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Sat 22 August 2026 20:00, UK
“I was getting into a lot of trouble,” Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler told a press pool in 1966, speaking of his pre-military days as a wayward youth in the 1950s, “Troubled and [getting into] fights and going nowhere. So I figured if I didn’t join up, well, I’d wind up a bum.”
Sadler, who was born in Carlsbad, New Mexico, in 1940, already had some significant tough guy credentials before he joined the US Air Force as a 17-year-old. Just months prior, he’d been working as a bouncer at a bar in Leadville, Colorado, and suffered multiple knife wounds and at least one gunshot while on the job.
Figuring he might as well suffer for a cause of some sort, Sadler wound up as a radar technician half a world away in Japan. By 1961, after his discharge from the Air Force, he quickly joined the US Army and gradually worked his way up to a role with Special Forces, the soon-to-be extra-famous Green Berets, which eventually landed him in Vietnam.
When his airbrushed, square-jawed, crew-cutted visage appeared on the iconic cover of his 1966 debut single, the multi-platinum selling ‘The Ballad of the Green Berets’, many cynics and early opponents of the Vietnam War suspected that Sadler was a plant, a phoney, some actor or cartoon composite created as part of a military propaganda campaign.
Just a year before the song was released, however, Sadler was still very much on active duty, only leaving Vietnam after he stepped on a Viet Cong booby trap and got stabbed in the knee by a feaces-covered ‘punji stick’. The wound became infected, and Sadler soon found himself back at Fort Bragg in the States, recovering from the injury and, apparently, developing his hobby as a songwriter.
Credit: RCA Records
“The reason I first began writing songs,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1966, “is because I’m such a lousy guitar player I never had the nerve to play someone else’s stuff. And I’m still a lousy guitar player”.
During the period that Sadler was recovering at Fort Bragg, he picked up a newly published book by the author Robin Moore, which offered a slightly fictionalised and machismo-filled account of his time embedded in the US Special Forces in Vietnam. That book, The Green Berets, seems to have inspired Sadler, who had some ideas about sharing his own story in a different medium. He decided to seek out the book’s author directly.
Further reading: Features
“Barry went Awol from an Army hospital,” Robin Moore, who also penned The French Connection, told the Hartford Courant in 1982, “He came to see me and played me his song on his guitar. We wrote the words, making them more sophisticated.”
Sophisticated is a relative term, of course. The lyrics of Sadler and Moore’s ‘Ballad of the Green Berets’ weren’t the sort to investigate the perils or trauma of war, or the complicated lives of the veterans who came home. Instead, it celebrates the Special Forces soldiers as American he-men, proud to die for their country and to sign up their sons to do the same in the next foreign quagmire.
“Back at home, a young wife waits / Her Green Beret has met his fate / He had died for those oppressed / Leaving her this last request / Put silver wings on my son’s chest / Make him one of America’s best / He’ll be a man they’ll test one day / Have him win the Green Beret.”
Robin Moore was not a man short on pride or ego, and he would later routinely give himself credit, and to a lesser extent, Barry Sadler, for reviving or perhaps even creating the reputation of the Green Berets, noting, “The Special Forces was on the verge of extinction after Kennedy was assassinated. If it hadn’t been for the book and the song, the Pentagon would have eliminated them. I’m proud of that”.
Moore might have played a role in the narrative, but Sgt Barry Sadler was absolutely the public face of this unexpected pop culture phenomenon, as ‘Ballad of the Green Berets’ claimed the top spot on the US Billboard chart for five straight weeks in the spring of 1966, providing a victory of sorts on the pop charts for the segment of America that Richard Nixon would famously call “the silent majority”: the conservative, fly-over country folks who weren’t interested in the mind-expanding adventures of The Beatles or the high-minded ideals of Bob Dylan and the protest singers in New York.
Sadler made the rounds during his newfound fame, singing his hit on The Ed Sullivan Show and making countless public appearances in small towns and big cities alike, given a hero’s welcome each time.
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“I don’t think the success of it has changed me much,” he said in the summer of ‘66, “It’s made some changes in my life, of course, but I don’t think it’s made any changes in me. The hardest thing to get used to, I think, has been the crowds. I’m not much of a partier. I don’t like large crowds or loud noises or loud music, and it gets on my nerves a little bit.”
No one in the media asked if his time in Vietnam might have contributed to his troubles with crowds or loud noises.
Sadler, who was only 25 when ‘Green Berets’ went to number one, was always going to be a long shot to maintain a long-term career in the music business. His breakout success had all the earmarks of a one-hit wonder novelty act, and indeed, despite efforts to cash in on the success of that first song with a full album of military ballads, a film adaptation of Moore’s book (starring John Wayne), and some TV acting credits for Sadler himself, public interest quickly waned, particularly as the popularity of the Vietnam War began to diminish.
He started writing pulp fiction novels in his Arizona home and tried to invest his music earnings into various enterprises, including everything from a cocktail lounge to an education fund for the children of Vietnam vets. His biggest swing was an $150,000 investment in a movie starring the actor Jeffrey Hunter from The Searchers, but Hunter died during production, and he lost everything. He went broke at least three times by the age of 30, and had to start selling insurance to make ends meet in the early 1970s.
“When you start at the top, there’s only one way to go,” Sadler mused to the Tucson Citizen in 1972, before pointing his thumb downward like a disappointed Roger Ebert.
By 1979, Sadler had settled into his permanent cultural role as the answer to a trivia question: the soldier who outsold the Beatles. Most people hadn’t heard anything new about the man for years, until newspapers reported that summer that he had been arrested and charged with the murder of 51-year-old associate and songwriter Lee Emerson Bellamy with a .38 special.
Much like a character from one of those songs, he was also completely unapologetic about the killing. Bellamy, who had a track record of abusive behaviour, was apparently jealous that his ex-girlfriend was now having an affair with Sadler (a married father of three), and he’d been threatening both Sadler and the woman for weeks.
“He [Bellamy] deserved to die,” Sadler told Florida Today in 1983, after serving just a 30-day prison sentence for the crime, following a guilty plea of “voluntary manslaughter”.
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“To this day, I don’t know whether I actually intended to kill the guy or what,” he continued, “I did pop a cap, and the judge did have to give me some kind of sentence, but I never apologised for anything, and nobody in Nashville condemned me for it. I didn’t even have a moving violation on my record.”
In a twist of fate, Sadler was shot in the head himself a decade after killing Bellamy, during an attack by an unknown thief in Guatemala City in 1988. He was in a coma for weeks after, and lived out his final days as a brain-damaged quadriplegic in several VA hospitals, dying at the age of just 49 in November of 1989.
His lasting image would always remain that photo from the ‘Ballad of the Green Berets’ record sleeve: proud, stoic, but also, to many observers, misguided and emblematic of a sort of militaristic patriotism that couldn’t survive in this new, post-WWII era.
Sadler had regrets about writing the song himself, feeling that he’d been misrepresented by the media, and that many of his fellow soldiers had turned on him, either jealous of his success or resentful that he’d sold them out. His true, somewhat disturbing wish in his final years wasn’t to be a pop star again, but to be back on a battlefield.
“It was exciting back then,” he said of his time in Vietnam, “It was a good little war. It was like everything you’d ever read in books, living with savages with their teeth filed down to the bone, living on the edge, it was just a tremendous experience… Most professional soldiers are incurable romantics. They have old-fashioned attitudes about women, about right and wrong, that kinda thing.
“I’d go back again,” Sadler told Florida Today in 1983, “Man is aggressive by nature, and everybody wants a high adventure in their life, and most adventures are dangerous. It’s a testing ground”.
