Avatar feed
Responses: 23
SPC Douglas Bolton
18
18
0
Great song. Great man.
(18)
Comment
(0)
Avatar small
LTC Stephen F.
17
17
0
Edited 4 y ago
Dbef3115
A2b3cc15
F76f66d0
91044971
Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on November 5, 1989, Green Beret Staff Sergeant Barry Allen Sadler died.
On July 18, 1963 Barry Sadler married 19-year-old Women’s Army Corps (WAC) nurse Lavona Ruth [nee Edelman] Sanders and they had two sons.
he had married Lavona, a 19-year-old Women’s Army Corps (WAC) nurse.
1. Thor named after the Scandinavian god of thunder and war.
2. Baron


Sgt. Barry Sadler on the Jimmy Dean Show
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri6ZLWIQjVs


Images:
1. Barry Sadler served four years in the U.S.A.F. as a radar technician [1958-1962] and became a martial arts expert during his year in Japan.
2. 1964 Barry Sadler in camouflage fatigues, on patrol with the Montagnards in Vietnam.
3. 1964 7th Special Forces Group Detachment A-216 at Camp Hardy in Plei Do Lim in the Central Highlands. Barry Sadler was a medic on the team treating Montagnards
4. Barry Sadler with his wife Lavona Ruth Sadler

Biographies
1. marcleepson.com/sadler/sadlerfacts.html
2. oocities.org/es/barrysadler_fansite/biografia_english.html]

1. Background from {[ http://marcleepson.com/sadler/sadlerfacts.html]}
Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler made his mark with “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” the No. 1 hit song of the year 1966, which is what he is rightly famous for. But Barry Sadler had an eventful and colorful life before, during, and after the song made him a household name during the Vietnam War years a half century ago.
How eventful and colorful? Consider these…

