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John Rambo - The Vietnam veteran



Sylvester Stallone
("John Rambo")
Name: John J. Rambo
Date of Birth July 6th, 1947
Place of Birth: Bowie, Arizona
Origin: Indian-German
Joined the Army: August 6th, 1964
Occupation: Green Beret of the "Special Forces"
Specialization: Light Weapons, cross-trained as medic.Helicopter and language qualified
Stats: 59 confirmed kills, 2 Silver Stars, 4 Bronze, 4 Purple Hearts, 1 distinguished Service Cross and the Congressional Medal of Honor
Commander: Colonel Samuel Trautman
"Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don't turn it off! It wasn't my war! You asked me I didn't ask you! And I did what I had to do to win, for somebody who wouldn't let us win! Then I come back to the world, and I see all those maggots at the airport, protestin' me, spittin', callin' me a baby killer and all kinds of vile crap! Who are they to protest me?! Huh?! Who are they?! Unless they been me and been there and know what the hell they yellin' about!"

Sylvester Stallone about his figure "John Rambo" & his thoughts about the Vietnam war:
" It was the first time, that we had had this kind of super soldier now declare a war with high tech weapons on his own country. I had mixed feelings about the war. At the beginning I was very much behind the war and then I felt that the soldiers were getting kind of a raw deal, because around 1970 you realize that there was no chance for us to win this war..and the soldiers had no chance. I had a real problem with calling them baby killers and spitting on returning GIs. I thought it was horrible, I know they went terribly slided...

The police men in First Blood deal with a modern Frankenstein creature. Something had been created by the system. So instead of being created by Dr. Frankenstein, this person is created by American Military. Then it escapes and guess what happens...and like the Frankenstein monster it just wants to somehow be absorbed into society and not being an outcast and so is Rambo - Rambostein."


David Morrell
(Author "First Blood")
Author David Morrell about the creation of his character John Rambo:

"One night, I was watching the TV news. I saw two back-to-back stories-a firefight in Vietnam followed by American soldiers patrolling the streets of an American inner-city destroyed by riots. It seemed to me that these were both the same story, and I decided to write a novel in which an embittered American soldier brought the war home.
When I wrote First Blood more than thirty years ago, it never crossed my mind that I was creating a phenomenon. The novel and the film started trends that persist to this day. Unfortunately, in movies, the result has been a barrage of special effects explosions and not much else. My own goal has always been to emphasize characterization as much as action.
In the U.S., many Vietnam veterans saw Rambo in terms of themselves-what they had suffered in Vietnam and what they felt when they came home to a nation that by and large didn’t welcome them. I’ve had many veterans thank me for the character as depicted in the first film.

Morrell tells about the origin of the name "Rambo":

One afternoon while I was writing, my wife came home from a grocery store and said that she'd found a new kind of apple that she thought was delicious. Apples were the farthest thing from my mind while I struggled to find that character's name, but politely I took a bite of the apple and discovered that it was in fact delicious. "What's it called?" I asked. "Rambo," she replied. This was in Pennsylvania, where the Rambo type of apple is grown and appreciated. Instantly, I recognized the sound of force.

It also reminded me of the way some people pronounce the name of a French poet I'd been studying, Rimbaud, whose most famous work is A SEASON IN HELL, which I felt was an apt metaphor for the prisoner-of-war experiences that I imagined Rambo suffering. In my novel, the character had only the last name. Later, the scriptwriters for the movie gave him a first name "John", as in the song about a returning WWII veteran, "When Johnny Comes Marching Home".