Earliest Media
The 1st Special Forces Group on Okinawa provided a number of troopers to act as extras in director Samuel Fuller's Merrill's Marauders (1961) and were credited at film's start. On U.S. television, a March 1962 episode of Surfside 6 titled "The Green Beret" featured SF training. Henry Fonda appeared in, and narrated, a 1962 "Special Forces" episode of The Big Picture series of U.S. Army-produced films that found their way to U.S. television. In 1963, a Green Beret appeared in the episode "In Praise of Pip" of The Twilight Zone though the U.S. Army told the CBS television network to not name the Southeast Asian country where the story occurred. The Green Beret's first Hollywood appearance is in the futuristic thriller film Seven Days in May (1963) wherein Andrew Duggan is a Special Forces officer loyal to the U.S. President, not the traitorous JCS Chief Burt Lancaster; the film also gave the U.S. filmgoer a first glimpse of the M16 rifle.
Mattel toys made "Guerrilla Fighter" playsets in 1962 containing a commando green beret with an interesting tin "Guerrilla Fighter" badge depicting the crossed arrows insignia of the Special Forces, (formerly worn by the 1st Special Service Force, and before that the U.S. Army Indian Scouts) and a jungle knife in front of a parachute. The set also contained the Mattel Dick Tracy automatic cap firing "tommy gun" or "Scattergun" (the Dick Tracy cap firing but no longer water firing riot shotgun) toy weapons, both now in military camouflage plastic, a military camouflaged poncho, and in some sets, a rubber Ka-Bar knife and a tripwire booby trap. Mattel later made the "M-16 Marauder", in 1966, which appeared in The Green Berets film wherein an enraged John Wayne smashes one against a tree.
The public was fascinated with this new type of soldier of the New Frontier, and the Army reluctantly gave journalists' access to many of Special Forces often top secret missions. One writer was Robin Moore, who used his connections with Harvard University classmate Robert F. Kennedy to write a book about the Special Forces. The U.S. Army agreed on the condition that Moore (then 38 years old) complete the Basic Airborne Course and SF training before being allowed to visit the Special Forces in South Vietnam.
Read more about this topic: United States Army Special Forces In Popular Culture
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