Posted on 05/14/2022 11:13:14 PM PDT by pboyington
This year marks the 40th anniversary of Rambo (First Blood) one of the greatest action adventure movies of all time, but more than that, the quintessential film about PTSD and its traumatic effects on combat veterans.
The film stars Sylvester Stallone as John Rambo, Brian Dennehy as Sheriff Will Teasle and Richard Crenna as Colonel Sam Trautman. It was directed by Ted Kotcheff and the screenplay was written by Michael Kozoll & William Sackheim and Sylvester Stallone.
With the Ghosts of Vietnam haunting America in 1982, the film opens with John Rambo walking down a lonely road in the Pacific Northwest. Immediately, we feel Rambo is a man alone in the world; a man who appears to have no one to protect, love or count on. He smiles lightly as he trudges down a rural path wearing a worn US Army olive drab field jacket decorated solely with a US flag patch. He will soon see his buddy Delmar, who served with him on a Special Forces A- Team in Vietnam. Minutes later, he learns that Delmar died of cancer from exposure to Agent Orange. What would be sad to civilians is devastating to Rambo. His world is crumbling around him. Members of the A Team are all gone, except for Rambo. He has no one left in the world. He moves on down a highway towards a small town, where he hopes to find a meal.
Rambo is soon intercepted by Sheriff Will Teasle who views Rambo as just another homeless bum drifting into his town to panhandle and make trouble. He tells Rambo to get a haircut, a bath and to take off the army field jacket. After an altercation when Teasle arrests Rambo for trespassing and resisting arrest, he is taken to the local small town jail. It is there that things go downhill rapidly. The local cops harass Rambo with a firehose shower. They find his dog tags and seem to have no respect for the fact that Rambo was a soldier, although they do not know about his service record…yet. While trying to shave him for his court appearance, Rambo flashes back to time served in a Viet Cong POW camp. He goes ballistic, takes out several deputies and promptly escapes from the police station on a motorcycle.
Rambo leads Teasle and half a dozen deputies on a wild chase which culminates in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest with Rambo escaping and evading with Special Forces aplomb. He uses a burlap tarp as a poncho and extracts a compass from his Randall knife. While chasing Rambo in a river gorge, Teasle and his men learn that Rambo is a highly decorated former Special Forces soldier and Vietnam veteran, who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. To Teasle it means nothing. He labels Rambo a ‘psycho’ as they chase him into a dark forest filled with enough hastily made booby traps to fill a Viet Cong obstacle course. With dogs and deputies immobilized Rambo takes refuge in a cave.
At a nearby base camp, we are introduced to Colonel Sam Trautman, a Special Forces officer dispatched from the Pentagon. Trautman was Rambo’s commander in Nam and he’s there to ‘get his boy and bring him back to Fort Bragg.’ Crenna, who was a US Army WW2 veteran plays the role of Colonel Sam Trautman brilliantly, even though he is ten years too old for the role. With Trautman’s arrival and Teasle’s egocentric pomposity, we are forced to confront a sad reality; it’s the civilian world against the military, a military still haunted by the Ghosts of Vietnam. Sheriff Teasle himself is a decorated veteran, but of the Korean War and his complete lack of respect for those who served in Vietnam is a main component of the tension and generational conflict.
Trautman contacts Rambo, who’s hiding out in a cave on the radio and asks him to surrender himself to the authorities. After telling Trautman that every member of their SF team is now dead, Rambo informs him that there are no friendly civilians and that they drew first blood.
From this point, the film spirals into more violence as National Guard members nearly kill Rambo with a LAW. He escapes from the cave, steals a deuce and a half truck and heads towards the town with a M-60 machine gun in tow.
Upon hearing of Rambo’s death at the hands of the National Guard, Teasle tells Trautman that Rambo was nothing more than a drifter and a vagrant. Trautman responds, ‘That will look great on his tombstone at Arlington. Killed for vagrancy in Jerkwater, USA.”
By nightfall, Rambo begins to destroy the town and then after a final showdown, he wounds Teasle but spares his life. Surrounded by the police, Trautman tells Rambo he must surrender. It is then that Rambo begins to meltdown in front of the only person left whom he can trust. Rambo tells Trautman that when he came home to the world, “Maggots at the airport were spitting on him, calling him a baby killer, that civilian life is nothing, in the field there was a code of honor, back here’s there’s nothing. I could fly a gunship, drive a tank, handle millions of dollars’ worth of equipment. Back here I can’t even hold a job.”
Rambo continues to breakdown while mumbling incoherently about a buddy who was killed and who died in his hands. He is finally consoled by Trautman who embraces him and leads him outside to surrender to the police.
Upon its release, much of the American public viewed the movie simply as a high octane, action-adventure flick. But, veterans knew better. As the film opens, Jerry Goldsmith’s John Rambo theme plays. It is beautiful and haunting and immediately the audience realizes there is something more to this film than gunfire and explosions. This not a traditional action adventure soundtrack with heroes dispatching a myriad of NVA, VC, Hezbollah and Russians to the tune of overly synthesized 1980’s sounds.
More than anything, Rambo is a story about PTSD and its haunting effects on veterans of all conflicts. The film focuses on several facets of PTSD that Rambo is suffering from.
Rambo is a lonely figure, a man seemingly alienated mentally, spiritually and physically from civilian society who at the beginning of the movie searches for one of the last few friends he has in this world. Like many veterans he feels that he can only relate to and trust the men he served in combat with in Vietnam. He is not only searching for his buddy, but also for a meaning to his new life as he meanders through the civilian world in virtual darkness.