Little-Known Barry Sadler Facts
1. Barry Sadler’s parents divorced before he was five. Soon after that, his father died of cancer. His mother Bebe was no June Cleaver. She worked in bars and brothels all over the West before settling in Leadville, Colorado.
2. With a largely physically and emotionally absent mother, Barry spent countless hours with his best friend, Delfino Gomez, and his large Mexican-American family in Leadville. The boys were practically like brothers. He also spent many nights under the protective wing of “Ma” Brown, the Madame at the brothel at the infamous Pioneer Bar in Leadville.
3. Barry was constantly in minor trouble with the law during his teen-aged years, but had the good sense to quit high school after his junior year and join the U.S. Air Force in the summer of 1958.
4. He served four years in the U.S.A.F. as a radar technician. He also earned his GED, got a tattoo (a panther on his arm), and became a martial arts expert during his year in Japan.
5. Barry joined the Army in August 1962, volunteering to go Airborne and for Special Forces where he chose to be a medic. He completed the arduous Green Beret medical training in December 1963. During that time he starting writing the song that would become “The Ballad of the Green Berets.”
6. He went to Vietnam in late December of 1964, serving temporarily in several SF units, before becoming permanently attached to Detachment A-216 at Camp Hardy in Plei Do Lim in the Central Highlands. He was one of two medics on the team. He mainly treated Montagnard men, women, and children, but took part in recon patrols with Montagnard fighters and other members of his team.
7. He worked on “The Ballad of the Green Berets” in Vietnam. During his tour he was summoned to Saigon to perform for a retiring general. While there, he was filmed singing the song and the segment appeared on the national TV news in the U.S. His wife Lavona turned on her TV one night in Pennsylvania, and saw the segment—not knowing it was going to be aired.
8. Sadler took a feces-infected punji stake in the knee during a patrol. He tried to treat it himself, but the leg became severely infected and he was medically evacuated to the Clark AF Base Hospital in the Philippines and then back to Fort Bragg where he was so emaciated that Lavona Sadler did not recognize him.
9. With the help of a Public Information Officer, Lt. Gerry Gitell, who set up a rudimentary recording studio at Fort Bragg, Barry Sadler recorded a demo. Gitell helped market it and was instrumental in Sadler signing a songwriter’s contract in July of 1964. Sadler was so grateful that he promised Gitell 25 percent of all royalties from the song—and kept that promise.
10. In the summer of 1965 Barry Sadler met Robin Moore, the author of the best-selling novel, The Green Berets. Moore bought Barry a guitar, added words to the song, and suggested changing the name of the song to “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” adding the “s” to tie it to his book’s title. Barry’s image graced the cover of the paperback of The Green Berets.
11. Barry Sadler signed a recording contract for $500 with RCA Records in November 1965. He recorded a 12-song album in one day in December. RCA released the single and album in January 1966. The song hit No. 1 on the Billboard Top 100 chart in late February and stayed there for five weeks, going on to sell more than 9 million records; the album, “Ballads of the Green Berets,” sold more than 2 million copies. Sadler, whose Army salary was about $300 a month, received more than $500,000 in royalties from the song in 1966 alone.
12. When the song hit, the Army took Sadler off his regular duty at Fort Bragg and sent him on a 15-month nationwide tour to promote the song at scores of state fairs, veterans conventions, U.S. Savings Bond drives and other events. Sadler hated it.
13. He got out of the Army as soon as his enlistment was up in May 1967 and moved with his wife and two young sons to Tucson. The plan was to make records and become a screenwriter and actor. His recording and acting careers went nowhere, although he had bit parts in four episodes of two TV western series, The High Chaparral and Death Valley Days, and in the unsuccessful film, Dayton’s Devils.
14. Barry Sadler ran through all his royalty money and was in debt by 1973 when he and his family moved to Nashville.
15. On December 1, 1978, he shot and killed Lee Emerson Bellamy, a washed-up country music singer and songwriter, in the parking lot of a girlfriend’s apartment in the Nashville suburbs. Sadler hired the top criminal defense attorney in Nashville, avoided trial, pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter, and wound up serving less than a month in the county workhouse after a plea bargain.
16. Sadler wrote 29 pulp fiction novels, beginning 1977, 22 of them in the Casca: The Eternal Mercenary series. They sold well, but Sadler remained in debt.
17. He moved to Guatemala in the early 1980s, telling people he was training the Contras, a guerrilla group fighting against the leftist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.
18. On September 7, 1988, he took a bullet to the head in a taxi cab in Guatemala City. The authorities said he was drunk and accidently shot himself. Friends and family say he was the victim of a robbery or an assassination attempt.
19. Bob Brown, the publisher of Soldier of Fortune, paid for a Lear jet and for a doctor and two nurses to get Sadler out of Guatemala. He underwent successful brain surgery at the VA Hospital in Nashville; however, he suffered brain damage and was all but quadriplegic.
20. After being moved to the Cleveland VA for rehab in November, Sadler was kidnapped out of the hospital by two former Green Berets who claimed he was being mistreated there. For a week his whereabouts were unknown to his family and friends in Nashville.
21. Following a tense court hearing, Sadler was returned to the Cleveland VA and then to the VA hospital in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, near Nashville. He died there on November 9, 1989.


2. Background from {[https://www.oocities.org/es/barrysadler_fansite/biografia_english.html]}
Barry Sadler (November 1, 1940 – September 8, 1989) was an American author and musician. Sadler served as a Green Beret medic and Staff Sergeant in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. Most of his works have military themes, and he billed himself under his military rank of Staff Sergeant as SSgt Barry Sadler.

Sadler was born in Carlsbad, New Mexico, the second son of John Sadler and Bebe Littlefield of Phoenix, Arizona. Sadler's parents divorced shortly afterward, with his father dying of a rare form of nervous system cancer at age 36. Littlefield took Sadler's older brother, Robert, to various places in the Southwest, working temporary jobs in Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas.

