First Blood (Rambo: First Blood Series Book 1)

by David Morrell

Six months back from the war and still he had the urge to destroy what was left of what he had eaten so he would not leave a trace of where he had been.

He shook his head. Thinking about the war had been a mistake. Instantly he was reminded of his other habits from the war: trouble getting to sleep, waking with the slightest noise, needing to sleep in the open, the hole where they had kept him prisoner fresh in his mind.

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.

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.

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.

He would head for Mexico. He would hole up in Mexico in a little coast town and swim every day in the sea. But he had better not ever see that sonofabitch Teasle again. He had promised himself that he was through hurting people, and now that sonofabitch had made him kill once more, and if Teasle kept pushing, Rambo was determined to give back a fight Teasle would wish to God he had never started.

He paused, peering at each flashlight, giving them time to think. “The trouble is, if you don’t give me food and clothes and a rifle, then I’m not leaving here until I find that still of yours, and in the morning the police will follow my track through there. It won’t matter if you take the thing apart tonight and hide it. I’ll come after you to where the parts are hid.” “We’d wait for dawn to take it apart,” the old man said. “You can’t afford to stay here that long.” “With bare feet I can’t go much farther anyway. No. Believe me. The way I am,

He’s an expert in guerrilla fighting, he knows how to live off the land, so he doesn’t have the problem that you do of bringing up food and supplies for your men. He’s learned patience, so he can hide somewhere and wait out this fight all year if he has to. He’s just one man, so he’s hard to spot. He’s on his own, doesn’t have to follow orders, doesn’t have to synchronize himself with other units, so he can move fast, shoot and get out and hide some place else, then do the same all over again. Just like my men taught him.” “That’s fine,” Teasle said. “Now you teach me.”

“I don’t kill for a living.” “Of course not. You tolerate a system that lets others do it for you. And when they come back from the war, you can’t stand the smell of death on them.”

“But you saw he wasn’t acting normally, and you didn’t try very hard to find out why. He was a vagrant, you said. What the hell else could he have been? He gave up three years to enlist in a war that was supposed to help his country, and the only trade he came out with is how to kill. Where was he supposed to get a job that needed experience like that?”

“For a colonel, the way you’re talking, you don’t seem to like the military very much.” “Of course I don’t. Who in his right mind would?” “Then what are you staying in it for, especially doing that job of yours, teaching men to kill?” “I don’t. I teach them to stay alive. As long as we send men anywhere to fight, the most important thing I can do is make damn sure at least some of them come back. My business is saving lives, not taking them.”

Fighting against him would be like fighting against myself, because I suspect he was pushed into this—”

As much as I hate war, I fear the day when machines take the place of men. At least now a man can still get along on his talents.”

There was a counter-rule: when somebody wants you to second-guess them, that’s when you don’t try. The best reaction is to go on as if you never heard it.

Just because he was living like an animal, he thought, didn’t mean he had to feel like one. That was from training school. Be clean whenever you can. It makes you go longer and fight better.