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.