Barry Sadler in the Military Service.
Sadler dropped out of the Leadville, Colorado high school in the tenth grade. He hitchhiked across the country, and joined the U.S. Air Force after a year of wandering the country. Sadler was trained in radar and traveled to Japan at age 17. After a few years in the Air Force, Sadler joined the Army, hoping for more excitement.
While serving in the Vietnam War, he was severely wounded in the knee by a feces-covered punji stick while leading a patrol in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, southeast of Pleiku in May 1965. At the time, Sadler was on an antibiotic for dysentery, so no major ill effects from the punji stick were seen. He used only a cotton swab and an adhesive bandage while finishing the patrol. Later, Sadler developed a major infection of the leg, sending him home. During dangerous surgery, Sadler's doctors had to enlarge the wound to drain it and administer penicillin. While recovering in the hospital, Sadler heard Robert F. Kennedy dedicating the new JFK Center for Special Warfare at Fort Bragg. At that moment, Sadler promised himself that if his leg fought the infection, he would give away the rights to his song.
Sadler recorded his now-famous song, "Ballad of the Green Berets," a patriotic song in ballad style. The recording of his Vietnam songs was initiated by the urging of writer Robin Moore, author of the novel The Green Berets. The book became a 1968 movie, The Green Berets, starring John Wayne with the Ballad of the Green Berets arranged in a choral version by Ken Darby as the title song of the film. Moore wrote an introduction to Sadlers' autobiography, I'm a Lucky One, written with Tom Mahoney (Macmillan, 1967). The book's title is also a Sadler recorded song. The "Ballad of the Green Berets" was picked up by RCA Victor Records in early 1966 and became a fast-selling single, reaching #1 on the yearly single charts. The song was a big hit in many U.S. cities, including 2 weeks at #1 on the weekly Good Guys music survey at WMCA, the top pop music radio station in New York in 1966. Sadler recorded an album of similarly themed songs, called Ballads of the Green Berets. None of the other songs on the album (which generally tell the common tales of soldiers serving in a time of war) made an impact. Sadler was widely thought to be a writer of simple songs, and having an average voice. Sadler's photograph also appeared on the 1966 paperback cover of Moore's book as well as on his LP and 45 version of Ballad of the Green Berets.

Literary Works
Unable to score another major hit, although "The A-Team" was a top-30 Billboard charted single in 1966, Sadler took to writing books. He chose to write about soldiers, but his series of novels took a turn far different from his music. His "Casca" series centers on the title character, Casca Rufio Longinius (a sort of combination of Longinus and The Wandering Jew), who stabbed Christ during the crucifixion, and is cursed to forever remain a soldier until the Second Coming. The series of 25 novels takes Casca through to the 20th century. Sadler himself wrote only the first few, with the remainder of the first 22 being farmed out by the publishers to other writers and issued under his name. Subsequent books have been written by different authors (see http://www.casca.net).

The Death
Later in life and after serving time in prison for a fatal shooting, Sadler moved to Guatemala City in the mid 1980's and often hung out at a bar/restaurant called La Europa (also known as Freddie's Bar for the German proprietor). During this time he was engaged in various pursuits. He continued to publish the Casca books (mostly using various ghostwriters), produced a self-defense video (which was never released) and even helped with vaccination programs in rural villages. But it was often believed that he was involved in selling arms to the Guatemalan military or arming the Contras in Honduras and Nicaragua.

It was in Guatemala City that he was shot in the head one night in a taxi cab. He was airlifted to the States by friends from the Soldier of Fortune Magazine, where he was hospitalized and remained in a coma for several months. He died little more than a year later in his mother's house in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The circumstances involving his shooting remain a mystery. It has been claimed that he committed suicide, that he shot himself accidentally while showing off to a female companion, and that he was assassinated for allegedly training and arming the Contras. It is also possible that he was simply a victim of random violence.
Always, Barry Sadler was a great man, great singer and a great soldier with a big heart whoever was arranged to make the right before all order.


FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs SMSgt Lawrence McCarter SPC Michael Duricko, Ph.D GySgt Thomas Vick SGT Denny Espinosa SSG Stephen Rogerson SPC Matthew Lamb LTC (Join to see) LTC Greg Henning Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. Maj Kim Patterson PO1 William "Chip" Nagel PO2 (Join to see) SSG Franklin Briant SPC Woody Bullard TSgt David L. MSgt Robert "Rock" Aldi MSG Glen Miller
(17)
Comment
(0)
LTC Stephen F.
LTC Stephen F.
4 y
8b3cce5b
06e29344
45aee897
5345a6c4
Barry Sadler - Greatest Hits (FULL ALBUM - BEST OF COUNTRY)
TRACKLIST
01- Letter From Vietnam 00:11
02- I'm A Lucky One 02:44
03- I'm Watching the Raindrops Fall 05:31
04- Lullaby 07:40
05- Saigon 10:09
06- The Soldier Has Come Home 12:34
07- The Battle Of The Green Berets 15:22
Barry Allen Sadler (November 1, 1940 – November 5, 1989) was an American soldier, singer/songwriter, and author. Sadler served as a Green Beret medic, achieving the rank of Staff Sergeant. He served in the Vietnam War from late December 1964 to late May 1965. Most of his work has a military theme, and he is best known for his "Ballad of the Green Berets," a #1 hit in 1966.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtZJxqfYU5s

Images:
1. Barry Sadler with his sons Thor and Baron on a swing In Tucson Arizona in 1971 photo by David Lee Guss
2. On December 1, 1978, he shot and killed Lee Emerson Bellamy, a washed-up country music singer and songwriter, in the parking lot of a girlfriend’s apartment in the Nashville suburbs.
3. Pioneer Bar in Leadville where Barry Sadler's mother was Madame at the brothel at this infamous bar.
4. Barry Sadler moved to Guatemala in the early 1980s, telling people he was training the Contras, a guerrilla group fighting against the leftist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua

Background from {[https://www.britannica.com/biography/Barry-Sadler]}
Barry Sadler
American soldier, songwriter, and author
Barry Sadler, in full Barry Allen Sadler, (born November 1, 1940, Carlsbad, New Mexico, U.S.—died November 5, 1989, Murfreesboro, Tennessee), American soldier, singer, songwriter, and pulp-fiction author who is principally remembered for his best-selling song “The Ballad of the Green Berets.”
Sadler’s parents divorced in 1945, three years before his father’s death. The young Sadler and his mother moved around the U.S. Southwest before settling in 1950 in Leadville, Colorado, where Sadler attended public school, dropping out of high school after completing the 10th grade. Sadler then joined the U.S. Air Force in June 1958 and served for four years, including a year in Japan, where he became proficient in martial arts and where he earned a GED. He received an honorable discharge in June of 1962.

With few job prospects, Sadler returned to military service, this time joining the U.S. Army in August 1962. After completing airborne training, he volunteered for Special Forces, choosing to be a medic. He trained 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, finishing in December of 1963. On July 18, 1963, he had married Lavona Edelman, a 19-year-old Women’s Army Corps (WAC) nurse.

Sadler served in Vietnam from late December 1964 to late May 1965, when he was medically evacuated to the Philippines for treatment for an infected punji stake wound. For most of his tour of duty, Sadler served as a medic with the 5th Special Forces Group’s Detachment A-216 at Camp Hardy in Plei Do Lim in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. He and the team’s other medics administered to the medical needs of the local hill people, the Montagnards, as well as to other civilians. The medics also treated their own team members who had been injured or wounded and led Montagnards into the field on combat and reconnaissance patrols and ambushes.

As a boy, Sadler had played the flute, harmonica, drums, and guitar—although he never took a lesson and could not read music. Sadler picked up the guitar again during his time in the Air Force and joined a short-lived trio after his discharge. He began composing a song about the Green Berets during his Special Forces medic training. With the help of Special Forces Lieut. Gerry Gitell, Sadler signed a songwriter’s contract with a New York music company in July 1964. He worked on the Green Beret song in Vietnam and after recuperating from his wounds at Fort Bragg.

In November 1965, while still on active duty, Sadler signed a recording contract with RCA Records. In December he recorded a dozen songs in New York City, including “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” the tune he had been working on for several years, which pays tribute to his fellow Special Forces soldiers. RCA released the single and an album titled Ballads of the Green Berets in January 1966. The song reached No. 1 on the Billboard Top 100 chart in late February and stayed there for five weeks, going on to sell more than nine million records. The album sold some two million copies and hit No.1 on Billboard’s best-selling albums chart in early April.

