Saturation
Robin Moore successfully completed the courses and was allowed to live with the soldiers in Special Forces and their South Vietnamese, Montagnard, and Nung allies. His book, The Green Berets, was published in 1965, but, because he mentions the American presence in North Vietnam and Cambodia, he published The Green Berets as a novel. The U.S. Army was upset by the book; the reading public was not and it became a best selling book, especially its paperback edition in 1966.
At the time of Moore's book and the increasing U.S. Military involvement in the Vietnam War, Special Forces Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler wrote a song with Robin Moore and recorded it under the title the "Ballad of the Green Berets." It became the number-one-single-record in the U.S. in 1966. In addition to the single, Sadler released an album Ballads of the Green Berets with Sadler's photograph of him in a green beret appearing on the single, the LP, and on the paperback cover of Moore's The Green Berets. SSgt. Sadler later recorded an additional, but lesser, song "The A-Team" and released two more long-playing albums, then wrote his autobiography, I'm A Lucky One.
"Ballad of the Green Berets" had many cover versions ranging from Ennio Morricone and Duane Eddy to "drugstore records" on labels such as Diplomat and Wyncote records. Hanna-Barbera Records released a children's LP The Story of the Green Beret available to members of the G.I. Joe club. The album was a tie-in with the release of the G.I. Joe Green Beret "action figure" (doll) that had appeared in 1966. The record had an album cover of Special Forces in action and a picture of the Medal of Honor. The record started off with a cover version of "Ballad of the Green Berets" but was a spoken account with sound effects of Colonel Pat Lawrence (Mike Road) taking two small boys (Andy and George) to visit Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to learn about the training and capabilities of The Green Berets. The album then featured an exciting account of the Battle of Nam Dong where Captain Roger Donlon received the first Medal of Honor in the Vietnam War.
A less successful song was Nancy Ames' "He Wore The Green Beret" with a flip side of "War is a Card Game". Dickie Goodman pitted the two fads of 1966 against each other in Batman & His Grandmother where the Caped Crusader went up against the Green Beret.
Robin Moore also wrote a 1965 Tales of the Green Beret newspaper comic strip with artwork by Sgt. Rock (comics) Joe Kubert that was also published in paperback. It later became a Dell Publishing American comic book in 1967 replacing their earlier Jungle War Stories and Guerrilla War comics. When DC Comics's Larry Rock (brother of the Sergeant), the replacement in Our Fighting Forces for the Marines Gunner and Sarge and their dog Pooch proved unpopular, DC replaced him with a Green Beret named Captain Hunter in 1966. Captain Hunter's adventures featured him hunting for his twin brother, a pilot shot down and captured by the Viet Cong. Other war comics put in their own Green Beret characters, such as Lightning Comics' Todd Holton-Super Green Beret (1967) .
Children could also enjoy Philadelphia Gum "Men of the Green Beret" trading cards of photographs of the Special Forces in action with a stick of bubble gum. The artwork on the box was by artist Norm Saunders of Mars Attacks fame. Aurora Models came out with a model of a Green Beret soldier.
Read more about this topic: United States Army Special Forces In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the word saturation:
“In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the end of life but the final saturation with absence.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)