I once saw a man turn gray.
I mean that quite literally. It happened at the Eastern States Exposition, the largest agricultural fair in New England, in the Craftadventure Building, about ten feet away from where I was demonstrating medieval quilting techniques.
By the presence of the words "medieval" and "quilting," one might be justified in assuming that I was there in my official capacity as a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and one would be right. My local barony had been asked to go through our paces as part of the Big E's annual effort to promote New England agriculture, entertain a million or so people, and provide enormous quantities of unhealthy but delicious foods to the delighted crowds. A dozen or so of the rest of us had accordingly gotten up early that Sunday morning, donned our very best and most authentic summer-weight garb, and trekked over to West Springfield ahead of the seething mass of humanity that would shortly descend to stuff themselves on pierogis and cream puffs, coo over the chick hatching display, purchase overpriced merchandise and underpriced jam, and gawk at the horses, emus, and people playing medieval dress-up.
And so we spent the morning fielding questions ranging from the serious to the deliberately silly, rode the merry-go-round in full garb (I rode sidesaddle), and demolished our share of pierogis, cream puffs, steak sandwiches, Tom Thumb donuts, and similar treats. By mid-afternoon we were tired, slightly punchy, and very, very grateful that most spectators had headed over to the stage to listen to either the Village People or Lynyrd Skynyrd, I don't remember which, or over to the dirt track to watch Robinson's Racing Pigs.
I was chatting with my friend Paul when a middle aged man wandered up. Paul, a frighteningly intelligent Army veteran with the lean, slightly deranged look of a coursing hound who's just spotted a warren of fat, slow, lazy, oblivious rabbits, was making himself a new chain mail hauberk, one link at a time. He wore a red and black parti-color tunic that came to a few inches below his knees, red tights, and a non-medieval but rather jaunty beret set just so on his head as he carefully joined link to link to link. The newcomer wore a black satin jacket that proudly proclaimed him to be a Vietnam veteran and member of VFW Post #___. He asked me a few questions, browsed our literature, and then turned his attention to Paul.
"Say, what you are doing?"
"Making chain mail." Paul glanced up, reached for another link, and began explaining how the chinks were interwoven to create a protective layer for a knight or man at arms.
The man listened for a few minutes, then said, "What do you do with it, fight?"
Paul set down his mail and picked up his demo helmet, a Norman-style piece of boiled leather with a metal nose piece modeled on those seen in the Bayeux Tapestry. "That's right. We don't use live steel, but otherwise we wear the same sort of armor, fight in tournaments and wars - "
The man in the satin jacket gave Paul a sardonic look and stared pointedly at his tunic and tights. "And what do your buddies say when you show up wearing a skirt?"
There was a distinct and not entirely pleasant silence. Then Paul picked up the ditty bag full of metalworking tools that had been sitting unnoticed under a chair. He'd had it since his Army days, and of course it was marked with his name, rank, and unit number and patch.
"I just show them that," Paul said with what could only be described as a feral grin, and made sure that his audience could see that, in addition to being a medieval enthusiast, he was a retired lieutenant colonel in the Special Forces who'd led long range patrols in Vietnam.
"You're - you were a LRP?"
Only the tips of Paul's canines showed. "That's right. What about you?"
"I - I - " Mr. Satin Jacket visibly swallowed. "I was a quartermaster. In Saigon."
"Ah," said Paul.
That was when Mr. Satin Jacket turned approximately the color of slightly weathered concrete. Paul didn't say a word for about ten seconds, and then he laughed in a way that was only slightly terrifying. Mr. Satin Jacket hesitantly joined in, and then they were swapping stories about Saigon back in the day, grousing about the terrible food, and generally enjoying the hell out of themselves. It was quite a scene, and I'm all but certain that they forgot about all me until Mr. Jacket's wife claimed him and they drifted off in the direction of the Maine Building in quest of a baked potato.
Paul, of course, simply smiled and went back to knitting his mail. Life in the US Special Forces had prepared him for just about anything, or so it seemed.
Many people today associate the term "special forces" with groups like SEAL Team 6, the Naval commando team that carried out the assassination of Osama bin Laden. However, it's more properly reserved to the Army unit better known as the Green Berets, for its distinctive headgear.
