BRAVO!! RAMBO TAKES AN SOF MISSION TO THE BIG SCREEN

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By Dr. Martin Brass
Soldier of Fortune

February, 2008

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MACHO FANTASY LINKS UP WITH MACHO REALITY

IT HAD BEEN years since the most macho fantasy figure Rambo had donned the cover of the most macho magazine, SOF.

Last year, Sylvester (Sly) Stallone, known for his portrayal of Rambo, contacted the SOF office. The plight of the Karen captured his imagination.

“I think SOF has proven time and time again that it has its thumb on the pulse of what is really transpiring in the remote, dark parts of the world that the drive-by media tends to overlook,” Sly said later when we interviewed him after the movie was completed.

“I wanted Rambo to be involved in a situation that was really infamous, but a lot of people did not know about,” Sly said.

He had come to the right place to find it.

The Karen are not totally alone; they have had a tireless advocate, Soldier of Fortune Magazine, as well as other committed advocates in the United States. Robert K. Brown, SOF publisher, has taken on their cause since visiting Karen controlled territory in 1982.

Burmese troops stealthily encircle the Karen Village in which missionaries render medical aid. The Burmese plan is to decimate the village and capture the missionaries.

His passion for helping the oppressed underdog had taken on a heightened sense of urgency in Burma when SOF correspondent Lance Motley was killed while covering the conflict in 1987.

Within a few moments of talking to Sly, we realized that he had developed a genuine compassion for the Karen.

“In the beginning of the movie, there is actual footage of atrocities,” Sly said. His guarded answers to what could have been a perfunctory interview had transformed into animated responses accentuated by his deep bark of a voice.

His movie had taken on a reality which movies usually only fabricate.

“The first two minutes are actual footage of Burmese atrocities going back 25 years. Buddhist monks are lying dead in the water,” he emphasized again, still recalling the morbid images of the result of the unspeakable brutality of mankind.

“We blend that into our own situation,” he said.

“The Burmese are attacking the marchers, you see beheadings. Bodies rotting in fields, children wailing, starving– its horrific,” he said with genuine disgust. For a brief moment, he had forgotten that it was a movie he was promoting, and he had taken us with him.

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NOTHING OTHER THAN GENOCIDE

Along with the nearly 500,000 in Thailand, the Karen have been fighting and dying for independence since the mid- 1940s.

Throughout WWII, the Burma Independence Army and the ruthless Japanese invaders slaughtered the the Karens, accusing them of being British allies.

As the war ended and their empire began to crumble, the British ignored the Karen’s request for independence. The British, focused on their domestic political struggles, left this region with messy loose ends, just as they had done in Palestine and other parts of the world.

When Burma gained independence in 1947, the new government squelched the Karen independence movement.

After decades of fighting the Burmese regimes, the Karen are no closer to gaining independence nor an autonomous territory that would let them live without constant fear.

Even as we interviewed Sylvester Stallone about his new movie, Rambo, based on the plight of the Karen, the Buddhist monks were once more leading protests for democracy in an eight-day insurgency, called the “Saffron Revolution”. In response, the dictatorship once more launched a brutal crackdown, including raids on Buddhist monasteries.

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THE 8888 UPRISING

Democracy has repeatedly been viciously crushed in Burma since 1962, when a military coup deposed the then so-called democratic government.

The previous rulers had refused independence to the Karen for 15 years. The situation further deteriorated under the new military junta, coming to a head in 1988, when students and Buddhist monks took to the streets in protest.

In that rebellion, dubbed the “8888 uprising” for the day it was launched, the military junta wiped out more than three fourths of the 20,000 Karen National Union fighters, and slaughtered thousands of Buddhist monks and students.

The initial assault on the village does not go well. The Burmese gain the upper hand. The situation is dire. The moment is black.

The military dictatorship refused to allow elections until a mass uprising forced their hand in 1988. The elections proved to be a sham. Although the democratic opposition won those elections decisively, the military rulers refused to honor the results. The winner of the elections, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, was placed under house arrest, and threatened with permanent exile if she ever left Burma. In each of these cases, the dictatorship has not hesitated to use deadly force, proving to be shockingly resistant to international pressure.

