The Ballad of the Green Berets

The story

"The Ballad of the Green Berets" is a patriotic song of 1966, written and sung by Barry Sadler, a soldier who began it while training as a medic in the United States Army Special Forces. The author Robin Moore, who had written the book The Green Berets, helped him with the words and with a recording contract with RCA Records. A demonstration tape was made in a simple studio at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, with the help of Gerry Gitell and Lieutenant General William P. Yarborough. The words were written partly in honour of Specialist 5 James Gabriel Jr., a Special Forces soldier and the first native Hawaiian to die in Vietnam, killed by Viet Cong fire on a training mission with the South Vietnamese Army on 8 April 1962; a verse that named him was left out of the recording.

Sadler recorded the song and eleven others with Sid Bass at RCA's studios in New York City on 18 December 1965, and the single and the album Ballads of the Green Berets came out in January 1966. The single shipped two million copies in five weeks, then the fastest-selling single in RCA's history, and topped the Billboard Hot 100 for five weeks from March 1966; Billboard now counts it the top Hot 100 song of the year, and it sold more than nine million copies. Sadler sang it on The Ed Sullivan Show on 30 January 1966 and on other television programmes.

It was one of the few popular songs of the Vietnam War years to show the military in a favourable light, and it succeeded in an era of protest songs and opposition to the war; the musicologist R. Serge Denisoff called it the most successful topical song of the period. John Wayne asked for it as the theme of his film The Green Berets (1968), and the composer Miklós Rózsa, who feared it would sound old-fashioned, arranged it for the opening and closing credits.

What it says

A patriotic tribute to the soldiers of the US Army Special Forces, solemn in tone; the song presents them in a favourable light and dwells on their humanity rather than on battle.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so they are not printed here. “What it says” above gives their theme in our own words, and the performance below lets you hear them.