The Berets, founded in 1952, began as an offshoot of the Army's psychological warfare division. Its first commander, Col. Aaron Bank, was a veteran of the Office of Special Services, the World War II-era covert ops group that later became the CIA, and the association between Special Forces and the American intelligence community has continued to this day, along with more conventional military operations like reconnaissance, foreign internal defense, counter-terrorism, and direct engagement with the enemy.
Fortunately or unfortunately, these elite warriors do not enjoy the same glamorous reputation as other elite units like the SEALS (their training course is incredibly tough! They killed Osama bin Laden!), Delta Force (they're Airborne! They rescue hostages!), or the Rangers (they're the oldest! They wear cool black berets!). This is at least due in part to the Berets' work in Vietnam; my friend Paul may have been basically an elite warrior, but the Berets as a group engaged in some very, very nasty operations, from leading Montagnard groups to assassinating locals suspected of being Viet Cong plants.
If that weren't enough, Vietnam-era Special Forces medical officer Jeffrey McDonald was accused (and later convicted) of the murders of his wife and daughters, while yet another Beret, right-wing activist Bo Gritz, launched a ham-handed attempt to "rescue" non-existent American POWs in the early 1980s and has spent the subsequent three decades poking his nose into pretty much every conspiracy theory around except possibly those involving the Lindbergh baby. Add in the infamous (and ludicrous) John Wayne movie, which not only portrayed the Berets as veritable saints in human form, but had the Duke walking eastward into the sunset with a small Vietnamese boy named, God help us all, "Hamchuck" or "Ham Chunk" or "Mauch Chunk"or something equally authentic, and the question isn't why the Berets have a questionable reputation, but why they haven't changed their name to something less notorious.
And then there was the musical tribute to the Berets that, for one brief, blinding moment, actually seemed on the verge of beating back the noxious forces of rock 'n roll, Motown, the Smothers Brothers, and impolite young people with long hair taking over college administration buildings in the name of peace, love, brotherhood, and bonfires made up entirely of draft cards: "The Ballad of the Green Berets," magnum opus of Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler.
That song, inspired by the words of a prominent liberal politician, was what launched Barry Sadler's career as soldier-singer-author-convict-martial artist-All-American tragedy.
The roots of Sadler's later career, both for good and for ill, may lie in his chaotic upbringing; his parents were both professional gamblers, scarcely a profession that will bring a family the sort of stability that a young child needs. Add that his parents divorced when young Barry was but a child, and that his father soon succumbed to a rare form of nerve cancer, and it's little wonder that Barry dropped out of high school at age 16 and spent the next year or so bumming around the country in search of the stability his home life had never provided.
The quest for stability is probably why Sadler then enlisted in the Air Force at the age of 17, then re-enlisted in the Army after a successful tour as a radar technician in Japan. Military life had the sort of discipline and structure his early life had lacked, and by the early 1960s he had completed Airborne training, volunteered for the Special Forces, and been sent over to Vietnam as a combat medic.
It was there that his artistic career began, although no one would have guessed it at the time.
Despite his medical training, it seems that Sadler suffered from that common disease of the young and stupid: he believed that bad things only happened to other people. There is no other explanation for him treating a severe leg wound caused by a feces-smeared punji stick by merely swabbing it out and slapping on a bandage; he was already on antibiotics for an earlier condition and seems to have thought that this would be enough to counteract having massive amounts of e. coli shoved directly into his blood stream on a wooden stick.
Of course he was wrong, and in short order Sadler war airlifted back to the States with a massive knee infection. Surgeons at Walter Reed had to enlarge the already good sized wound to allow it drain properly, and there was talk that Sadler might lose his leg. To pass the time while he healed, Sadler then began to write songs, which he accompanied himself on the guitar; he had always been interested in music and had supported himself as a touring musician during the time between his discharge from the Air Force and his enlistment in the Army, so it only seemed logical for him to turn to composition during his convalescence.
One song in particular came to the attention of a writer named Robin Moore, who was working on a book about the still-little known Green Berets. Moore, whose book about the Special Forces later became the basis of the aforesaid John Wayne movie (see above), liked what he heard and helped Sadler smooth out the rough edges in his lyricsd. He also encouraged Sadler to have his patriotic ballad professionally recorded. Sadler hesitated until he heard Senator Robert F. Kennedy dedicate JFK Center for Special Warfare at Fort Bragg, and was so moved by RFK's words that he vowed then and there that if he recovered, not only would record he "The Ballad of the Green Berets," he would donate all the proceeds to charity.
