Word: sadler
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...luckiest one is U.S. Special Forces Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler. At 25, he has come away from Viet Nam not only with his skin but with a clutch of ballads that have made him famous and rich. His recording of The Ballad of the Green Berets, only three months old, has sold more than 2,000,000 copies, and a subsequently released twelve-tune album has already leaped to the top of the bestselling LP lists. For this, Sergeant Sadler has earned $250,000 so far this year, and the demand for personal appearances is so great that the Army...
...Here's the Mail." Sadler is probably the closest-cropped, ruggedest (Black Belt in judo), and most musically illiterate performer on the pop charts. But give him a subject and a guitar and he comes up with a song in ten minutes. RCA Victor arrangers transcribe the work for him which he describes as "kind of intermediate between ballad and country-western, with maybe a little calypso." Then, with cracking, lackluster tenor and a backing of RCA trumpets, or fiddle and humming voices, he croons away. For the most part, the ballads are banal and ridden with sentimentality ("Here...
...Sadler grew up in "maybe 25 towns" in the West. His father, an itinerant plumber, died when Barry was seven; his mother was a barmaid. Young Barry quit school at 15, "bummed around for three years" before joining the Air Force. When he got out in 1962, a buddy taught him drums and guitar, and they formed a combo. But they couldn't hack it playing honky-tonks, so Sadler tried the Army. Then came eleven rigorous months of Special Forces training that qualified him for his green beret as a combat medic. Along the way, at Fort...
Tough Talk. It was a few months later, while on patrol in Viet Nam's Central Highlands, that Sadler's short combat career was ended. He fell on a Viet Cong-planted punji pole, suffered an infection that left one leg scarred and partially numb. He returned Stateside, talking both tough ("You get a sort of satisfaction out of a good shot, leading a man running across a field and bringing him down") and tenderly ("We're overgrown social workers"). Mostly, though, he preferred not to talk at all except in his songs...
...them might indeed have been crooned in a shot-up rice paddy on the Mekong Delta. If so, it is interesting to note that, aside from a few murky references to Freedom and Those Oppressed, the lyrics are entirely apolitical, and unconcerned with whom we are fighting or why. Sadler, it seems, is only interested in his Fightin' Soldiers From...