First Blood (Rambo: First Blood Series Book 1)

by David Morrell

“I can teach you how to write but not what to write about.”

It occurred to me that, if I’d turned off 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.

Wary of stereotypes, I wanted him to be as complex as the action would allow.

the intention was to make him as motivated and sympathetic as Rambo, because the viewpoints that divided America came from deep, well-meant convictions.

were both men heroes, both men villains?

My intent was to transpose the Vietnam War to America. In contrast, the film’s intent was to make the audience cheer for the underdog.

If you’ve heard about him but haven’t met him before, he’s about to surprise you.

“No, by God. Not this time. This time I won’t be pushed.”

“I’m telling you,” the policeman said. “I don’t like being stared at.” “Who does?”

I wonder which war, Rambo thought. You’re just a bit young for the second one.

The handle was big because it held a clip of thirteen bullets instead of the seven or eight that most pistols held.

My crew radioed in about you five minutes after you got back.” “What took them so long?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

Teasle could give up the game at this point and leave him alone; if he did not, well then it was Teasle who wanted the trouble, not himself.

And that was it, Rambo decided. One of them was going to have to back down, or else Teasle was going to get hurt. Bad.

No, not for this, he told himself. You’re all right now.

You kept your life at home where it belonged. If your problems made you start to rush through something, then you forced yourself to slow and do it extra well.

To Marine Corps Master Sergeant Wilfred Logan Teasle. For conspicuous and valiant leadership in the face of overwhelming enemy fire, his citation read. The Chosin Reservoir Campaign. December 6, 1950.

Always it came, some remark. Always.

Special Forces school and the five miles they made him run before breakfast, the ten miles of running after breakfast,

That was the point of becoming a Green Beret. He could take anything.

“In the war.” That was a weakness. He should not have answered. “Oh sure. Sure you did. In which army?” Rambo almost killed him right then.

The guy was so efficient in the office, always second-guessing; now, with no routine for this kind of trouble, he was stupidly acting on impulse.

Fifteen years he had been a policeman and he had never lost a prisoner and he had never had a partner killed. He wanted to smash the kid’s face against cement.

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 knew Orval had them trained so well that they only barked when they were supposed to.

He understood why he did not like advice: there were teachers he sometimes met who could not stop lecturing once they were out of class, and he was a little like them, so used to giving orders that he could not accept someone telling him what to do.

Long and firm, Orval had said. Make your handshake as good as your word. Long and firm.

What did this kid do to you, Will?” “He sliced one deputy nearly in half and beat another maybe blind.” “Yeah Will,” Orval said and struck the match, cupping it to light his cigarette. “But you didn’t answer me. What did this kid do to you?”

nobody had better push too close or he would push back—hard.

He called out in Vietnamese, in the little French he had learned in high school. He mocked a southern accent, a western one, a British one.

That was how these outfits were run, always in the family, an old man to give the orders and one or more juniors to do the work.

Or they might be an inbred family, not intelligent enough to see the logic he was using.

It tasted like two hundred proof, golden-strong and burning his tongue and throat, flooding hot every inch down to his stomach.

But he had not felt this alive in years, excited to be in action again, eager to chase after the kid.

I don’t sleep much anymore. Not because I can’t. I just begrudge the time spent.”

She was the one who had left, not the other way around, and that made it look as though he was in the wrong. Maybe he was. But she was too.

in a way I’m glad she went, I’m on my own again, no more arguments, free to do what I want when I want, come home late without calling to explain I’m sorry to miss dinner, go out if I feel like it, screw around.

But it’s the little things that make a town what it is, that you can watch to make it safe.

It’s me I was concerned about as much as the kid. I can’t allow myself to loosen up. I can’t keep order one time and not another.”

Shoes too large, pants too tight, it was a good joke on him.

a .30-30 lever action, the power to whack a bullet through a man a half-mile away as if close through a block of cheese.

“This is the police,” the man’s voice boomed from the copter’s loudspeaker. “You don’t have a chance, give up. Anyone in these woods. A dangerous fugitive may be near you. Show yourselves. Wave if you’ve seen one young man alone.”

For sure he could hit them. But explode them? It was only in dreams that a man without phosphorus-tipped ammunition ever managed that trick.

Because he was trembling, he trembled even more:

In a way, it was funny, a seventy-two-year-old man setting the pace, running them all into the ground.