No Time for Sergeanting

TIN PAN ALLEY

I'm goin' home; my tour is done-- I'm goin' home. I'm a lucky one. --from Ballads of the Green Berets

The 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 has assigned a lieutenant colonel to handle his bookings and pressagentry.

"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's the mail that came today/ His silver wings and green beret; Come all ye young maidens, and hear my sad tale/ 'Bout a brave young trooper whose 'chute did fail"). If Viet Nam has produced a true war poet, he is no doubt too busy fighting to write.

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 Sam Houston, he says, "I started writing songs because I had a terrible time playing anybody else's music." His first audiences were the boys in the barracks and the girls in the bordellos below the border in Nuevo Laredo. "The Army doesn't like me to talk about that," he says, "but what the hell, I'm no angel. I'm a soldier, just a plain old dumb sergeant."

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.

Now there's no time for sergeanting. Nominally assigned to the Fort Bragg, N.C., public information office, Sadler tours the country as a flesh-and-blood singing recruiting poster, and performs before big audiences from Atlantic City to San Francisco. He plays some commercial engagements, but only on leave, and he has earmarked part of his income to a scholarship fund for the children of veterans.

"I hope," he says, "I have enough character not to let this blow my head out of proportion. I'm Government property until March 1967, and then I'll probably get out and into the entertainment world." He's got a healthy start. He has just signed an agreement for commercial licensing of his name on T shirts and toy guns.

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