Ballad of the Green Beret: The Life and Wars of Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler from the Vietnam War and Pop Stardom to Murder and an Unsolved, Violent Death

by Marc Leepson

Overview

The rough-and-tumble life of Special Forces vet and Sixties pop star Barry Sadler

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 hyper-patriotic tribute to the men of the Special Forces by Vietnam veteran, U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler. But Sadler’s clean-cut, all-American image hid a darker side, a Hunter Thompson-esque life of booze, girls, 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 killed a lover’s ex-boyfriend in Tennessee. Settling in Central America, Sadler ran guns, allegedly trained guerrillas, provided medical care to residents, and caroused at his villa. In 1988 he was shot in the head in Guatemala and died a year later. This life-and-times biography of an American pop culture phenomenon recounts the sensational details of Sadler’s life vividly but soberly, setting his meteoric rise and tragic fall against the big picture of American society and culture during and after the Vietnam War.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811772297
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	02/15/2023
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	1,024,038
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Journalist and historian Marc Leepson is the author of nine books, including What So Proudly We Hailed: Francis Scott Key, A Life; Saving Monticello; and Lafayette: Idealist General. Aformer staff writer for Congressional Quarterly, his work has appeared in many magazines and newspapers, including Smithsonian, Military History, the Civil War Times, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. He has appeared on The Today Show, CBS This Morning, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, The History Channel, BBC, and NPR; is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica; and edited the Webster's New World Dictionary of the Vietnam War. He served with the U.S. Army in Vietnam in 1967–68, and is arts editor, senior writer, and columnist for TheVVA Veteran. He taught U.S. history at Lord Fairfax Community College in Warrenton, Virginia, from 2008 to 2015, and lives in northern Virginia. His website is marcleepson.com.

Table of Contents

Prologue - A Soldier at Heart 1

Chapter 1 Tough Guy 8

Chapter 2 An Extreme Beginner 16

Chapter 3 Why Don't You Write a Song about Us? 23

Chapter 4 By an Unknown Soldier 35

Chapter 5 A Lucky One 42

Chapter 6 The Right Man with the Right Song 56

Chapter 7 A Hot New Single with a Ready-Made Market 65

Chapter 8 A Dirty, Old Staff Sergeant 79

Chapter 9 A Young, Crew-cut Troubadour 89

Chapter 10 The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Him 107

Chapter 11 Being a Family 118

Chapter 12 A Nice Guy 133

Chapter 13 Where the Money Is 142

Chapter 14 The Only Hero of the Vietnam War 152

Chapter 15 That's Murder One, Ain't It? 164

Chapter 17 A Total Tennessee Redneck 175

Chapter 17 The Slow Descent 185

Chapter 18 Life Out on the Edge 197

Chapter 19 The Constitution of an Elephant 205

Chapter 20 The Last Battle of the Vietnam War 213

Chapter 21 A Man's Man 228

Acknowledgments 233

Endnotes 236

A Note on Sources 258

Index 260

Editorial Reviews

In this fascinating and thoroughly researched biography, Marc Leepson has delved deeply into the story of Sgt. Barry Sadler, the singing soldier who wrote and performed the "Ballad of the Green Berets" that rocketed up the charts in 1966. Sadler handled soldiering in Vietnam well, but he could not handle the success, money, civilian life, women, and booze that followed. Sadler's one-hit wonder song was perfectly timed for a nation that still supported the war in Vietnam then, but none of the adulation and hero-worship felt right to him.

Joseph L. Galloway

Marc Leepson, a noted historian and accomplished biographer, has written the definitive biography of the only Vietnam vet who became a famous musical performer. Barry Sadler's tragic life is recounted in intimate detail, especially his military service, for the first time. In doing so, Leepson masterfully captures the essence of a short-lived cultural icon who was a genuine casualty of his own fleeting fame. This is a timely book that all my fellow Vietnam veterans, as well as any American fascinated by the tumultuous Sixties, will find captivating.

Richard K. Kolb

Marc Leepson's in-depth plunge into the turbulent life and times of soldier/singer/novelist Barry Sadler is a treat; especially for those of us who were inspired—for good or ill—by his "Ballad of the Green Berets." It takes a writer and Vietnam veteran like Leepson to really dig beneath the surface of Sadler's roller-coaster life and trace the turbulent 60s events that so influenced a larger-than-life personality who was arguably the nation's most well-known veteran of that war. This is much more than an engrossing biography. It's a cautionary tale for generations that raise pop culture figures to iconic status. Nice work, Marc.

Dale Dye

03/27/2017
In early 1966, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones briefly took a backseat to the number one hit “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” Barry Sadler’s unabashed paean to America’s fighting men during the early, optimistic days of the Vietnam War. Historian Leepson (What So Proudly We Hailed) recounts how Sadler, who lived a hardscrabble life in Colorado before finding direction in the military, wrote the song during his Army Special Forces medical training, polishing it off in a latrine. After a short tour of duty in Vietnam, Sadler hit the road, becoming a one-man “recruiter” for the Green Berets and the war. He had only middling talent and was ill at ease with a performer’s life, and he fell into a nostalgia-tour existence punctuated by poorly received songs that never duplicated his one-hit wonder. He eked out a living as a pulp fiction writer, but his penchant for alcohol, women, and bad company set him spiraling, and eventually he committed murder. Sadler evaded serious jail time but met a bloody end in Guatemala. Leepson mines the recollections of Sadler’s family, friends, and business associates to produce a compelling period piece about a Vietnam veteran who remained a true believer in the war to the end. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler's short life constitutes one of the strangest, saddest, and least known stories of the Vietnam War. Rocketing to fame as the author of "The Ballad of the Green Berets," this high school dropout turned Special Forces medic fell to earth just as suddenly, unable to handle his newfound celebrity. Later in life he would commit murder and support himself as a pulp writer before being murdered under mysterious circumstances in Guatemala. Marc Leepson does full justice to this bizarre and riveting tale.

Max Boot

Marc Leepson has written a biography worthy of his subject, full of shoot-outs, murder, mayhem, and the human foibles of a lost soul. Barry Sadler; soldier, musician, pop idol, womanizer, teller-of-tales (on and off the page). This book, like Sadler's life, is never boring, a volatile yarn about fame, fortune, comedy, and as such tales often go, tragedy. The meteoric rise and self-destructive fall of a momentary American icon.

Patrick Sheane Duncan