Those of us who are of what they call "a certain age" will remember what happened next.
Sadler indeed made a full recovery, went into the recording studio, and before you can say "sun setting in the East," "The Ballad of the Green Berets" had been picked up by a major label, soared straight to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and brought Sadler an invitation to perform on The Jimmy Dean television show. Soon Sadler had recorded an entire album of patriotic Green Beret songs (which sold over a million copies), seen another ballad, "The A-Team," hit the Top 30, and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in full Army uniform.
Best of all, "The Ballad of the Green Berets," one of the very, very few Vietnam-era songs that cast the military in anything approaching a positive light, became the theme music for the John Wayne movie, ensuring its continuing popularity among both red-blooded patriots and lovers of terrible films.
With this kind of success, it's little wonder that Sadler soon left the Army. He cut at least two more country albums, ran a martial arts school, and tried unsuccessfully to recreate his brief, early success. His life, formerly clean and disciplined as only a soldier's can be, hit its low point when he shot songwriter Lee Bellamy in a dispute over a woman, then attempted to plant a gun in Bellamy's dead hand to strengthen his case for self-defense. Sadler served less than a month for voluntary manslaughter, but his image was severely damaged and it seemed that he would go down as yet another 'Nam vet gone bad.
And then, like the phoenix of myth, Sadler reinvented himself yet again as a novelist.
It would probably be too much to expect that the author of a sentimental ballad urging a widow to send her son into the very same service that killed his father to be another Dickens, or even another Jim Webb. But who would have thought that even the inventive mind of a man like Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler would produce a series of pulp novels about a saint?
The Casca Series, which began in 1979 with The Eternal Mercenary and the promisingly named God of Death, concerned the exciting, action-packed, relentlessly grim, relentlessly bloody, and literally never-ending exploits of one Casca Rufio Longinus. Casca, who starts out as a Roman legionnaire and ends up in the 20th century, is the Roman soldier who pierced Jesus with the Spear of Destiny and was promptly condemned to wander the earth as a soldier until the Second Coming of Christ.
Now, the observant may point out that Sadler had somehow conflated two figures of early Christian legend to create his anti-hero: St. Longinus, the Roman soldier who actually wielded the Holy Lance and was so impressed by Jesus that he became a pious Christian almost immediately, and the Wandering Jew, who had scorned Jesus on the Via Dolorosa and been condemned to wander eternally as punishment. Sadler got around this by having Longinus stab Jesus out of pity for his suffering, then inadvertently get a taste of the Holy Blood when some trickles down onto his spear, then onto his hand, and thence into his mouth when he wipes sweat from his face.
As I'm sure you all can imagine, literally drinking the blood of Christ does not end well.
Far from being moved by Casca's attempt to put him out of his holy and inspirational suffering, Jesus says,
Soldier, you are content with what you are. Then that you shall remain until we meet again. As I go now to my father, you must one day come to me.
Casca immediately goes into convulsions, but doesn't realize just what has happened until a thirty year sentence at hard labor in some unconvincingly portrayed mines doesn't age him a day. Eventually he learns that he is immortal, at least until Jesus returns for their long-promised
tete a tete, and since all he knows how to do is be a soldier, well, that's what he sets out to be.
Alas for our anti-hero, immortal he may be, and unkillable, but invulnerable is too much to ask. Over the course of the twenty-two books Sadler churned out over the next decade, Casca is shot, stabbed, cut open, had most of his skin burned off, blown up, and nearly loses an eye to a prostitute who is less than happy that he attempts to employ her without paying. Along the way Casca battles a fanatical group called teh the Brotherhood of the Lamb, who regard him as the enemy for his treatment of the Lord and spend the next two millenia doing their best to make his life even more hellish than it already it. This doesn't prevent him from meeting the likes of Temujin (better known as Genghis Khan), Torquemada, Blackbeard the Pirate, Robert E. Lee, Adolf Hitler, George Washington, and plenty of other famous historical figures. He also meets one Dr. Julius Goldman, a Vietnam-era Army surgeon who treats Casca in Nha Trang, realizes that he heals faster and better than any human who isn't Wolverine should be able to, and decides to chronicle Casca's life to date.
