What this book is really about - differing traumas for veterans of different wars.
While the movie with its more sympathetic portrayal of Rambo presented a much needed spotlight on PTSD experienced by returning veterans of the Vietnam conflict, the objective of the original book by David Morrell was quite different. For in the book, a lot more attention is given to Sheriff Teasle’s Korea vet status.
Why??
Because the book’s intent was to compare and contrast the trauma of the Vietnam vet with the trauma of the Korea vet. But to understand why the nature of the trauma affecting veterans of one war differed so much from the other, we have to understand something more about the wars themselves.
The Forgotten War
The Korean War broke out on June 25th 1950 and was a bloody seesawing conflict that lasted a brutal three years until both sides ceased fire and established a Demilitarized Zone in 1953. While most Americans are certainly aware of North Korea as an adversary of the US, and are also aware that the US maintains a large military presence in South Korea to defend it from Northern aggression, very few know of the bloody struggle that led up to this.
While the specifics of the conflict itself are best read about in the page about The Korean War or in further detail in Wikipedia, or best, in history books, what matters here is how people at home perceived this war.
While this war certainly came home for the families of the 36,574 killed, the 103,284 wounded and the 4,000 and odd who were taken prisoner, some of whom were even subjected to “reeducation”, this war was seen by most Americans as a distant conflict one only heard about in occasional news reels. Unlike WW2 in which sovereign American territory was bombed, American fleets destroyed, rationing disrupted people’s lives, factories retooled and hired women in droves and the news was filled with constant updates about “how our boys were taking the fight to the Nazis and Japs”, many Americans could be forgiven for not even being aware that a war was even being fought in Korea.
While returning veterans of the Korean War certainly did suffer from lingering wounds and PTSD, most of them were expected to bear the pain and suffer the trauma silently as they reintegrated back into civilian 50s society. There was no ticker tape parade for them like what WW2 veterans received; no news stories about them having problems readjusting, nothing in popular culture extolling their virtues and sacrifice. From the average American’s perspective, someone like Teasle just went away for a few years, never really talked about what he did while he was gone, and just resumed life afterward.
And when the book begins, Teasle has had a good thing going. Under his watch, his town (probably his hometown) has become the kind of place where nothing terribly disruptive will ever happen. Now, all of a sudden, a completely different kind of veteran brings a completely different kind of war home - the kind of vet Teasle deeply disapproves off - and a style of war that is completely alien to most Americans.
The Scar on the Nation
The Vietnam War began in 1964 with the Gulf of Tonkin incident and just like WW2, there was initially a surge in patriotism as people enlisted, or eagerly accepted the draft. In the first two years, American forces won conventional battle after conventional battle as the NVA was steadily pushed out of South Vietnam. Then the war shifted into a “policing action” i.e. a counterinsurgency campaign. About the same time, people started to protest the war and soldiers / marines started to come home in body bags or badly broken. And then the VC overran the American embassy in Saigon and Walter Cronkite declared that “the war is unwinnable!”
The way that the American left reacted to the debacle in Vietnam is well known. What is glossed over is how members of Nikon’s center-right “silent majority” - such as Will Teasle - reacted.
