First Blood (Rambo: First Blood Series Book 1)

by David Morrell

Christ, he thought. 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

“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.”

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.”

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.

The native allies in the war had called it the way of Zen, the journey to arrive at the pure and frozen moment, achieved only after long arduous training and concentration and determination to be perfect. A part of movement when movement itself ceased.