The Lineup: The World's Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives

RAMBO
BY DAVID MORRELL

From 1966 to 1970, I lived in a town surrounded by mountains in the middle of Pennsylvania. The town was State College-University Park, the main campus of Pennsylvania State University. I was a graduate student in the English department. More important with regard to the creation of Rambo, I was a Canadian, born and raised in the twin city of Kitchener-Waterloo in southern Ontario.

The path that led me to Penn State was unusual. In high school, I was hardly what you’d call a motivated student. I liked English classes. I enjoyed acting in local plays. Otherwise, I spent eight hours a day watching television. Truly, I didn’t go to bed until our local station signed off for the night. My high school principal once summoned me from a trigonometry class (merciful salvation) and told me that I would never amount to much.

As things turned out, television showed me the way. At 8:30 p.m. on the first Friday of October in 1960, I watched the premiere of a new television series, Route 66, and my life changed. That series was about two young men in a Corvette convertible, who drove across the United States in search of America and themselves. It was filmed entirely on location. It was brilliantly acted and photographed.

But what I grew to care about was that the majority of the scripts-a blend of intense action and powerful themes-were written by Stirling Silliphant. They so impressed me that at the age of seventeen, I decided that I wanted to be a writer and that Silliphant would be my model. I wrote to Silliphant to tell him so and received a two-page, single-spaced letter that encouraged me to pursue my ambition. Realizing that a writer ought to have an education, I suddenly wanted to get a BA.

St. Jerome ’s College (now a university) was then an affiliate of the University of Waterloo in southern Ontario. It was so small that the English honors program consisted of six students. Often, in the manner of an Oxford tutorial, one of us was required to teach a class while the professor watched and made comments. I received a wonderful education there, but in the process, I forgot my ambition to be Silliphant. At the start of my fourth year in the BA program, I got married. I planned to become a high school English teacher, but then another writer changed my life.

St. Jerome ’s had a library the size of a large living room. One afternoon, expecting to be disappointed, I looked for books that analyzed the work of one of my favorite authors, Ernest Hemingway. To my surprise, I found one. Written by Philip Young, this is how it began:

On the Place Contrescarpe at the summit of the rue

Cardinal Lemoine, Harry remembered, there was a room

at the top of a tall hotel, and it was in this room that he

had written “the start of all he was to do.”

If you’ve ever studied literature in college, you know that scholarly books don’t start that way. But Young’s book had so much tone and vitality that in parts it had the drama of a novel. His style was spellbinding. He made me feel that he was talking directly to me, and he not only informed me, he made me smile. Indeed, a couple of times, he made me laugh, causing a librarian to give me a disapproving look.

By the end of the afternoon, I was so overwhelmed that I went home and said to my wife, Donna, who was a high school history teacher, “I read this amazing book about Hemingway. It’s written by Philip Young, who’s a professor at Penn State, and it’s so fabulously written that I suddenly have this crazy idea. I’d like to go to graduate school at Penn State. I’d like to study with Young. Would you be willing to quit your teaching job and go there with me?”

Donna, who had just learned that she was pregnant, answered, “Yes.”

Thus, in the summer of 1966, shortly after Donna gave birth to our daughter, we packed everything that was important to us into our green Volkswagen Beetle and set off on our odyssey to the United States, where I eventually became Young’s graduate assistant and, under his supervision, wrote my master’s thesis on Hemingway’s style.

This is where Rambo comes in. Penn State paid me to teach freshman composition courses. It also provided reasonably priced apartments at a place called Graduate Circle. Shortly after we moved into one of the units, I met a neighbor, and almost the first thing he said to me was “This damned Vietnam War is getting worse and worse. If it keeps up, the government might stop giving out student deferments.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. The only time I’d heard about Vietnam was three years earlier, in a 1963 Route 66 episode, “Fifty Miles from Home,” in which Silliphant had written about a US soldier who returned from Vietnam (wherever that was) and had trouble shutting down his war mentality. (The episode illustrates how ahead of its time that series was.) In Canada, I’d never paid attention to any news about the Vietnam War. It simply wasn’t on my radar. But at Penn State, typical of universities across the United States, I soon discovered that the war was a constant topic.

