First Blood

First Blood is an action-thriller novel published in 1972 by the American writer David Morrell. Its protagonist, known only by his surname, Rambo, is a homeless Vietnam veteran who wanders into Madison, a small fictional town in Kentucky. The local police chief, Wilfred Teasle, repeatedly sends him away until he finally arrests him for vagrancy and resisting arrest. Locked in a claustrophobic cell, Rambo relives memories of his time as a prisoner of war and reacts violently when the officers try to cut his hair. He escapes, and from then on the story becomes a manhunt through the mountains, with policemen, National Guardsmen and hunters pursuing him.

Morrell alternates the points of view of Rambo and Teasle, allowing the conflict to be seen from both sides: that of a soldier trained to survive in the wild and that of a policeman who, after losing his men, becomes a figure marked by grief and a certain sympathy for his quarry. The novel was written in the late 1960s, at the height of the controversy over the Vietnam War. Morrell, who taught writing, drew on the accounts of former students who had fought there. He also acknowledged the influence of Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male and of Audie Murphy, the Second World War hero who suffered untreated post-traumatic stress.

The book was generally well received, though not without dissent. John Skow of Time called it "carnography", while conceding that its technical aspects were well handled. Its success paved the way for the 1982 film starring Sylvester Stallone, which changed the character profoundly: in the movie Rambo kills no police officers or guardsmen and survives at the end, giving rise to a franchise of films and to many readers and viewers who never encounter the original book. The novel has been translated into numerous languages and is still read as an early example of the human-hunt thriller and a meditation on war trauma.