Unlike the volatile Israeli- Palestinian situation, that has become a world-wide obsession since WWII, the plight of the Karen in Burma, a squalid country of little strategic importance to the United States, has largely been ignored. The few economic and political sanctions that have been imposed have failed to influence the dictatorship, and at the same time have devastated the population. The Burmese thugs have managed to muddle through the sanctions with the support of neighboring countries. Thailand, Communist China, India, and South Korea continue to provide essential lifelines and weapons to the Burmese tyrants. Ukraine has been selling them T-72 main battle tanks and BTR-3U infantry fighting vehicles, used to squelch the opposition.

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NOT YOUR ORDINARY CELEBRITY CAUSE

Many actors had joined the Hollywood ‘celebrity gone missionary’ bandwagon, with high-profile attention-seeking stars taking on causes such as AIDS and clearance of land mines, adopting orphans internationally, or opening a school in South Africa. Had Sly done so, too? It doesn’t matter if celebrity publicity helps even a few of the hundreds of millions of the world’s unfortunates.

But he was still the showman, always feeling the pulse of his audience.

“We are trying to play with reality a little bit. The difficulty is, you don’t want to do a documentary and you have to provide entertainment. I know I’m going to get grief, people wondering, ‘Why didn’t you say more on the Karen story?’ He seemed to be preempting any questioning on why the movie had to focus on Rambo dramatics.

“I say, ‘Well, because I know, as I found out in Rambo III, that if you don’t have Americans in the script, you could loose the audience. In that movie, we were dealing with the Mujahideen, and the audience couldn’t have cared less,” Sly said almost apologetically.

“But the missionaries we are trying to save in the movies are for real (at least movie-style real). That was a hard thing– to do justice to the Karen, to show the atrocities and still capture the American audience, which averages 25 years old, by the way, without getting bogged down.

They don’t want to see The Deer Hunter. Rambo brings a certain expectation.”

I asked him where he had gotten the real life scenes.

“It was very difficult to get from news agencies, but we did, including from the BBC. They did not want to go there,” he said. Obviously a whole lot of research had gone into making sure the movie was based on as much reality as the American audience could handle.

“You are doing a great service to the Karen in exposing their plight. The Karen have no pressure groups to represent them,” RKB said, pleased that Rambo, superstar, had taken on one of his missions to save the underdog from the Burmese tyrants.

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LOW-RENT MERCS

RKB asked him how he had selected the individuals playing mercs on his team, a question that highly amused RKB, as he had been involved in many situations where mercs had been hired by foreign governments.

“I found that the mercenaries out in the real combat zones come from every corner of the world,” Sly responded. “We have an Australian, a Korean, a Puerto Rican, a British ‘SAS’, but only one American.

“I told the casting director what I wanted,” Sly spoke with authority, like a seasoned recruiter of mercs, or actors at least.

“And then this long arduous process begins,” he said, half out of boredom, half out of frustration with a process that he had endured over and over again in his many movies.

“They are all ex-this and ex-military, they tell you, and then you realize that none of them have ever done anything. Yea, right!”

I knew exactly what RKB was thinking as he let out a guffaw of total empathy, feeling a comradeship with Rambo for a brief moment. In over thirty years of publishing SOF, RKB had met more phony vets, con artists, and macho wannabes than one could ever imagine.

“I had to get the people with the right attitude,” Sly continued, “I trained them as good as I could. They are low-rent mercs, but in the end they come through when they are pushed to the battle. The audience hates them until the end, when they are extremely heroic. I wanted to keep them at bay, to have them to look at Rambo with distain, as a joke, a boatman, until he finally goes into full battle mode.

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ACTOR MERCS GET A DOSE OF REALITY

“What was the nature of their training, and how many days did they train?” RKB queried.

“They probably didn’t get more than two weeks, but when they got to Thailand, we worked with the Thai border police and National Guard, who are very adept at jungle warfare. They showed us what they do to the drug dealers on weekends. It’s gruesome,” Sly said, still blown away by the brutality the mild-appearing Thais displayed.

“They don’t ask questions of their captives. They are brutal. They are hard, hard men. They showed the guys how to hold their weapons, how to create a sense of stealth. By the second or third week, the guys got rid of their Hollywood patina and were starting to look like the real thing.

“We used the Karen Guerillas,” Sly continued. “We actually had a fellow who was the head bad guy, that was playing the chief villain, who is a Burmese major who is really leading his battalion in these horrible horrendous raids. He is, in reality, an ex-Karen rebel and a major in that army. It was funny. He was actually helping the army that was going to defeat him—the Karen rebels—which are sort of a rag tag army. They move without a sense of unity or purpose. They are these ferocious fighters, but not out front.