This Dr. Goldman (or Barry Sadler, or one of Barry Sadler's continuators/ghostwriters) does in passages like the following:
To the stunned surprise of the spectators, Casca took his helmet off…He threw the helmet at Jubala. It hit, bounced, and rang off the black’s shield. Then he threw his shield at the Numidian so hard it almost knocked Jubala to the sand. And finally he took his sword and presented it in a salute to the Roman audience. ‘For you!’ he cried. ‘For you I dedicate this kill with my hands’. And he threw the sword into the stands. The crowd went insane…. Jubala grinned beneath his helmet, and Casca matched it with a grin of his own. The massive Circus Maximus was silent. Even the emperor was leaning over the railing in concentrated study. Never had anything like this happened in the history of the games.
EXTREME GLADIATORIAL COMBAT!!!!! TONIGHT ONLY!!!!!
(Boguda the Hun) bore down on Casca, trampling bodies beneath the already bloodstained hooves of his warhorse. (Casca), instead of waiting in wide-eyed terror for his death from Boguda’s hand, was throwing himself into the path of his horse. What was the fool doing? The onrushing animal crashed to its knees as Casca’s sword rammed straight through the hide and flesh, piercing its heart. Blood was coming from its mouth and nostrils as it fell, yet it was trying to sink its yellow stained teeth into the face of the man who’d killed it.
Who knew that Mongol horses would be jonesing for a nicotine fix?
From the roof of his palace in the great city of Tenochtitlan, the king-god Moctezuma (Mexican version of the name ‘Montezuma’) set aside his robe of rare feathers and removed from his wrists and arms the bands of beaten gold that were set with emeralds. Stroking the thin hairs of his moustache, he watched the sun set, casting pathways of shimmering gold streaming over the dark waters of the sacred lake Texcoco. Torches set in gold brackets cast a red glow over his sun-dark features. His face was troubled; worry lines creased the high, noble brow. There had been portents and signs that disaster would soon walk the lands of the Aztecs.
"Tonight, on 'Lifestyles of the Rich and Moustached,'...."
Casca had been standing watching the battle, his legs spread a little with one foot on a small rock, when one of the bandit arrows whished between his legs, (narrowly missing) the family jewels. That was too much! It was bad enough having to live for centuries waiting for the Jew (Christ) to return. But to wait castrated…Without the solace of women… Casca was damned if he was going to stand for that. Roaring like a bull… Casca grabbed the jirad of a Mameluke downed beside him and hurled it at the archer who had shot at him. All Casca’s rage was behind the throw, and the weapon smashed through the bandit’s guts as fast as through thin air.
One pities the TSA agent who attempts to touch Casca's junk.
For all the less than ept prose, unattractive hero, and questionable historicity, the Casca series proved surprisingly popular among the devotees of men's adventure fiction, pulpy science fiction, and cut-rate historical fiction. Casca was a hit, and by the mid-1980s Sadler had made enough money that not only was he able to hire ghostwriters to do much of the actual writing, he had enough money to move to Guatemala. There he taught martial arts, assisted with vaccination programs, and spent what turned out to be far too much time hanging out at a bar in Guatemala City called Freddie's Bar (officially La Europa).
It was there that the balladeer of the Green Berets met his fate. One night in September of 1988 Sadler was shot in the head by a would-be robber. Friends had him airlifted to the United States for treatment, but his injuries proved severe enough that he died a little over a year later. He left the partial manuscript for a final (presumably non-ghostwritten) Casca novel on his computer, which was completed by a friend and published in 1990.
There the matter, and the series, might have rested...but like Casca himself, the books have continued. The 23rd novel (distinguished by Casca spending six years underwater before being rescued) appeared nine years after Sadler's death, the 37th was published to virtually no acclaim last April, and the 38th and 39th are in various stages of production. Even though Barry Sadler himself has long resided in that section of Valhalla reserved for men with silver wings upon their chests, his literary legacy seems fit to continue as long as men are men, soldiers are soldiers, and mindless action books are sold at fine newsstands, paperback exchanges, and drugstores across this great land of ours.
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And so, gentle readers...did any of you own the .45 of The Ballad of the Green Berets? Read a Casca novel? Know a Green Beret? Giggle over the parody in Bored of the Rings of the Green Toupees and their gallant leader Farahslax? It's cold and snowy Saturday night here in New England, so don't be shy!
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