Ballad of the Green Beret

The top Billboard Hot 100 single of 1966 wasn’t The Rolling Stones' “Paint It Black” or the Beatles' “Yellow Submarine.” It was “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” a patriotic tribute to the men of the Special Forces written and sung by Vietnam War veteran, Army Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler.

But Sadler’s clean-cut, all-American image hid a darker side, a wild life of booze, women, and guns. Unable to score another hit song, he wrote a string of popular pulp fiction paperbacks that made “Rambo look like a stroll through Disneyland.”

He also shot and killed a lover’s ex-boyfriend in Nashville, and wound up spending less that a month in the local jail for the crime. Sadler left Nashville and moved to Guatemala, where he ran guns, allegedly trained guerrillas, provided medical care to residents, but mainly caroused at his ranch outside Guatemala City and in the city’s drinking establishments. He was shot in the head in a taxi cab in Guatemala City in 1988, and died a year later.

Ballad of the Green Beret is a life-and-times biography of an American pop culture phenomenon that recounts the sensational details of Barry Sadler’s, and illuminates his meteoric rise and tragic fall against the bigger picture of American society and culture during and after the Vietnam War.