The Pentagon sent Sadler on a 15-month nationwide tour to promote the song and the Special Forces. Sadler left the military in May 1967, intending to make a career in show business. A second album sold reasonably well, but the handful of recordings he made after that were unsuccessful. On December 1, 1978, Sadler shot and killed Lee Emerson Bellamy, a former country music singer, in Nashville. He pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and served less than 30 days in a minimum security jail. Having left show business around that time, Sadler wrote 29 pulp fiction books beginning in 1977, 22 of them in a series called Casca: The Eternal Mercenary.

Sadler moved to Guatemala in the 1980s, where he wrote books, provided medical care to impoverished Mayan people, and was involved in arms selling. On September 7, 1988, he was shot in the head in Guatemala City. Witnesses and the police said he accidently shot himself. Others claimed he was the victim of a robbery or assassination attempt. Friends flew him to Nashville, where he was operated on at the VA hospital. After the operation, he was left quadriplegic and confined to a hospital bed with brain damage until his death.'


FYI SSG Franklin Briant SSG Michael Noll LTC Wayne Brandon LTC (Join to see) SCPO Morris Ramsey SGT (Join to see) SFC William Farrell PO1 H Gene LawrenceMaj Marty Hogan SMSgt David A Asbury Cpl (Join to see)SSG Jimmy CernichSSG Jeffrey LeakeCPL Dave Hoover SSG Samuel KermonSSG Donald H "Don" Bates SGT Gregory Lawritson SGT John " Mac " McConnell CWO3 Dennis M. SPC Matthew Lamb
(10)
Reply
(0)
LTC Stephen F.
LTC Stephen F.
4 y
5d5c9059
529f3bfe
Ef235b92
596ed278
Barry Sadler And The Casca The Eternal Mercenary Book Series - An Absolute Classic!
In this video I take a look at all the Barry Sadler Casca The Eternal Mercenary paperbacks as published in the USA by Ace Charter Books.
Some of these are certainly getting scarce now but this is a series you MUST track down!
Every book is featured, right from the very first volume, where we see Casca as a mercenary, then the Panzer Soldier, The Warlord, The Barbarian, Soldier of Fortune, The Conquistador, The Samurai, The Cursed and many more, plus a few of Sadler's Vietnam war novels and the three UK editions!
https://youtu.be/42sqjY8oH38

Images:
1. Barry Sadler as a child
2. SSG Barry Sadler with his son Thor
3. SGT Barry Sadler with his young son Baron
4. Barry Allen Sadler died of cardiac arrest on November 5, 1989, just four days after his 49th birthday. He is buried in Nashville’s National Cemetery.

Background from {[https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-01-27-vw-1665-story.html}]
Background from {[https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-01-27-vw-1665-story.html]}

The Ballad of Barry Sadler : The War-Glory World of an Acclaimed Soldier of Song Has Shrunk to a Hospital Bed, and a Bitter Family Battle
By BOB SIPCHEN
JAN. 27, 1989 12 AM
TIMES STAFF WRITER

Had Barry Sadler died when a bullet pierced the frontal lobe of his brain in Guatemala last Sept. 7, it would have been a clean ending to the sort of life storytellers tidy up and turn into popular mythology.
But the man whose “The Ballad of the Green Berets” burned an indelible impression on the mind of America 22 years ago, lives. He moves from bed to wheelchair to therapy room and back in the Cleveland hospital he now inhabits.
And so his story is about to take still another twist, as full of intrigue, confusion and good intentions gone bad as the war he came to symbolize.
Alleged inconsistencies between the nature of his wound and the accounts that came out of Guatemala--that Sadler accidentally shot himself--have sent rumors of attempted murder ricocheting through the mercenary-music-business-pulp-fiction circles through which the 48-year-old Vietnam veteran traveled.

