THE BALLAD OF THE GREEN BERETSSsgt. Barry Sadler

Ssgt. Barry Sadler's "The Ballad Of The Green Berets" is a patriotic song about the Green Berets, an elite special force in the U.S. Army. It is one of the very few songs of the 1960s to cast the military in a positive light, yet it became a major hit, reaching # on the Billboard Hot 100 for five weeks in March and early April 1966. It was also a crossover smash, reaching No. 1 on Billboard's Easy Listening chart and No. 2 on Billboard's Country survey. The song was written by Robin Moore and Sadler, while the latter was recuperating from a leg wound suffered as a medic in the Vietnam War. The lyrics were written in honor of Green Beret James Gabriel, Jr., the first Native Hawaiian to die in Vietnam, who was executed by the Viet Cong while on a training mission on April 8, 1962. Sadler debuted the song on television on January 30, 1966, on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Not only was the song the #1 hit in the U.S. for five weeks, it was ranked the #21 song of 1960s, despite the later unpopularity of the Vietnam War and the competing "California Dreamin'" sharply dividing the popular music market. It has sold over nine million singles and albums and was the top single of the year, a year in which the British Invasion, led by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, continued to dominate the U.S. charts. The Beatles' top hit for the year was We Can Work It Out (#16) while the Stones' top hit was Paint It, Black (#21).

Sadler moved to Guatemala City in the mid 1980s and often hung out at a bar/restaurant called La Europa. It was in Guatemala City in 1988 that he was shot in the head one night in a taxi. He was airlifted by friends from Soldier Of Fortune Magazine to the states where he was hospitalized and remained in a coma for several months. He died little more than a year later in the Alvin C. York Medical Center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The circumstances involving his shooting remain a mystery. It has been variously claimed that he committed suicide, that he shot himself accidentally while showing off to a female companion, and that he was assassinated for allegedly training and arming the Contras. The most common story identifies the incident as a robbery. According to his companion at the time, he had been training Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries and had received death threats.