“We did have to take liberties in the last battle. You can imagine General Custer with the Indians swarming down on him. We had the Burmese, who were about to execute the mercenaries along the river, in a valley. Just then all hell breaks loose. Over the ridge on all sides come the Karen, who pin them down on three sides with the river at their backs. It’s a throwback to great movie visuals: Here comes the cavalry!”

“I became disillusioned with the Burmese who were in bed with Thai generals. I became disillusioned with the Thais,” RKB interjected.

“I know what you mean,” Sly said.

“The Thai cut deals with the Burmese on teak. I thought the Thais would interfere with your movie,” RKB observed.

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THE ‘LAND OF SMILES’ HIDES A VENGEANCE

“I could not believe it,” Sly said. “At first I disguised the script as if we were going after drug dealers, but they got a hold of the real script. I tell you that the Burmese looked like the scourge of the earth in this—just horrific. I tell you I couldn’t believe it when we got the green light. Then we got a lot of threats,” Sly said gravely.

“I had two death threats that came through the switchboard. They somehow circumvented the switchboard and phoned me in my room. The fellow was very polite. ‘Mr. Stallone?’ I said, ‘yes.’ ‘You are here to film a move about the Burmese. Do not do . . . please. If so . . ., you can die.’ Then he said, ‘Thank you’ and hung up. Oh Man!” Sly imitated the soft, steely voice.

“Then I talked to the leader, his name is Nate, one big guy in the King’s squad. “He said, ‘Take this seriously, because they have a lot of operatives. A lot of Burmese secret police are in Thailand, especially in the Mae Sot area. They are hovering around and they know exactly what you are doing.’ So, I had the armored vehicles and I had basically a Thai SWAT team of around nine men 24-7.

“These guys are so polite, but they are tough, nasty…ooh,” his voice was a chill.

“The Thai know everything that’s going on,” RKB said. “Every time we went across the river, you had a Thai intel person with you; they are very, very capable people.”

“They got to our casting director and told him that if there were any real Burmese in this movie, there is going to be hell to pay and they are going to go after their families in Burma. I could not get ONE Burmese refugee to be in this movie, a Karen,” Sly emphasized.

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A MARKED MAN

“Finally, one guy who was playing a bad guy stepped forward, and said ‘I have to do this, I have seen too much death and mayhem not to exploit this opportunity.’ So he did it. Rambo kills these six pirates and they are all Burmese, the real deal.

“The Karen who plays the pirate captain, the major villain in the movie, said afterword, ‘I heard that my cousin was arrested along with my uncles back in Burma. He feels really bad. They did penalize him. He’s the real deal. He had the Karen tattoos on his arm. He said that if I do this, there is going to be hell to pay in Burma with my family, but he feels like he’s a marked man. When the movie comes out, it’s not going to be pretty. They contacted him and said his family would be incarcerated.’

“Did you get flak from the United States?” RKB, who is an old hand to getting harassed by some power hungry pencil pusher, asked.

“Not at all,” Sly responded, “We had a warning from the U.S. embassy that this was not the smartest idea. They suggested we do it in Mexico. I said, ‘We can’t do it in Mexico, we have to do it on the real soil. We tried to do it in Mae Sot, and we were along the Salween River that borders Thailand and Burma, it’s really dangerous.’”

“We could actually see the meth labs on the other side. It was unbelievable. I kept saying, ‘Why are these soldiers around these crappy warehouses?’ They told me that each general or colonel has his own business going.”

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DEATH TO TYRANTS!!!

Sly was animated, back in the jungle, still in shock over the ruthless nature of the Burmese government. He was treading a fine line between reality and fantasy.

Totally taken in by his seemingly genuine display of outrage, forgetting that he was a skilled actor that had captivated his audience for years, I asked him, “Where did your head go, what would you have done if the bad guy were right there?”

“I wanted to rain such havoc on the bad guys because all of the research I had done made me realize the way they dismembered these people, the way they beheaded them, burned them alive, buried them alive, that when the time came,” Sly barked back ferociously, “I wanted the mercenaries to unleash hell on them, I don’t hold back anything. It is probably the most brutal assault footage you have ever seen, you see limbs, you see what it is like when a guy is hit point-blank with a .50 caliber.”

Now reality or fantasy, that’s SOF— “Death to tyrants!!”

The opinions expressed above do not necessarily represent the views of Soldier of Fortune.

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