Barry Sadler: The strange life of the army veteran who once outsold The Beatles
By the mid-1960s, The Beatles had risen from being teenage skiffle musicians in Liverpool to the founders of a global empire built upon revolutionary pop music. There had never been a band like The Beatles before, either in their artistic innovations or the sheer scale of success that fell at the feet of the Fab Four.
When they released their magnum opus, Revolver, in 1966, they were powerful enough to take anybody else in the world on, but not, as it would appear, the military-industrial complex, which has long since dominated the United States.
Political protest and cultural revolution were themes which dominated the counterculture era of 1960s America. As the civil rights movement marched on, and the war in Vietnam only intensified, legions of young people took to the streets of the US to voice their dissent and disgust at the actions of the nation’s government and, crucially, its military. Given that the war in Vietnam was largely televised, and information about war crimes and atrocities like the My Lai massacre were eventually released to the public, the US Army no longer boasted the same level of PR popularity that it had in previous years.
Nevertheless, the conservative majority of the US population continued to blindly support the horrific overseas actions of its military, causing a vast divide between the counterculture kids of the hippie era and the rest of the American population. Recognising the strength of this market, in addition to the desperate need for a PR boost, the US Army began to concoct its own cultural output, revolving around the unlikely figure of Barry Sadler.
The unlikely soldier who outsold The Beatles
An ordinary bloke from Carlsbad, New Mexico, Sadler had spent much of his adolescence as a directionless drifter, busking honky tonk style and moving in whichever direction the wind took him. Eventually, perhaps in an effort to get his life back on track, Sadler enlisted in the US Air Force at 17, before joining the US Army Special Forces during the early 1960s. This move saw the young American transported to the jungles of Vietnam, where his time was quickly cut short when he injured his leg on a punji stick—a sharp stick hidden in a hole in the ground—a classic of the Viet Cong’s guerrilla style tactics.
This injury spelt the end of Sadler’s combat career, but he continued to serve the Army as a kind of poster boy. His strong, all-American look made him a powerful PR weapon for the forces, and he was used to his fullest extent in late 1965, when he was recruited to record ‘The Ballad of the Green Berets’. A patriotic Army anthem, the track was largely written by Robin Moore, whose novel, The Green Berets, served as the inspiration both for this song and the universally panned John Wayne film of the same name.
Sadler was naturally suited to performing the ballad, and its focus on the people behind the green berets, rather than the war itself, made the song unique during that time. Despite the ever-growing anti-war movement within American counterculture at the time, the song became an instant hit upon its release in 1966. Selling two million copies within the first five weeks, the single was RCA’s fastest-selling record to date, and it went on to sell a whopping nine million copies, topping the Hot 100 charts for five weeks, and, most significantly, outselling anything The Beatles released in 1966.
However, unlike The Beatles, Sadler’s career didn’t feature much in the way of development. Following ‘The Ballad of the Green Berets’, the former soldier wrote and recorded a variety of other military-focused patriotic anthems, but none of them could replicate the intense, Lennon-slaying success of that 1966 single. He was honourably discharged from the military in 1967 and went on to live an incredibly bizarre and chequered life after that.
Giving up on music entirely, the next time audiences heard from Sadler was in 1977, when he began to write pulp fiction books. Predominantly, his work consisted of the biblical serial Casca: The Eternal Mercenary, which amassed 22 instalments over the years. Shortly after beginning his publishing career, however, Sadler fatally shot and killed country musician and love rival Lee Emerson Bellamy in Nashville, leading to a voluntary manslaughter charge and a horrendously short jail sentence of less than 30 days.
Then, during the 1980s, the former US Army poster boy relocated to Guatemala, where he was involved in dealing arms to local militias and administering medical aid to the wounded during the Guatemalan Civil War. It was during this time that Sadler was shot in the head in 1988. Depending on who you ask, he either shot himself accidentally or was shot as a result of a robbery gone wrong. Either way, he was left quadriplegic and with serious brain damage, eventually passing away a year later in November 1989.
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