Judge’s Ruling Due
Meanwhile, on Monday, a Cleveland judge is scheduled to decide, based on a psychiatrist’s report, whether Sadler--who has been hospitalized since the shooting--is competent to manage his own affairs.
Based on that decision, the judge may also then adjudicate the familial fire-fight that has developed over who should take custody of a man some consider Vietnam’s only living hero.
On one side are Sadler’s wife, Levona, 44, and his children, who want Sadler returned to a medical facility in Nashville, where he had been flown from Guatemala. On the other is Sadler’s 70-year-old mother, Blanche (Bebe) Sadler, who, with the help of a handful of Special Forces veterans, quietly sprang Sadler from a Cleveland VA hospital--at his own request, they say--the day before he was to be transferred from that facility back to Nashville.
As Sadler’s attorney in Cleveland said, with a sigh: “I hope this doesn’t turn into the last battle of the Vietnam War.”

1966, the year Sadler’s “The Ballad of the Green Berets” sold an estimated 8 million copies--battling Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ ” for the top of the Billboard chart--was a year on the cusp of a new era. Time magazine could still quote Special Forces Sgt. Sadler saying, with no apparent irony, that the Green Berets in Vietnam were just “overgrown social workers.” Yet it was also the year that 10 Buddhist monks burned themselves to death in Vietnam to protest the war and anti-draft demonstrations gained momentum here.

To counter that momentum, the Army jerked the 23-year-old amateur songwriter from the jungles and transformed him into a Rambo of recruiting. The snap in his salute was evident even in the still photos that wound up in newspapers and on the cover of Robin Moore’s book “The Green Berets.” But Sadler, who claimed he wrote his famous song in a Mexican brothel, bore little resemblance even then to the spit-and-shine icon that appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” friends say.
A career soldier who spent five years in the Air Force before joining the Army and becoming a Special Forces medic, he had already been taken off parachute-jump status after stepping on a “punji stick” planted by the Viet Cong. Still, he resented being pulled from active duty. And some of his Green Beret comrades resented that he drew song royalties while they fought.

In 1967 Sadler left the Army with an honorable discharge. He and Levona, the WAC he had married in 1963 after a three-week romance, moved to Tucson, and, while working at other jobs, he began efforts to parlay his hit song into an entertainment career.
He appeared in a film and handful of television shows, including “Death Valley Days.” But as one business partner said, “he just didn’t take off like Audie Murphy.”
In 1972 the family landed in Nashville. Billy Arr, a Nashville songwriter, said Sadler walked into his Country Corner bar soon after arriving in town. They started talking about places to live in the area, then about the Army and music.
“About four hours later, Barry said, ‘By God, I’d better get going, my wife and kids are out in the Winnebago.’ ”

As befits a man who is a legend in his own as well as other people’s minds, just about anyone who ever met Sadler, it seems, has a stock of Sadler stories, most of them clearly polished from repeated tellings.
“The bad-ass Green Beret” was the core of Sadler’s image, friends say.
“Like Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood, he knew what he was selling,” said Paul Wyatt, an independent record producer and friend in Nashville. And as the king of macho, there were always men who wanted to knock him off the hill.
Billy Arr and others talk about one brawl Sadler had with a group of Indians in a Nashville country-Western band. “One of the guys cut him with a carpet knife. He had a pretty good pot gut by then, and it cut all the way through the lard,” Arr said. But rather than go to a doctor, Sadler drank some more Jack Daniels, and “went home and sewed himself up.”
“Several times I heard (Special Forces veterans) accuse him of prostituting the beret to make money,” said Bill Parrish, a Nashville real estate agent and friend. “Barry always handled it well. He’d say, '. . . Before that, everyone saw that hat and thought you were a bellhop.’ ”
“Barry is a closet romantic,” said Duke Faglier, a barrel-chested adventurer of sorts from Atlanta, who wears a big diamond in one ear and says he and Sadler considered themselves brothers.
“He said he was born with the body of a tank and the soul of a poet. Unfortunately there was a lot more call for a tank than a poet.”
“I describe him in four words,” says Arr. “A sheep in armor. He hated violence. But he always had to put up a front because people expected it.”

