Rambo! In my Reagan-era youth, the
name was synonymous with the Vietnam War — at least the Vietnam War reimagined,
the celluloid fantasy version of it in which a tanned, glistening, muscle-bound
commando busted the handcuffs of defeat and redeemed America’s honor in the
jungles of Southeast Asia. Untold millions including the Gipper himself,
an inveterate Vietnam revisionist, were enraptured.
Many years later, studying war crimes in Vietnam, I would come across a real Rambo
— or maybe you’d call him an anti-Rambo. To the best of my knowledge,
this Rambo didn’t fire a machine gun one-handed or use explosive-tipped arrows. But his work was a powder
keg with a short fuse and his conscience a bright flame. While conducting
research for a Pentagon-funded project on refugees, A. Terry Rambo turned up
evidence that South Korean troops, functionally serving as America’s mercenaries
in Vietnam, had massacred a large number of civilians. That Rambo “presented
the findings” to, he said, “a whole slew of colonels — 10 or 12” of them.
He thought the American brass would take action. Instead, a U.S. officer
instructed him to leave that information out of his report. “I told [the
officer] as a civilian I didn’t feel myself bound by [U.S. military] orders
and that I was going to submit a report on it.” Rambo eventually went public with the story.
He was far from alone.