Chris Phillips

Lost Rambos

Chris Phillips

Although tribal fighting has long been present in the Papua New Guinea highlands, the influx of modern automatic weaponry in the 1990s turned local disputes into swift lethal exchanges which threatened to permanently reshape highlands culture. Bootlegged copies of the American film Rambo circulated in remote communities, becoming a crude tutorial on the use of such weaponry. The influence of the film was so pronounced that the term Rambo is now used in Papuan dialects to describe hired mercenaries who are paid to support local combatants in violent tribal disputes. The services of Rambos were suddenly in high demand as a variety of M16s and Indonesian military weaponry found its way down the Sepik River through swap-laden smuggling routes.