The February Soldier of Fortune features an article on Sadler’s life in Guatemala, where he moved in 1983. In typical “jist ‘tween us gunslingers” tone, it paints Sadler as something of a gun-running mercenary, or “merc” in Soldier of Fortune parlance.
The people who claim to know Sadler best say he nurtured the mercenary image only to sell books.
“The routine in Guatemala was party till 2, write till 7, sleep till 2, party till 2,” said one friend. “That didn’t leave much time for being a mercenary.”
Pictures show him posing with knife-wielding Guatemalan troops, or slinging a rifle over his shoulder for a shot with some Contras; and his writing desk was invariably strewn with guns, knives and hand grenades.
But friends contend he had long ago lost the stomach for killing. When he went into the field, it was usually to use his skills as a medic to help children.
Faglier thinks that Sadler’s affection for the children of Guatemala may have come from the things he saw in Vietnam.
“He said he never met a people who love their families more than the Vietnamese,” said Levona. “He said that when a child died, they cried from the soul.”
Not everyone, though, believed he was only posing.
The Hall of Fame Motor Inn’s Sound Track Lounge in Nashville is the kind of place where people wear their music business connections on the back of silk “Waylon and Willie” tour jackets. It was Sadler’s favorite Nashville hangout, and just about every songwriter, pedal steel player and small-time hustler who hangs out there knows him. Many there say they believed the aura of menace and adventurism that clung to Sadler, especially after stories that he was doing mercenary work began filtering back from Guatemala.
“If he didn’t tell me (he was a mercenary) he implied it,” said Hurshel Wiginton, a 21-year veteran of TV’s “Hee Haw.” “He never answered questions about it.”
More than once, said one Nashville woman who asked not to be named, Sadler would goad her with the sort of chauvinistic statements on which the press sometimes quoted him, and “people were afraid for my safety because I got in his face.”
But, she recalled, she could never shrug off the Sadler stare.
“There’s a look in the eye, it’s a look of having no fear,” she said. “When people have that, you know they’re . . . someone to truly fear . . . I think he was one of those people who really doesn’t care. . . .”
“He laid it on heavy and pretty much alienated everyone in the music business,” with his macho routine, said Parrish, who worked with Sadler on some music projects.
In Nashville, where living music stars have their own museums selling Barbara Mandrell salt shakers and Hank Williams Jr. coffee mugs, fame is the fuel of business.
But neither Sadler nor those he teamed up with were able to get the spotlight to focus on their projects as brightly as it had illuminated “The Ballad of the Green Beret.”
Instead, Sadler and his cohorts earned a living by moving from one job to another, one scheme to the next.
One time, Arr recalled, they drew up a prospectus to hold regional, no-holds-barred contests to find the toughest man in the world. Another time they decided to turn Sadler into a pro wrestler. Wearing camouflage shorts and a cape with sergeant’s stripes, he would swagger into the ring to the tune of the Green Beret. Neither project got off the ground.
Through the mid-'70s, Sadler would make occasional forays out onto the club or concert circuit. He was the first to admit that his voice and musical talents were limited, said Arr. But “I was always amazed to see the way people welcomed him due to that song. They’d give him standing ovations when he hit the chorus to Green Berets. They went insane.”
But gradually, he turned to writing books, instead of songs.
Sadler has written more than 30 books, in three series of action-adventure novels. In the most popular, “Casca the Eternal Mercenary,” a Roman soldier receives a head injury similar to the one Sadler himself received, and is condemned by Christ to continue living and fighting wars.
“The way he describes things, he could make it rain on the page,” said Robbie Robison, who became Sadler’s literary agent in 1978 when they sold the Casca series to Charter books. “And he could make it rain blood. He told me once, ‘No one writes slaughter like Sadler.’ ”
Over the years, readers have bought “a few million” copies of Sadler’s books. But even with the royalties rolling in, financial security eluded Sadler.
Robison recalls a time when Sadler cashed a check for $20,000, and casually rolled the bills up and stuck them in his Levis.
“If he had $2 or $10,000, he’d spend it. It didn’t matter,” said Faglier, “and usually on other people.”
He was perpetually pawning things, especially an intricately carved chess set he had packed out of Vietnam, friends said.
“He borrowed a piano of mine once, and damn if he didn’t go and sell it,” said Wyatt. “Somehow you didn’t mind.”
They didn’t mind, friends said, because Sadler never failed to pay back his debts, financial or otherwise.
“Barry would buy fun before he would buy bread, and when he was having fun, he wanted everyone to have fun,” said Arr.

