On this day (November 1) in 1940, Barry Sadler was born in Carlsbad, New Mexico. After serving his country as a Green Beret medic in the Vietnam War, he achieved national fame with his 1966 song “The Ballad of the Green Berets”. One of the few popular songs from the era to shine a positive light on the U.S. military, “The Ballad of the Green Berets” spent five weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 and reached number two on the U.S. country chart. The song was so big, it outsold every individual single released by The Beatles that year.
Today, we’re taking a look at the life of the man behind the song, who would have turned 86 years old today.
Barry Sadler Served His Country Before Finding Chart Success
Barry Sadler’s parents divorced when he was just five years old, and his father died of cancer shortly after. Finding work wherever she could, Sadler’s mother moved the family around the Southwest, including Arizona, California, Colorado, and Texas.
According to his AllMusic profile, Sadler became interested in music at age 12 after learning a range of Western and Mexican songs at a logging camp. He taught himself to play guitar before dropping out of high school during his sophomore year in Leadville, Colorado.
At 17, Sadler enlisted in the U.S. Air Force, serving a year in Japan working as an air traffic controller and radar specialist. Unable to find steady work following his discharge, he traveled around the western United States playing music before ultimately re-enlisting, this time in the U.S. Army.
Wounded in Action
After completing airborne training, Barry Sadler volunteered for Special Forces. He trained as a combat medic at Fort Sam Houston’s Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas, the U.S. Army Hospital at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and the Advanced Medical Training School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Achieving the rank of staff sergeant, he shipped off to Saigon.
While leading a patrol in Vietnam in 1965, Sadler sustained a severe knee injury from a Vietnamese punji stick. Developing a serious infection in his leg, he was medically evacuated to the Philippines, where he sang and wrote songs for the other wounded soldiers in the hospital.
“The Ballad of the Green Berets”
During medic training, Barry Sadler began writing the lyrics that would become “The Ballad of the Green Berets” as a tribute to the U.S. Army Special Forces.
According to Songfacts, a TV news crew filmed him singing the song at the hospital. When the footage aired in the U.S., its popularity quickly spread.
Sadler officially recorded the song at RCA Records’ 24th Street Studios in New York City in December 1965. The following month, he released the song as part of an entire album titled Ballads of the Green Berets.
The fastest-selling RCA single of its time, “The Ballad of the Green Berets” sold more than nine million copies and catapulted Sadler to national fame. It later inspired the 1968 John Wayne film The Green Berets.
What Came Next?
The Pentagon sent Barry Sadler on a 15-month nationwide tour to promote the song and the Special Forces.
Having signed with RCA, Sadler left the military in 1967 looking to further pursue his music career. While he did land a top 30 hit with 1966’s “The A Team”, none of Sadler’s subsequent work ever matched the success of “The Ballad of the Green Berets”. After landing minor roles in TV Westerns, he moved to Nashville and began writing pulp-fiction novels.
In 1979, Sadler was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the previous year’s shooting death of country music songwriter Lee Emerson Bellamy, who managed Marty Robbins, Bobby Helms, Jimmy C. Newman, and George Jones.
Sadler served 28 days in a Nashville workhouse for the shooting, which reportedly arose from a dispute between the two men regarding the same romantic partner.
In the early 1980s, Sadler moved to Guatemala. Four years later — on September 7, 1988 — he was shot in the head while sitting in a cab in Guatemala City.
While witnesses claimed that Sadler had accidentally shot himself, his manager, family and friends believed he was the victim of a robbery or assassination attempt.
Friends flew Sadler to the U.S. via private jet, where he spent six weeks in a coma at the Nashville VA hospital. When he awoke, he was a quadriplegic and had suffered extensive brain damage.
[RELATED: 6 Emotional Ballads From 1966 Every Baby Boomer Can Still Sing by Heart]
Barry Sadler never recovered from his injury. On November 5, 1989 — four days after his 49th birthday — he died of cardiac arrest at the VA hospital in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
Featured image by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
The post Born 86 Years Ago Today in New Mexico, the Green Beret Who Scored a No. 1 Hit With a Patriotic Anthem That Outsold the Beatles appeared first on American Songwriter.