Operation Thriller, USO Authors' Tour

This series of LKL blog exclusives was written by five authors on their experiences from the recent USO tour ‘Operation Thriller’ in the Gulf to entertain our troops.
November 23, 2010
Operation Thriller: Real Life 'Rambo'
David Morrell
USO Authors’ Tour
Kuwait/Iraq 2010

“We joined the army because of your novel and the movie,” two wounded soldiers told me at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The novel and movie they referred to are First Blood, in which the character of Rambo was created.

“Which means that I bear a responsibility for your being in this hospital,” I told them.

“Not at all,” they answered. “Bad guys planted an IED that blew us up. You didn’t do that. We joined the military for the same reason Rambo did—to help our country. We’re not as badly injured as some of the guys here. We leave the hospital in a couple of weeks, and we want to go back to our unit.”

Whatever I expected at the start of the first-ever USO authors’ tour, it wasn’t a conversation like that. Our journey took us to bases in Kuwait and Iraq, where our group (the other authors were Steve Berry, Andy Harp, Douglas Preston, and James Rollins) emphasized that we wrote made-up action while the troops experienced the real thing, and all we could hope is that our inventions helped to distract them from reality.
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Operation Thriller