I had a grand time after church in late October. And I had S/Sgt. Barry Sadler to thank.
A group of us were talking about music. For some reason, the truly awful song The Men In My Little Girl’s Life came to my mind. Pure treacle. It was sung by Mike Douglas, the TV host. The very title made my companions shriek. I remember it went to #6 in ’66. – sign of the devil. So yeah.
One of my buddies was talking about how they had gone through all of the songs that had reached #1 on the pop charts. The discovery was that some of the ones before the rock and roll era weren’t very good.
I wondered if The Ballad of the Green Berets by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler was an outlier, but they didn’t remember it. This surprised me because it’s so different than most of its contemporary tunes. I confidently said it was the #1 tune of 1966, which was true if being #1 for five weeks is the measure. We Can Work It Out, Soul and Inspiration, Monday Monday, Summer In The City, and Winchester Cathedral all topped the charts for three weeks that year.
But they were young and didn’t understand its impact until I asked someone younger than I, I think, but older than them about the song. She immediately launched into “Fighting soldiers from the sky…” This generated a look of utter disbelief, and I had to laugh. You did not need to be a supporter of the Vietnam war to have that song stuck in your head for decades without having heard it again.
A new verse?
The song was so ubiquitous in the day that I could have, but didn’t, recite the lyrics of the last verse.
Back at home, a young wife waits
Her Green Beret has met his fate
He has died for those oppressed.
Leaving her his last request…
I knew the song was controversial at the time, of course. What I didn’t realize until recently is that there is a new, more inclusive version that has this verse:
Delta Force and CIA
SEALs and SOCOM
They clear the way.
Covert missions are now in play
These special ops
like the Green Beret
Some in the military apparently hate the additional words. I think they’re clunky.
I blame Chuck Miller for getting the original song stuck in my head. On his radio show, he played the B-side of Ballad of the Green Berets, a song called Letter from Vietnam, right before that church discussion.
The movie
Oh, yeah, I also saw the movie The Green Berets (1968), starring John Wayne, and fresh off the TV show The Fugitive, David Janssen. It also starred Jim Hutton of Binghamton, NY as Sgt. Petersen, which may have been a factor in me seeing it at the time.
Janssen’s character, George Beckworth, was a newspaper reporter cynical about the war until seeing Col. Mike Kirby (Wayne) and his troops in action. That’s a little oversimplified, but so was the film, which was pilloried by the critics as a WWII film.
When I watched The Vietnam War, the PBS series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, in October 2017, I was naturally drawn to the music. Here is