A life lesson from John Rambo

The first two movies featuring Sylvester Stallone as John Rambo –First Blood and Rambo: First Blood Part II offer up not only action-paced yarns but also a life lesson.

Come again: A life lesson from Rambo movies?! You read that correctly. And the lesson is nothing superficial, either. For John Rambo is more than just an action hero: He is a man haunted by personal demons.   The life lesson of the first two films stems from how he deals with them.

In First Blood, John Rambo drifts across the Pacific Northwest. He is saddened by the discovery that the last comrade in arms he had from his Vietnam War Green Beret team has died. Killed by Agent Orange-caused cancer a year before Rambo came to visit. In the town of Hope, Washington, Rambo is given a ride by police chief Will Teasle (Brian Dennehy) who does not want “drifters” in his town. Teasle does not treat Rambo as a human being but a non-person. He does not even care that Rambo is hungry. This only put’s Rambo’s guard up.   And when Teasle arrests Rambo when he tries to walk back to town, an explosion begins to build inside Rambo.  

His demons pay him a visit while being booked in the form of a flashback to the suffering he endured in a North Vietnamese prison camp he later escaped from. Things are not helped with Gault (Jack Starret), a sadistic deputy of Teasle’s takes pleasure in tormenting Rambo, climaxing in ordering him to be shaved without soap after a “bath” consisting of being hit by a fire hose.  

Big mistake: This triggers another prison camp memory of being tortured with knife cuts, whose scars litter Rambo’s torso.   This is all the spark that building explosion needs to detonate.  Screaming in feral rage, Rambo beats up Gault and every policeman who tries to stop him, including Teasle. From the police station, Rambo flees Hope on a stolen motorcycle into the nearby hills. During Teasle’s pursuit, Rambo indirectly causes Gault’s death by hurling a rock at a helicopter the sadist is sniping at him from.

This is despite Teasle’s radioed demands to know what he was doing. Gault loses his balance and falls screaming to his death. Rambo then plays havoc with (but does not kill) the rest of Teasle’s posse. He leaves Teasle with a stern warning: “Don’t push it or I will give you a war like you wouldn't believe.”  

But Teasle does push it. To the point Rambo (now completely controlled by his demons) returns to Hope, temporarily cuts the road in by blowing up a gas station, and finally confronts Teasle at the police station. Badly wounded, Teasle is only saved by the timely intervention of Colonel Sam Trautman (Richard Crenna) who confronts the former Green Beret who is like a son to him.  At first, Rambo resists Trautman’s demands that he surrenders, but after giving voice to the demons pent-up inside him, Rambo’s inner grief finally brings tears. At last he gives in.

Image courtesy Wikimedia.

At the start of First Blood Part II, we find Rambo in prison with five years of his sentence left to go. But Sam Trautman returns with an offer Rambo accepts: A covert operation seeking out remaining Vietnam POWs in Vietnam has been formed and Rambo is the soldier most likely to accomplish it. But thanks to the double-crossing of mission leader Marshall Murdock (Charles Napier), Rambo is left high and dry when he actually finds a POW.  

Big mistake: Once Rambo is freed from captivity yet again and endures the death of Vietnamese partisan Co (Julia Nickson), the only woman he ever loved, he has been pushed farther than Will Teasle ever did.  Demons from his past sharpen and hone his rage into bringing every skill as a warrior he ever learned to the forefront.  

The combined Vietnamese/Soviet teams hunting him in the jungle begin to die by ones, twos and then scores. No “don’t push it” warnings here; now Rambo is going to give them a “war like they couldn't believe.” The climax of which is Rambo’s attack on the prison camp to free the Americans held there. But in the process, he accomplishes something else: By attacking the camp that spawned the demons inside that raged out of control in Hope, Rambo cleanses them from his soul by taking them out on the guilty place and the guilty people.  

To cap it all, Rambo even freaks out Murdock at the end by almost knifing him and leaves him with a stern warning to find the rest of the POWs or Rambo would find him. While Murdock, Trautman and the other team members take the POWs back to "The World," Rambo chooses to stay in Thailand. At peace with his demons to the point where he wishes to live next door to the country a part of him died in.

So here is the life lesson John Rambo’s story teaches: If tormented by demons, don’t take them out on innocent people or places, but do take them to the people or places responsible and return them to sender any way you can; preferably non-violently, but if a bully traumatized you and is still unrepentant, do a Rambo and slug ‘em one.

Main article image courtesy Wikimedia.