First Blood by Thriller Writer David Morrell

David Morrell, can you talk about how you got the idea for the story?

How does it feel to have created one of the most iconic characters in literature?

At the end of Ch. 1, Wilfred Teasle, police chief of Madison, Kentucky, drops Rambo outside the town limits. Immediately, Rambo starts back into town. As a reader, I was on edge. After being “escorted” out of 15 towns, Rambo thinks, “I have a right to decide for myself whether I’ll stay … or not. I won’t have somebody decide that for me.” He almost tells Teasle about his Congressional Medal of Honor but feels he shouldn’t have to explain himself. This internal debate seems very real, very human. Tell him, I kept thinking. Though I, too, felt he shouldn’t have to.

Early on, Teasle says, “What do you say we don’t lose our perspective?” Yet Teasle, too, can’t leave well enough alone. They both see the other as the one doing the “pushing.”

Rambo thinks about Vietnam, where “some of the soldiers he had heard in the night and hid from must have been Americans.” Teasle thinks about friendly fire incidents in Korea and Louisville, Kentucky. Even his father had died in a hunting incident. Even the civilians who gather to hunt down Rambo cause chaos, much as Teasle predicted. David Morrell, can you talk a bit about friendly fire and the idea that we don’t always (or ever) really know who we’re fighting?

Teasle sees Rambo’s bullet scar above his knee, scars across his chest, and lash marks on his back, but he doesn’t know Rambo’s story. Trautman points out that Rambo hadn’t been acting normally, and Teasle hadn’t bothered to find out why. Trautman says to Teasle, “You went after a man you didn’t know anything about, not even his name. There’s a rule we teach—never engage with an enemy until you know him as well as yourself.” Teasle has a Distinguished Service Cross (from his time in Korea). It’s the second highest medal you can get (only Rambo’s Congressional Medal of Honor ranks higher). This was powerful — everyone has a story, and when we don’t know that story we tend to fill in the gaps with our own expectations and biases.

In the midst of a terrific storm, Teasle realizes he “had not been chasing the kid. It was the other way around. He had been letting the kid lead them into an ambush.” What Teasle doesn’t know will, in fact, hurt him (and kill all his men). Rambo’s Special Forces/Green Beret training prepared him to outmaneuver, outlast, and survive most anything. Rambo has every advantage. He’s a guerilla fighter who knows how to live off the land and lie in wait patiently for the kill. He’s alone, hard to spot, and doesn’t need to follow orders. Teasle’s team was outmatched, yet he “had been determined not to radio for help no matter what happened. Even when he saw the crashed and burning helicopter, he had not called. But Orval. Orval was going to die.” After seeing Rambo kill two men with ease at the police station, Teasle didn’t call the state police for help. It’s like his brain is muddled. I have trouble forgiving Teasle for what seems like the ultimate hubris here. How do you feel, David Morrell?

Rambo has an alcoholic father who tried to kill him with a knife. Colonel “Uncle” Sam Trautman is shocked by Rambo’s actions (particularly pursuing Teasle and his deputies as they retreated) while simultaneously feeling a sense of fatherly pride. Orval Kellerman, age 72, is Teasle’s “second” father (after his father had been killed). (Though Orval says a hurtful thing – that Teasle was “like” a son). Even Teasle and Rambo might be seen as father and son. Teasle himself wants to be a father. David Morrell, can you talk about the ways father-son relationships are key to your writing?

​​​​Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) wasn’t defined or fully understood in 1972 when First Blood was published. The term PTSD first appeared in 1980 in the DSM-lll. Until then, suffering veterans were said to have “soldier’s heart,” “shell shock,” “war neurosis,” or even “Vietnam syndrome.” [Lord Peter Wimsey has PTSD in Dorothy Sayers’ Whose Body (1923).] He had been a POW. He had been on the run. Six months after returning from Vietnam, he still has 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 has trouble sleeping, wakes if he hears any noise, sleeps in the open. At the police station, he “did not want to hurt anyone, but … he could feel his anger spreading out of control.” Teasle, in turn, says that he had to punish Rambo because he “can’t keep order one time and not another.” The depiction of PTSD here is powerful. David Morrell, is keeping order Teasle’s way of taming his own demons?

