Ballads of the Green Berets
Barry Sadler drove a sharp spike into the already polarized American psyche with his unabashedly patriotic and pro-Vietnam War chant "Ballad of the Green Berets," which rocketed to the top of the charts in 1966. Supporters of the war in Southeast Asia embraced "Ballad of the Green Berets" as an anthem; antiwar activists derided it as jingoistic, machismo garbage. In retrospect, they were both right. Sadler, a wounded and decorated Vietnam veteran, possessed a thin, stilted baritone better suited to recitations than actual singing (which there is actually very little of herein). As a songwriter, he was little more than one-dimensional. And, sadly, like so many veterans, Sadler's life seemed to slowly unravel after the war, and after the fleeting taste of fame that "Green Berets" afforded him. Though he continued to record and write soldier-of-fortune-style pulp war novels, he never had another hit. He died in 1989 after being shot in the head near his home in Guatemala, under mysterious and somewhat seedy circumstances. Oddly, though, when heard today, far removed from its emotion-charged original context, this scant, musically inconsequential collection of guts-and-glory odes and reminiscences takes on new meaning as a slender but vivid historical document from one of America's most divided and tumultuous epochs.--Bob Allen