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248 DOI: 10.7330/9780874219043.c12 12 “America’s Best” Cultural Poaching on “Ballad of the Green Berets” Tad Tuleja Greatest military hymn of all times. your not american if this doesnt choke you up. —YouTube comment on “Ballad of the Green Berets” What is distributed is not completed, finished goods, but the resources of everyday life, the raw material from which popular culture constitutes itself. —John Fiske In 1965, more than 180,000 American troops were stationed in Vietnam. That spring, responding to a Vietcong attack on the US army base at Pleiku, President Johnson approved the continuous bombing of North Vietnam known as Operation Rolling Thunder. Soon afterward, teach-ins spread across college campuses; protesters surged to rallies; journalist David Halberstam published a book with the unnerving title The Making of a Quagmire; and telegrams flooded the White House, those opposing escalation outnumbering by six to one those favoring it (Prados 2009, 112–32). Even staunch supporters of administration policy had to admit that, in that first year of serious US commitment, the American people were not on board with the war. And the peaceniks had all the good songs. With the folk music revival in full swing, even AM radio, saturated by pop, soul, and surfer music, was airing antiwar songs like Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War,” Phil Ochs’s “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” “America’s Best” 249 Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Universal Soldier,” and Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction.” With the exception of the McGuire song, these were not Top 40 hits, but they outplayed handily the few pro-military songs that even made it to the airwaves. If measured by Cash Box or Billboard ratings, Americans opposed to the Vietnam War far outnumbered those with promilitary sentiments. In 1965, hawks looked in vain for a patriotic hit. The following year, they found it. The single most popular song of 1966—it spent five weeks at Billboard’s number one position—was a poignantly pro-military anthem, “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” which praised the courage of the US Army’s Special Forces. It was cowritten by journalist Robin Moore, author of the best-selling book The Green Berets; and Special Forces staff sergeant Barry Sadler, who had been wounded in Vietnam and whose performance of the song on radio and television made him a celebrity. The song became the title track of Sadler’s album Ballads of the Green Berets, which featured such other paeans to heroic sacrifice as “Letter from Vietnam,” “The Soldier Comes Home,” and “I’m a Lucky One.” Adopted by John Wayne as the theme of his 1968 movie The Green Berets, it soon became a political touchstone, as unreflectively revered by hawkish patriots as it was unreflectively ridiculed by their detractors. Because the song became so invested with the passions of the Vietnam era, it may be tempting to dismiss it as a period piece—a relic of the 1960s whose elegiac sentimentality can best be understood as a reflection of that turbulent time. But the song’s afterlife belies this reading. In the four decades and more since its debut, “The Ballad of the Green Berets” has demonstrated a remarkable durability. YouTube contains dozens of video versions, and posted comments on them show that, decades after Sadler’s death, the “Ballad” continues to inspire both respect and disdain. In his autobiography, I’m a Lucky One, Barry Sadler proudly quoted a newspaper editor who believed that the “Ballad” would “live as long as ‘Long, Long Trail,’ ‘White Christmas,’ or any that you can name” (Sadler 1967, 180–81). We won’t be able to judge the validity of that prediction for some time. But I suspect that as an emotional trigger, not just a historical footnote, Sadler’s song will continue to be played and sung and wept over long after the events of Vietnam have been forgotten. In this chapter, I will try to defend this seemingly rash claim by exploring the song’s long and still shimmering shadow. 250 Tad Tuleja The Ballad Itself: Core Virtues Let me look first at the song itself, particularly at one key to its popularity : its lean, poignant celebration of core military virtues. The first stanza introduces these virtues: Fighting soldiers from the sky Fearless men who jump and die Men who mean just what they say The brave men of the Green Beret The dominant virtue here...

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