It’s an anti-Vietnam War novel that’s also about bullheaded escalation and the obstinate refusal to see things from someone else’s point of view. It’s about the anger of student protesters who saw older people, especially those in authority, as the enemy. It’s about the arrogance of people in power who won’t admit they’re wrong or tolerate being disagreed with. But as a Canadian who’d been required to sign a loyalty oath before he received his temporary-resident’s card, I couldn’t explicitly say any of that without risking exile from a country I now thought of as my home. Vietnam is hardly mentioned. My task became to write about what was happening in and to the United States and yet to present it as a thriller without moralizing and desk pounding.

In 1969, I interrupted the book to write my doctoral dissertation. Meanwhile, the war continued to escalate, spreading to Laos and Cambodia. The demonstrations against it escalated also, and suddenly they were in my backyard-on February 24, four hundred protesting students occupied the Penn State administration building. Fifteen hundred students with quite different attitudes surrounded the building and threatened the radicals inside. With difficulty, a truce was negotiated. The protesters surrendered.

In 1970, I returned to the novel. On April 15, the Penn State administration building was again occupied by demonstrators. Buses brought in seventy-five state policemen. Students stoned them as they evicted the building’s occupiers. Eighteen policemen were injured. On May 4, three weeks later, Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on unarmed student demonstrators at Kent State University. Four students were killed. Nine others were wounded. Many of the victims were bystanders. Across the country, eight million students went on strike, shutting down numerous universities. Again, I wondered what would have happened if my radicalized Vietnam veteran had been one of those students who were shot at, or if the police chief in my novel had been one of those state troopers who were pelted with rocks at Penn State.

Although my status as a guest in the United States prevented me from putting any of this in First Blood, I could certainly use my anger, dividing it between Rambo and the police chief, heightening their conflict. I kept thinking of Socrates and never favored one character over the other. I wanted the reader to understand both of them and to be dismayed that the protagonists in the novel weren’t capable of doing the same. Their fury guaranteed their mutual destruction.

In August of 1970, Donna and I again packed suitcases, put our daughter in our little green car, and set out on another odyssey, this time to the University of Iowa, where Philip Young had written his PhD dissertation on Hemingway and where I was now employed as an assistant professor. There, one of the first things I heard about was the massive student protest that had shut down the Iowa campus after the Kent State shootings. Accounts of that event stoked my emotions when, between preparing classes and teaching, I found time to continue writing First Blood, eventually finishing it in the summer of 1971.

Back at Penn State, a creative-writing professor, Philip Klass (whose pen name is William Tenn), had introduced me to Henry Morrison, a literary agent who accepted me as a client. Until that time, few novels had the amount of action that First Blood had. Henry wondered if a hardback publisher would be comfortable with it, but six weeks after the novel was submitted, a hardback house, M. Evans and Co., accepted it. Evans was known for its bestselling nonfiction books Body Language and Open Marriage, and promoted First Blood with the enthusiasm it had brought to those other titles.

Columbia Pictures purchased the movie rights for Richard Brooks to write and direct. High schools and colleges taught the book. Before he was a bestselling author, Stephen King used it as one of his two texts when he taught creative writing at the University of Maine (the other was James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity).

Columbia, evidently not liking the script that Brooks prepared, sold the film rights to Warner Bros., which hired Sydney Pollack to direct Steve McQueen, only to realize after six months of script development that McQueen, in his mid-forties, was far too old to be a returning Vietnam veteran. In another possible production, Paul Newman was considered. It’s interesting that the two protagonists are so balanced in the novel that Newman’s role would have been the police chief, whom some book reviewers considered to be the main character.

The project was sold to another studio, and another. Twenty-six scripts were prepared. Finally, ten years after the book’s publication, a new company, Carolco, hired Ted Kotcheff to direct Sylvester Stallone, and the resulting 1982 movie was the most successful autumn release in memory.

Some changes were made. The setting was moved to the Pacific Northwest (to get Canadian financial incentives). The character of the police chief was simplified. The degree of action was reduced. Rambo was allowed to live (although in an early version of the film, he did die). Perhaps most important, the character was softened. My Rambo is furious about his war experience. He hates what he was forced to do, and he especially hates that he discovered he had a skill for killing. It’s the only thing he knows how to do, but he’s a genius at it, and in the novel, when the police chief keeps pushing and pushing, Rambo finally explodes, almost with pride in the destruction he can accomplish.

Not in the movie. Concerned that the character might not be sympathetic, the producers made him a victim. At the start of the film, Rambo walks soulfully to a home near a lake where a black woman hangs washed clothes on a line. Rambo, we discover, is looking for a friend who was in his Special Forces unit, but as the black woman explains, Rambo’s friend died from cancer. Agent Orange, a defoliant used by the military in the Vietnam War, killed him.

After pressing these sympathetic emotional buttons, the script arranges for Rambo to walk into town, where the police chief gives him trouble because he doesn’t like the look of him. In the novel, this motivation works because Rambo has the long hair and beard of a hippie, an automatic target for police officers when I wrote the book. But by 1982, ten years after the novel’s publication, just about all American men had a long-haired hippie appearance. People in the audience murmured to one another, “What’s wrong with the way he looks?” But then the plot got down to business, showing Rambo being harassed by the police, and when the razor came toward him, the book and the movie coincided.

I was fascinated to see how the same story could be interpreted in different ways, but I became even more fascinated when, three years later, I saw how the 1985 sequel film, Rambo (First Blood Part II), interpreted the character in yet another way, as a jingoistic superhero who rescued American POWs, long rumored to still be in Vietnam, and single-handedly won a second version of the Vietnam War, which had ended with the North Vietnamese invasion of Saigon in 1975. One often-quoted line from the film was “Sir, do we get to win this time?” The obvious implication was that American politicians, influenced by the antiwar protests, had hampered the military’s ability to show its full strength.

President Ronald Reagan made frequent references to Rambo in his press conferences. “I saw a Rambo movie last night. Now I know what to do the next time there’s a terrorist hostage crisis.” Not surprisingly, the novel was no longer taught in high schools and colleges. The jingoistic Rambo also appeared in 1988’s Rambo III, in which he fought Soviet forces in Afghanistan, but this time audience emotions weren’t as engaged because the day the movie premiered in American theaters, the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan. Perhaps they’d heard that Rambo was coming. The political controversies struck me as being ironic inasmuch as I’d made so strong an effort to conceal the politics that had prompted me to write the book.