While the 1970’s cinematic anti-hero, ex Green Beret Billy Jack fought the external enemy of bigotry in the name of social justice, Rambo is a man battling internal enemies.
Forty years later, in 2022, America has long since vanquished the Ghosts of Vietnam. While only a small percentage of the nation serves in the military, the country embraces its veterans more openly, while the subject of PTSD is better understood by the medical community.
Still, 20% of all veterans from the Iraqi and Afghanistan War, 12% of veterans from the Gulf War and 15% of veterans from the Vietnam War suffer from PTSD. Those numbers represent reported cases. The fact remains that many veterans simply remain silent about any PTSD issues they may have.
As Memorial Day approaches, let us honor the memory of those who made the ultimate sacrifice. But, let us also salute those who suffer every day from PTSD. May they, like John Rambo, find internal peace in a violent world.
Donald Trump put our Vets first. Look how “America” treated him. At this point America needs several divisions of “Rambos” to bring justice to the elites and restore the Republic.
Only part of Billy Jack worth watching is when he kicks everyone’s ass in the town square.
What is now called PTSD is the result of being immersed in an environment of intense danger, very little sleep, and seeing things our young minds had difficulty processing. We used to call it "the shakes" and it was completely understandable.
We came home, got married, got our education, got jobs and built our lives. Nobody turned into killing machines. We drank too much and many marriages failed - but eventually most of us got over it, just like all the men who returned from war in all the previous generations.
Rambo was an insult, like every other damn "Vietnam war" movie (.Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Deer Hunter, MASH, etc.- and we haven't forgotten how that felt when we got back.
I read the “First Blood” back in ‘73-74 (?), while in the Navy. If I remember correctly, Rambo and the Sheriff both die at the end.
But, of course, that didn’t make for sequels, so...
'First Blood' Director on Original Ending That Gave Stallone's Rambo a Shocking Death
Billy Jack had the worst singing I have ever heard in a movie.
That was enough to make me quit watching.
I don’t know how someone could stomach all four.
Gimme a damn break! I'm an actual combat vet of Vietnam and have the scars to prove it - and that junk you wrote is idiotic.
I know nothing about the author but..
A memorial day message that involves that movie is... well.. pretty disconnected from reality.
Nice write, brother. I did a couple VN tours in armored cav and air cav and have seen most of the films. As to accuracy, mostly crap. Except maybe the rain in Platoon was spot-on. The air cavalry destruction of the village in Apocalypse Now, including the Robert Duvall attitude was more than a little realistic. Of all the war movies, the most accurately disturbing was the opener of Saving Private Ryan. Maybe the closest to PTSD I’ve been since retiring. That’s what the smallest firefight is like, all that destruction and noise and hardly ever seeing the enemy.
BTW, that photo of Stallone? That potato sack fit and form wasn’t the proper field jacket of the era, either. You’d think they could have found one of the early cool ones. I gave one of my originals to my daughter and she made it look terrific. One of the formless ones I just found yesterday while cleaning out my garage. So uncool none of my kids wanted it.
TYFYS
Oh man...didn’t realize there was an alternate ending. Thanks for that.
The first movie, I loved...great action flick that I’ve watched numerous times. The middle couple were OK. The 4th, at least to me, should’ve been the end of the series...as the final scene depicted Rambo returning to his family ranch (walking down the long drive to the house). The 5th movie (with the cartel) was overkill.
But hey, if Rambo survived the 5th movie (I’m not sure he did), and was recalled from the old folk’s home to save someone/somewhere just one more time...I’d buy a ticket. He’d probably mount rocket launchers on his wheelchair, LOL.
PTSD; Home from service and not knowing any better, I got on with OJT in life the best I knew how; albeit in some social-intellectual-spiritual vacuum. Easily found a decent job which just as easily led to a luck of the draw career position. Whatever “issues” I had from service in RVN were resolved by concluding “others had been in deeper s**t than me”. I had stood at the abyss yet skated war’s worst.
Fast-forwarding nearly 20-years, I began experiencing what I thought to be service connected PTSD. To say the least, it was confusing as I thought that was all neatly stored on my mind’s personal history shelf. In my DIY style, came to realize that it wasn’t service connected PTSD but my perception of ethical failures of two next-inline managers. But PTSD nonetheless.
I found the following works by Dr. Jonathan Shay to be of great help in understanding PTSD and perhaps it’s greater presence in daily life. “Jonathan Shay - Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (2002) and Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (2010)
I disagree
“Rucus” was released in 1980 - 2 years before Rambo.
A Vietnam veteran passing through a small town is harassed by local bullies but he fights back, using his wartime skills, and triggers a full-scale police manhunt.
(https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084611/)
Of course we didn’t give them the attention they needed when we called it shell shock either. There’s a reason Nazi memorabilia became such a big part of the outlaw biker image. Cause that’s where a lot of WWII vets found the support they needed, they left our society and made their own.
Most war movies in that genre have been created by American hating leftists.
Now, they own the Presidency.
The U.S. defeated North Vietnam during the Tet Offensive in 1968, was fully out of the fight in 1973, except for the Marines guarding the embassy. Congress lead by Ted Kennedy cut funding to Vietnam in 1975, then the North Invaded.
The U.S. Army already won the Vietnam War five years before Congress lost it. Academics, Hollywood, and the news have been blaming the Army ever since. It has taken a long time to start to correct the record.
Why is the “junk” I wrote idiotic?
We don't need "Vietnam Era vets" implying that we will get violent if somebody give us a hard time.
Don’t forget the KGB was behind the pinko peace movement too. The Left has always despised this country.
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