Unwilling to admit my ignorance and stand out as a foreigner, I headed for the library, where I discovered that North and South Vietnam were in Southeast Asia. Since 1959, the United States had been involved in a conflict between the two, siding against the Communist regime of the north. In 1964, two American destroyers claimed to have been fired upon by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. An outraged US Congress issued the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave President Johnson the power to conduct military operations against North Vietnam without declaring war. (Many years later, declassified documents revealed that the torpedo boat attacks did not occur and that members of the Johnson administration knew they hadn’t occurred but preferred to use bogus intelligence reports to justify the attacks on North Vietnam.)

I also learned that increasing numbers of young American men were being conscripted and sent to Vietnam. The burden of the draft fell on the unemployed and the uneducated, while college students tended to be given deferments. The pressure to receive scholarships and earn higher-than-average grades was intense, and some students, such as my Graduate Circle neighbor, worried about a time when students would no longer be exempt (this eventually happened in 1971). I didn’t share the same concerns because, in addition to being a student, I was also married with a child, and on top of that, I was foreign, but I didn’t want to set myself apart by admitting that. Moreover, the documentation that came with the temporary-resident card allowing me to stay in the United States made it clear that as a guest, I should refrain from expressing political opinions, and of course, political activities were out of the question. Failure to meet this requirement could result in deportation.

The result was that I fell into a habit of listening to what my fellow students said about the Vietnam War and of studying news reports about it while keeping my opinions to myself. As the decade continued, demonstrations against the war increased across the country. At Penn State, some student teachers made Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, about the 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon, a required reading assignment in freshman courses.

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.

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.

In August of 1970, Donna and I again packed suitcases, put our daughter in our little green car, and set out on another odyssey, this time to the University of Iowa, where Philip Young had written his PhD dissertation on Hemingway and where I was now employed as an assistant professor. There, one of the first things I heard about was the massive student protest that had shut down the Iowa campus after the Kent State shootings. Accounts of that event stoked my emotions when, between preparing classes and teaching, I found time to continue writing First Blood, eventually finishing it in the summer of 1971.

Back at Penn State, a creative-writing professor, Philip Klass (whose pen name is William Tenn), had introduced me to Henry Morrison, a literary agent who accepted me as a client. Until that time, few novels had the amount of action that First Blood had. Henry wondered if a hardback publisher would be comfortable with it, but six weeks after the novel was submitted, a hardback house, M. Evans and Co., accepted it. Evans was known for its bestselling nonfiction books Body Language and Open Marriage, and promoted First Blood with the enthusiasm it had brought to those other titles.

Columbia Pictures purchased the movie rights for Richard Brooks to write and direct. High schools and colleges taught the book. Before he was a bestselling author, Stephen King used it as one of his two texts when he taught creative writing at the University of Maine (the other was James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity).

Columbia, evidently not liking the script that Brooks prepared, sold the film rights to Warner Bros., which hired Sydney Pollack to direct Steve McQueen, only to realize after six months of script development that McQueen, in his mid-forties, was far too old to be a returning Vietnam veteran. In another possible production, Paul Newman was considered. It’s interesting that the two protagonists are so balanced in the novel that Newman’s role would have been the police chief, whom some book reviewers considered to be the main character.

The project was sold to another studio, and another. Twenty-six scripts were prepared. Finally, ten years after the book’s publication, a new company, Carolco, hired Ted Kotcheff to direct Sylvester Stallone, and the resulting 1982 movie was the most successful autumn release in memory.

Some changes were made. The setting was moved to the Pacific Northwest (to get Canadian financial incentives). The character of the police chief was simplified. The degree of action was reduced. Rambo was allowed to live (although in an early version of the film, he did die). Perhaps most important, the character was softened. My Rambo is furious about his war experience. He hates what he was forced to do, and he especially hates that he discovered he had a skill for killing. It’s the only thing he knows how to do, but he’s a genius at it, and in the novel, when the police chief keeps pushing and pushing, Rambo finally explodes, almost with pride in the destruction he can accomplish.

