In 1966, the biggest song in America didn’t come from The Beatles, The Rolling Stones or a hot new rock band. It came from an Army medic.
Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler released “The Ballad of the Green Berets” in January 1966. It was his very first single, and by March, it had reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, where it stayed for five weeks. It also topped the easy listening chart and reached No. 2 on the country chart.
Sadler was born in Carlsbad, New Mexico, in 1940 and had a difficult childhood. His parents divorced when he was 5, his family moved often, and he dropped out of high school in 10th grade. At 17, he joined the Air Force, and he later enlisted in the Army, where he volunteered for the Special Forces, known as the Green Berets, and trained as a medic.
He began writing the song during his Special Forces training. In May 1965, while on patrol in Vietnam, Sadler was wounded in the knee by a punji stick, a sharpened bamboo booby trap. The wound became badly infected, and he was evacuated for surgery before recovering at Fort Bragg.
With help from Robin Moore, author of the book The Green Berets, Sadler polished the lyrics and landed a deal with RCA Records. He recorded the song in December 1965 and performed it on The Ed Sullivan Show on Jan. 30, 1966.
The song was a phenomenon. It shipped 2 million copies in its first five weeks, making it RCA’s fastest-selling single at the time, and it has sold more than 9 million copies overall. Billboard later named it the No. 1 song of 1966. Two years later, John Wayne used it in his film The Green Berets.
But Sadler never had another hit. He left the Army in 1967 and later wrote the popular Casca series of novels. His life took dark turns. In 1978, he shot and killed songwriter Lee Emerson Bellamy during a dispute in Nashville. Sadler pleaded to voluntary manslaughter and served 28 days.
In 1988, he was shot in the head in Guatemala City, under circumstances that remain unclear. He spent weeks in a coma and never fully recovered. Sadler died on Nov. 5, 1989, four days after his 49th birthday.
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