Colonel Samuel Richard "Sam" Trautman is a fictional character in the Rambo novel and film series, and other media in the franchise.

Douglas had previously expressed displeasure with the scripted ending, and as filming commenced he decided more rewrites were required.

Director Ted Kotcheff and producers Mario Kassar and Andrew G. Vajna strongly disagreed and Douglas left the production after 3 weeks.

Marketing stills of Kirk Douglas in the uniform of Col. Trautman exist and are now part of the extras on the DVD of First Blood.

Their one significant interaction comes at the end of the book, when Trautman tells Teasle that he "took the top of his [Rambo's] head off with this shotgun."

According to the DVD special features to the film First Blood, Trautman's dossier records him as being born on July 6, 1929, in Columbus, Ohio.

Trautman began his career in the United States Army after completing officer training at the University of Texas in 1950, where he also graduated with a bachelor's degree in Sociology.

From 1970 to 1973, Colonel Trautman was unit commander of "Team Delta" that included his boot camp protégé John Rambo.

It is likely that between 1979 and 1982, Trautman was assigned stateside to work in the Department of Defense as he alluded in the film to Rambo he "wasn't spending much time in Bragg lately" as his superiors had him in Washington D.C. "shining a seat with his ass."

At the time of Rambo's 1982 incident with local Washington state authorities, Trautman was listed as divorced with no children.

Trautman undertakes to deliver the shipment himself, but is captured by the Soviets in Afghanistan and Rambo decides to launch a one-man rescue mission into the Russian prison camp so he can get his only friend back home.

Trautman's role in Rambo III has been described as "a well-meaning, but naive extension of the broken and mismanaged American military system".

Sam Trautman was featured in the animated series, Rambo: The Force of Freedom, voiced by Alan Oppenheimer.

[11] The cartoon generated a mild controversy at the production studio, with writers wondering how they could present a child-friendly main character who was created as a troubled Vietnam War veteran suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

[13] In the Russian TV series, Brigada, the character Sasha asks people who claim to have served in the military (as he had in Afghanistan), "who was your colonel?

[1]: 225 The Trautman character and model resembles Colonel Roy Campbell in Hideo Kojima's 1998 Playstation video game Metal Gear Solid, according to many fans of the series.