Not in the movie. Concerned that the character might not be sympathetic, the producers made him a victim. At the start of the film, Rambo walks soulfully to a home near a lake where a black woman hangs washed clothes on a line. Rambo, we discover, is looking for a friend who was in his Special Forces unit, but as the black woman explains, Rambo’s friend died from cancer. Agent Orange, a defoliant used by the military in the Vietnam War, killed him.

After pressing these sympathetic emotional buttons, the script arranges for Rambo to walk into town, where the police chief gives him trouble because he doesn’t like the look of him. In the novel, this motivation works because Rambo has the long hair and beard of a hippie, an automatic target for police officers when I wrote the book. But by 1982, ten years after the novel’s publication, just about all American men had a long-haired hippie appearance. People in the audience murmured to one another, “What’s wrong with the way he looks?” But then the plot got down to business, showing Rambo being harassed by the police, and when the razor came toward him, the book and the movie coincided.

I was fascinated to see how the same story could be interpreted in different ways, but I became even more fascinated when, three years later, I saw how the 1985 sequel film, Rambo (First Blood Part II), interpreted the character in yet another way, as a jingoistic superhero who rescued American POWs, long rumored to still be in Vietnam, and single-handedly won a second version of the Vietnam War, which had ended with the North Vietnamese invasion of Saigon in 1975. One often-quoted line from the film was “Sir, do we get to win this time?” The obvious implication was that American politicians, influenced by the antiwar protests, had hampered the military’s ability to show its full strength.

President Ronald Reagan made frequent references to Rambo in his press conferences. “I saw a Rambo movie last night. Now I know what to do the next time there’s a terrorist hostage crisis.” Not surprisingly, the novel was no longer taught in high schools and colleges. The jingoistic Rambo also appeared in 1988’s Rambo III, in which he fought Soviet forces in Afghanistan, but this time audience emotions weren’t as engaged because the day the movie premiered in American theaters, the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan. Perhaps they’d heard that Rambo was coming. The political controversies struck me as being ironic inasmuch as I’d made so strong an effort to conceal the politics that had prompted me to write the book.

The ironies became stronger. In 2001, now an American citizen, I was on a publicity tour in Poland. So many journalists asked for interviews that I met with them for twelve hours in a row. They all spoke excellent English. A woman in her mid-thirties noted that I seemed surprised by all the journalistic attention I was receiving. She told me that I needed to understand the way Rambo was viewed in her country. During the Solidarity years of the late 1980s, when Polish youth protested against the Soviets, the Rambo movies were not allowed to be shown, but illegal videotapes were smuggled in. She said that protesters would watch the movies to fire up their emotions. They would then put on forehead sweatbands resembling the one Rambo wore and go out to demonstrate. In an indirect way, she said, Rambo was an element in the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Her explanation reminded me that in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, demonstrators were filmed painting “Rambo” on the wall before they tore parts of it down.

Rambo’s name is in the Oxford English Dictionary. In positive and negative ways, it continues to be part of daily vocabulary around the world. The novel has been translated into twenty-six languages. It has never been out of print. But I didn’t expect to see a fourth movie about Rambo. Released twenty years after the previous one, the new film, simply titled Rambo, took the character into one of the most politically repressive and violent regions in the world, Burma, the official name for which is Myanmar. Yet again, my character was reinterpreted, but now, to my surprise, for the first time he was presented in the way that he had appeared in my novel so many years ago: angry and disillusioned. Sickened by violence but knowing that killing is what he does best, Rambo has fallen into despair. He hunts cobras for a snake farm and is so at home with death that he handles them with indifference, just as they seem to recognize a kindred soul and submit to being handled. He spends a lot of time in the rain, trying to cleanse himself of what he has done. People call him “the Boatman,” with all the Greek-myth implications of death and the River Styx. During an anguished scene in which he forges a knife to go into yet another battle, he tells himself: “Admit it. You didn’t kill for your country. You killed for yourself. And for that, God won’t forgive you.”

In a Rambo movie. Absolutely astonishing. After four films and thirty-six years, the character returned to the tone of his origins in my novel. It felt like old times to see him again.