CHAPTER 2

EDUCATION & THE M-60

What Rambo Taught Me About Morality, Politics, & Being a Man

“I called to the executioners that I might gnaw their rifle-butts while dying. I called to the plagues to smother me in blood, in sand. Misfortune was my God. I laid myself down in the mud. I dried myself in the air of crime. I played sly tricks on madness.” - Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

RAMBO AT THIRTEEN AND THIRTY SEVEN In 1982, the first film in the Rambo series opened in theaters. I was ten years old and in the fourth grade. For whatever reasons, Dad took us to see Conan the Barbarian but not First Blood. I caught First Blood (Kotcheff, 82) when network television started to run it. I remember my parochial school friends who were into hunting with their fathers being really into the film and the John Rambo character. I enjoyed the movie and always thought it was sad when Colonel Troutman (played by Richard Crenna) leads Rambo to his captivity at the end while Dan Hill sings “It’s a Long Road” on the soundtrack, kind of the same morose feeling I caught every week watching Bill Bixbie as David Banner hitchhiking down the road at the end of every episode of The Incredible Hulk. It wasn’t until 1985 and the release of a sequel, Rambo: First Blood, Part 2, that I really got hooked on the Rambo character and, unwittingly but head over heels, the themes pervading the film. Rambo, the films, the novels, and the character, need to be viewed as a text, as cultural artifacts that teach us what is real, what is good, and what is possible. With hindsight I think I have a grasp of what it was that “hooked” me into the Rambo character, the franchise, and the underlying political and ethical messages, and this deconstruction—of my own attraction and the film’s motifs—constitute the scope of this chapter. Like many pre-teen and teenage boys (and girls for that matter) I was experiencing firsthand the construction of gender, the ascribing of meaning to what it entails to be born sexually male or female. The 80s were a time of action heroes in film, and the demographic these movies aimed for were teenage males to men in their 30s and 40s. That these action heroes—from Stallone to Schwarzenegger to Jean-Claude Van Damme to Dolph Lundgren—were “jacked” (hyper-muscular) is not incidental. The build Sylvester Stallone unveiled in Rambo: First Blood, Part II (Cosmatos, 85), was what we then called “diesel,” what kids in the high school where I teach today call “brolic.” Rambo was more muscular and ripped than any action hero icon of the silver screen up to that time. I distinctly recall a scene in the film where Stallone affixes his bandana, filmed from behind to capture the muscles of his arms, shoulders, and back as they ripple; the entire theater erupted in cheers for

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Sly’s muscles and also for the fact that we all knew Rambo was about to get some payback for the death of his potential girlfriend. Fast forward twenty three years later to 2008 and, again, an entire theater applauded when a brutal Burmese soldier’s head disintegrated after being hit by a .50 caliber shell in the fourth film in the franchise (Stallone, 08). These were and—with the release of Rambo in ‘08 and talk of a fifth film in the works—remain action films. The action of Rambo’s two-through-four carried extremely high bodycounts. This represents a disparity with the first film, where we only see one man die, an evil sheriff’s deputy who, hell-bent on exterminating John Rambo, gets pitched off his perch sniping from a helicopter skid to his death on rocks below (after Rambo hurls a stone at the windshield, causing the pilot to jerk back on the yolk and send the whirly-bird cantering—in other words, an unintended death). To me and my friends, who were in various stages of puberty with testosterone coursing through our bodies and hair sprouting in places it had never been before, the site of Sylvester Stallone wielding a twenty-five pound M-60 squad automatic machine gun (and feeding it linked ammunition himself, usually with bandoliers of 7.62mm rounds crossing his chest), a Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) launcher, or dispatching enemies with an outsized “survival knife” and explosive-tipped arrows from a compound bow, these visions sent us into paroxysms of applause; an ovation that would rival any fans’ at a football game. I was personally primed for the action, weaponry, and muscularity to appeal to me. My father had gotten me into reading through comic books. I remember him bringing home titles like Devil Dinosaur (Kirby, 78) and the original twenty four issue print run of Marvel’s Godzilla (Moench, 77). We’d sit and read these to one another and this early love of reading sparked a nascent literacy and facility with the written word in me. I distinctly recall dad bringing home G.I. Joe (Hama, 82) number one: the cover depicted a group of heavily-armed special forces soldiers springing into action, weapons blazing, from atop a massive tank. Go Joe! I was hooked and stayed loyal to the series through issue one-hundred-and-something until it had even gotten too silly for me. I started collecting the action-figures, tanks, planes, and even the P.I.T., G.I. Joe’s base, and would amuse myself for hours with fake battles between G.I. Joe and their nemesis, the evil terrorist organization, Cobra. They fought against and then with their Soviet counterparts, the October Guard. There were other action and war comic books on top of Larry Hama’s G.I. Joe, many with World War II settings such as Sgt. Rock (Kanigher, 59) and Haunted Tank (Kanigher, 61), the latter which ran in D.C. comic’s G.I. Combat and featured the spiritual guidance of Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart. At the time I was a small boy, slight of build and frame, though I did develop a bit of a paunch in 8th grade from bad eating habits and general physical inactivity. I had held my own throughout elementary school but something happened around 6th grade or so, maybe a lack of confidence, and I found myself the occasional butt of a group of bullies. I’ll be the first to say I wasn’t bullied as bad as some other students were, but the effect—feeling that no matter what I did, from eating crow to avoid confrontation to fighting back when no other option seemed possible to joining the bullies in bullying someone else in the hopes it would distract them from

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