You’ve said that you were thinking in part about Audie Murphy when you wrote the novel. Murphy was America’s most decorated soldier in World War II, and he had trouble adapting to peacetime, post-war. World War II was quite different from Vietnam. Teasle himself served in Korea. Can you speak to different kinds of warfare and how these differences affected those who served?

Rambo brings the war home. Trautman says, “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.” “We forced him into it over there, and now he’s bringing it all back home.” When Teasle says, “I don’t kill for a living,” Trautman replies, “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.” First Blood doesn’t feel like a political book, yet politics are bubbling up under the surface. Rambo could have just as easily been a war protester. David Morrell, can you talk about the idea of bringing the war home?

First Blood is your debut novel, the “father” of modern action novels. It was published in 1972 while you were a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa. You taught American literature there from 1970 to 1986, simultaneously writing other action thrillers and mystery novels, many international bestsellers. David Morrell, what was it like to publish First Blood while teaching? What was the response to the book on campus and in the classroom? Were you teaching American literature? What were some of your favorite courses and books to teach?

In grad school, you wrote a master’s thesis on Ernest Hemingway and a doctoral dissertation on John Barth (author of Giles Goat-Boy, 1966, a postmodern satirical Cold War fantasy/allegory). What influence did these two very different writers have on you? You’ve said that when you started First Blood back in 1968, you were deeply influenced by Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male. “The inventiveness of the plot, the power of the action, and the quality of the prose opened my eyes to the wonder of suspense fiction. Talk a bit about the influence of Rogue Male. Tell us how it went when you asked Geoffrey Household to read First Blood?

In the mine, Rambo must pass through a bat’s den. “He ceased his fight with them, gave himself up to them … and in that wonderful release from fear and desperation, utterly hopeless and passive … he came to understand [them].” They weren’t attacking him; they’re trying to get out. (Imagine if Teasle had had as much insight into Rambo.) “He had never felt so good.” He becomes accustomed to the darkness of the underground and undergoes a spiritual change. The fields, forests, mud-filled pool, pleasure of exertion, theme of hunter vs. hunted, and Rambo’s underground baptism by burial seem reminiscent of Rogue Male. Would you agree, David Morrell?

Trautman goes off to kill Rambo, but Teasle is obsessed with being present. He believes Rambo wants Teasle to kill him. Rambo knows he’s dying. “The one choice left to him was how to die, and it was not going to be like a holed-up, wounded animal.”

The alternating viewpoints between Rambo and Teasle came as a surprise. You’ve said that Rambo represents the disaffected, while Teasle represents the establishment. However, both are sympathetic characters. There’s no clear hero or victim. David Morrell, did you (or do you) see yourself more closely aligned with one character or the other? The book focuses on both Rambo and Teasle, while Rambo seems much more clearly a victim in the film. The book also ends very differently than the movie. How do you feel about these differences between the novel and the film?

Teasle assumes Rambo is a vagrant – unemployed, doing drugs, stealing. He looks a bit like a hippie war protester. Later in the book, Teasle tells Trautman, “Your school trained him well. … He did exactly what he was trained to do, and that’s how I outguessed him.” Teasle says, “You have to be in his place. You have to pretend that you’re him.” In fact, Teasle comes to think of Rambo differently by the end of the book. He says, “I shot him, and all at once I didn’t hate him anymore.” He even seems to be able to sense what Rambo will do. Can you talk about this evolution?

Getting the first film released in 1982 was a time-consuming, complex process. David Morrell, can you tell us about that process? Did you think the film would ever be made? [key actors: Sylvester Stallone, Brian Dennehy as Teasle, and Richard Crenna as Trautman]]

You wrote novelizations of the first two sequels to First Blood. Not everyone will be familiar with the term “novelization” – can you explain how a novelization works?