Sylvester Stallon stars as John Rambo, who has spent years trying to track down the only family he ever really knew -- the soldiers who fought alongside him in the war.  To Rambo's dismay, he finds he is all alone, as all of the rest were killed in action, or died from cancerous war-related exposure to chemicals, leaving him but to drift along the roads in search of new meaning to his life.  In the small town of Hope, the local sheriff (Brian Dennehy) named Will Teasle tags Rambo as a vagrant drifter and quickly ushers him out of town.  However, Rambo defiantly tries to return, whereupon he is arrested for vagrancy. When he doesn't quite understand why he is being incarcerated, he resists their strong-arm tactics to get him to comply, triggering flashbacks of his days as a tortured prisoner of war.  Rambo, an ex-Green Beret, perhaps the most lethal of them all, muscles his way out of the station and into the nearby woods, where the police are in hot pursuit.  What they don't realize is that Rambo is a one-man killing machine, with raw instincts for guerrilla warfare and very little to hold his fragile mentality together.  He just wants to be left alone, but the police are going to see to it that he never gets his wish.