Ghost of the Green Beret

I remember listening to WBZ just over a year ago when Bruce Bradley introduced a new song. he predicted it would be in the top ten within a week. I thought he was crazy; I was wrong. "The Ballad of the Green Berets" sold something over two million copies, and brought fame and fortune to a 26-year-old high school drop-out named Barry Sadler, who has a son called Thor and a smart-aleck grin like that kid in your homeroom who used to shoot craps during morning announcements.

You hated the song; now hate the book.

Don't misunderstand--there is nothing really hateful about Sadler. His story has its own appeal. A no-good kid from a broken home who likes to sing joins the Air Force, gets shipped to Japan and wins a black belt for judo, then becomes an Army paratrooper, and finally winds up in Special Forces school where he writes down a song that has been on his mind for years. He copyrights it and sends it to a publisher, where it languishes for months while Sadler plays medic and sings some more in Vietnam. An ABC film crew happens by the camp and records Sadler singing his "Ballad," and he is flown to Saigon to sing for the general. In the hospital (with a leg infection he got from stepping on a poison stick) Sadler "resolved that day to see that America heard my song, even if I had to give it away."

Give it away he does not. The New York smoothies realize what a picturesque thing it is, arrange for a tie-in selling campaign with novelist Robin Moore (Sadler poses for the paperback cover for The Green Berets), tell him to write enough songs to fill up an album, and get the show on the road. In months, Sadler is the American Legion's "Favorite Serviceman 1966," the owner of two Jaguars--one black and one blue--and the name-sake of the Barry Sadler Foundation for college scholarships to Vietnam victims' children.

It's a real American success story, one nobody would begrudge. But reading about it is something else. Sadler and a cat named Tom Mahoney who, say the liner notes, "wrote down Barry Sadler's story," ramble on for page after page, 185 in all, managing to turn what could have been a mildly enlightening tale of either a hillbilly (Happy Valley, N.M.) in the New York publishing world or a soldier in Vietnam--into an absolutely wretched book.

Our man Sadler doesn't take a step without offerings a 2000-word discourse on where he is going and where he has come from. He visits the Alamo; three pages on the history of Texas. On the Alamo's wall is a plaque recalling the battle of Thermopylae: two pages on the history of Greece. Sadler gets tattooed: a page noting everyone from Field Marshal Montgomery to Winston Churchill's mother who had a tattoo.

If that was-the extent of the book's flaws, though, this one out of many ghost-written hack autobiographies would be merely a drag. But there is something more, an uneasy aftertaste. Sadler was set up in 1966--in the press, among veterans' groups, probably in the minds of tens of thousands with relatives in the jungles--as the image of the American soldier in Vietnam. His book is dedicated to "my friends I left across the sea," and concludes with a five-page list of the names and dates of death of the 143 Special Forces soldiers who were killed in Vietnam between April 1961 and last November. "Tell them about us, Sadler, don't let us die in vain," they say in one of his songs.

If Sadler brought back any genuine emotion at all from Vietnam, it is simply that the Army and everything he did in it was the best thing that ever happened to him. You get it in his little asides--"Life in Vietnam can be very interesting," or "The [benefits of being in the Army] are substantial. If they were better known, I think military careers would be more popular and draft-card burnings fewer. If you are in the armed services, you don't need to worry about the necessities of life. . . ." You get it in his description of the good fun in the front lines: "Most of us awoke each morning with a cheerful curiosity about what the day would bring" (this from a chapter happily entitled "All my Friends are Dead"), and the good fun in Saigon: "Saigon also has a happier and more wholesome side. There are schools, orphanages, and hospitals."

And it hits you head-on when, home safe, Sadler writes in his last chapter: "The Army as a whole has been a great experience for me . . . When my son, Thor, grows up, I want him to spend some time in the Army. In fact, I'm going to start him on judo and karate by the time he is five.