Song of the Day 11/21: SSgt. Barry Sadler, “The Ballad of the Green Berets”

This one’s for George Frankel, the state senate candidate who wants to employ ex-Green Berets to keep order in high schools.

“The Ballad of the Green Berets,” written by a Green Beret medic wounded in Vietnam, was released in January 1966; in the previous nine months U.S. troop presence in the country had increased from a few thousand to 200,000, with little popular support. But patriotic propaganda was rampant during the Cold War, and not all of it was government-manufactured. Plenty of people bought into the notion that they were defending their country by fighting anti-colonialism half a world away.

For them, staff sergeant Barry Sadler was a godsend. He wrote his tune while he recuperated from a wound he suffered from a booby trap. He got some help with the lyrics from Robin Moore, who had just written a book on the Green Berets after spending a year undergoing special forces training (Moore later wrote “The French Connection,” source of the film, and co-wrote “The Happy Hooker” with Xaviera Hollander). Moore also helped him get a recording contract.

The song quickly climbed the charts and spent five weeks topping the Hot 100, but it quickly became a relic of misplaced patriotism as more than 300 soldiers a month died in the jungle throughout 1966.

The years weren’t particularly kind to Sadler. After his discharge and desultory attempts at singing and acting went nowhere, he moved to Nashville and started writing pulp fiction novels, finding success with a series about an immortal mercenary that appealed to the Soldier of Fortune crowd.

His personal life was another matter. He served a brief prison term for manslaughter after killing his girlfriend’s harassing ex-lover in 1978. He pleaded self-defense, though the man was unarmed and Sadler was found to have planted a gun to incriminate his victim. He moved to Guatemala City in 1984 – many of his mercenary tales were set in Central America, a hotbed of guerrilla fighting in the Reagan years – where he was killed in 1988 by a bullet to the head.

I dunno, is that the guy you want patrolling your local high school?