It’s about the arrogance of people in power who won’t admit they’re wrong or tolerate being disagreed with. But as a Canadian who’d been required to sign a loyalty oath before he received his temporary-resident’s card, I couldn’t explicitly say any of that without risking exile from a country I now thought of as my home. Vietnam is hardly mentioned. My task became to write about what was happening in and to the United States and yet to present it as a thriller without moralizing and desk pounding.
In 1969, I interrupted the book to write my doctoral dissertation. Meanwhile, the war continued to escalate, spreading to Laos and Cambodia. The demonstrations against it escalated also, and suddenly they were in my backyard—on February 24, four hundred protesting students occupied the Penn State administration building. Fifteen hundred students with quite different attitudes surrounded the building and threatened the radicals inside. With difficulty, a truce was negotiated. The protesters surrendered.
In 1970, I returned to the novel. On April 15, the Penn State administration building was again occupied by demonstrators. Buses brought in seventy-five state policemen. Students stoned them as they evicted the building’s occupiers. Eighteen policemen were injured. On May 4, three weeks later, Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on unarmed student demonstrators at Kent State University. Four students were killed. Nine others were wounded. Many of the victims were bystanders. Across the country, eight million students went on strike, shutting down numerous universities. Again, I wondered what would have happened if my radicalized Vietnam veteran had been one of those students who were shot at, or if the police chief in my novel had been one of those state troopers who were pelted with rocks at Penn State.
Although my status as a guest in the United States prevented me from putting any of this in First Blood, I could certainly use my anger, dividing it between Rambo and the police chief, heightening their conflict. I kept thinking of Socrates and never favored one character over the other. I wanted the reader to understand both of them and to be dismayed that the protagonists in the novel weren’t capable of doing the same. Their fury guaranteed their mutual destruction.