had written “the start of all he was to do.”

If you’ve ever studied literature in college, you know that scholarly books don’t start that way. But Young’s book had so much tone and vitality that in parts it had the drama of a novel. His style was spellbinding. He made me feel that he was talking directly to me, and he not only informed me, he made me smile. Indeed, a couple of times, he made me laugh, causing a librarian to give me a disapproving look.

By the end of the afternoon, I was so overwhelmed that I went home and said to my wife, Donna, who was a high school history teacher, “I read this amazing book about Hemingway. It’s written by Philip Young, who’s a professor at Penn State, and it’s so fabulously written that I suddenly have this crazy idea. I’d like to go to graduate school at Penn State. I’d like to study with Young. Would you be willing to quit your teaching job and go there with me?”

Donna, who had just learned that she was pregnant, answered, “Yes.”

Thus, in the summer of 1966, shortly after Donna gave birth to our daughter, we packed everything that was important to us into our green Volkswagen Beetle and set off on our odyssey to the United States, where I eventually became Young’s graduate assistant and, under his supervision, wrote my master’s thesis on Hemingway’s style.

This is where Rambo comes in. Penn State paid me to teach freshman composition courses. It also provided reasonably priced apartments at a place called Graduate Circle. Shortly after we moved into one of the units, I met a neighbor, and almost the first thing he said to me was “This damned Vietnam War is getting worse and worse. If it keeps up, the government might stop giving out student deferments.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. The only time I’d heard about Vietnam was three years earlier, in a 1963 Route 66 episode, “Fifty Miles from Home,” in which Silliphant had written about a US soldier who returned from Vietnam (wherever that was) and had trouble shutting down his war mentality. (The episode illustrates how ahead of its time that series was.) In Canada, I’d never paid attention to any news about the Vietnam War. It simply wasn’t on my radar. But at Penn State, typical of universities across the United States, I soon discovered that the war was a constant topic.

Unwilling to admit my ignorance and stand out as a foreigner, I headed for the library, where I discovered that North and South Vietnam were in Southeast Asia. Since 1959, the United States had been involved in a conflict between the two, siding against the Communist regime of the north. In 1964, two American destroyers claimed to have been fired upon by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. An outraged US Congress issued the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave President Johnson the power to conduct military operations against North Vietnam without declaring war. (Many years later, declassified documents revealed that the torpedo boat attacks did not occur and that members of the Johnson administration knew they hadn’t occurred but preferred to use bogus intelligence reports to justify the attacks on North Vietnam.)

I also learned that increasing numbers of young American men were being conscripted and sent to Vietnam. The burden of the draft fell on the unemployed and the uneducated, while college students tended to be given deferments. The pressure to receive scholarships and earn higher-than-average grades was intense, and some students, such as my Graduate Circle neighbor, worried about a time when students would no longer be exempt (this eventually happened in 1971). I didn’t share the same concerns because, in addition to being a student, I was also married with a child, and on top of that, I was foreign, but I didn’t want to set myself apart by admitting that. Moreover, the documentation that came with the temporary-resident card allowing me to stay in the United States made it clear that as a guest, I should refrain from expressing political opinions, and of course, political activities were out of the question. Failure to meet this requirement could result in deportation.

The result was that I fell into a habit of listening to what my fellow students said about the Vietnam War and of studying news reports about it while keeping my opinions to myself. As the decade continued, demonstrations against the war increased across the country. At Penn State, some student teachers made Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, about the 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon, a required reading assignment in freshman courses.

Meanwhile, some returning veterans enrolled at Penn State. A half dozen of them were assigned to one of my composition courses, where they had major problems accepting me as an authority figure. We were the same age, but they’d been risking their lives in a far-off jungle. As far as they were concerned, I was a draft dodger. Their hostility was strong enough that I asked for an after-class meeting. There, I explained my unique circumstances and won their trust enough to persuade them to tell me about themselves. I learned about how they had nightmares and broke out in spontaneous sweats and dove behind cover whenever an unexpected loud noise sounded like a gunshot. I learned about their anger, their frustration, and their fears. These days, we have a term for what they were enduring-post-traumatic stress disorder. But back then, the only description I could think of dated back to World War I: shell shock.

Across the United States, the antiwar protests became more frequent and more extreme. In early 1968, the government’s insistence that there was a light at the end of the tunnel lost credibility during Tet, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year celebration, when eighty thousand North Vietnamese guerrilla fighters attacked more than a hundred strategic targets in South Vietnam, including nearly all the provincial capitals and Saigon itself.

But my wife and I didn’t need to pay attention to the news to realize that the war wasn’t getting better. In those days, Penn State was on a quarterly system. Four times a year, after classes ended, Donna and I packed suitcases, secured our daughter in a car seat, and drove our Volkswagen Beetle north to visit our relatives in Canada. There wasn’t a direct route. We often took back roads through small towns suffering hard economic times. During our back-and-forth trips in 1966, we passed cemeteries that had occasional American flags on graves, signifying soldiers who had died in Vietnam. In 1967, there were more flags. In 1968, the percentage had increased so dramatically that we wondered if the casualty reports the government released were understated.

Nineteen sixty-eight: Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated that year. So was Bobby Kennedy. At Columbia University, student protests escalated to the point that five buildings were occupied and the university was shut down. I watched the CBS Evening News and was struck by two back-to-back stories. The first showed American soldiers during a firefight in Vietnam. The second showed American National Guardsmen patrolling a riot-devastated street in a burned-out inner city of America. I can no longer recall which riot it was. There were so many. Within days of the King assassination, for example, there had been 110 of them, including one in Washington, DC, ten blocks from the White House. While these were race riots, they had relevance to Vietnam because, compared to whites, a disproportionate number of blacks from inner cities were being drafted due to their poverty and lack of education. It occurred to me that if the television sound were turned down, the two stories might seem like aspects of a single story. The devastated street might appear to be in Vietnam and the firefight might appear to be in the United States.

Watching another television news broadcast, I was stunned by the violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. War protesters marching toward the convention were greeted by almost twelve thousand Chicago police officers, who waged a riot of their own, assaulting anyone in their path, including reporters. These police rioters were so out of control that they didn’t care if their violence was broadcast for hours on network television. It suddenly occurred to me: What if one of those protesters was like those angry veterans I’d encountered in the classes I taught? What if one of those veterans was a man with exceptional combat skills, a former member of a Special Forces team, an escaped POW, and a recipient of the Medal of Honor? What if he’d decided the war was wrong and believed that he’d earned the right to protest it without seeming to be unpatriotic? What if he was furious to begin with, and a police club striking his skull now filled him with an absolutely destructive rage?