In 1978, Lee Emerson Bellamy, the estranged boyfriend of a woman Sadler was seeing, decided to interrupt the fun. Sadler shot and killed the man.
Sadler’s son, Thor, 24, recalls that “the month before, the guy was calling him names, said the Green Berets are sissies.” The harassment reportedly became more serious, with Emerson, who had a long record of violent crime, calling Sadler and his girlfriend to recite rhymed death threats.
When Emerson showed up at the woman’s apartment one night, Sadler followed him into a parking lot. Emerson reached into his pocket and Sadler saw a flash. He opened fire. The man had reached for his keys.
Published reports also quote Sadler as bragging, after his release, about the crack shot he had made--that he had nailed the guy between the eyes. But his statement in the court files states, “I drew my gun and fired aiming in front of him. The bullet broke up on impact with the glass and a fragment hit him in the head. . . .”
The case splashed Sadler back into the press for a short time. In the end, he plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to four to five years in the Tennessee State Penitentiary. The judge later reduced the sentence to 30 days with two years’ probation. Sadler got off after 22 days on good behavior.

On a questionnaire Sadler completed for the probation department after his conviction, he was asked: “How do you feel about your marriage.” His answer: “It’s been good.”
Later in the form he explained, though, “All of us are very independent and as such don’t get on very well together. There is no hostility but we get along better when we’re apart.”
Early in the marriage, the family got along just fine, Levona said.
She recalls her husband reading poetry to her as she took baths. Older son, Thor, and Baron, 21, remember the stories Sadler would tell them, making them up from scratch or embellishing on children’s books such as “The Little Engine That Could.”
His gentle side never interfered with the military discipline with which he ruled the home, though.
“His favorite line was, ‘I’ll whip you till your butts bleed,’ ” said Thor, but, “We always cried louder than it hurt. It was a con we learned.”
Standard punishment for the boys was to make them stand at attention, and they remember one time, after they had been fighting, that their father had them stand face to face in the yard, staring into each others eyes for an hour.
Both sons say they now appreciate the discipline. “He taught me self-control, how to control my temper . . . ,” said Thor. “I know how to stare someone down.”
A rock-hard young man with his father’s jut jaw, Thor just graduated from college. A 2nd lieutenant in the Army Reserve, he wears the silver wings of the airborne division on a green military cap and a Soldier of Fortune emblem on his leather jacket. He goes on active duty soon and plans to become a Ranger or Green Beret.

Baron also has enlisted and hopes to join the Special Forces or Rangers.
Thor points proudly to a big knot on his brother’s forehead, the result of a reported fight with a man 50 pounds heavier.
“Baron’s fearless,” Thor said.
Thor was 18 when his father moved to a town outside Guatemala City, where he leased a large ranch house with an enclosed yard. Sadler named it Rancho Borracho (drunkard).
Thor says he understood. “Dad was not your typical Ward Cleaver. . . . That didn’t mean he didn’t love us.”
That’s how Levona saw it too. He was always a womanizer, as are most men, she said. When she asked him how long he thought it would take to get over his affection for young women, he said “five years max,” she recalls.
Meanwhile, both sons worked, and Levona managed convenience stores. Divorce was never considered, Levona said.
In Guatemala, Sadler “lived like a king,” Faglier said. “Long-necked beers are 30 cents. The best-looking hooker in Guatemala City costs $30. At Rancho Borracho he had a gardener, a maid . . . for $250 a month, furnished.”
Friends of Sadler in Nashville began getting calls from Guatemala on the night he was shot. The story, they say, was that he shot himself. Then it changed. His gun accidently discharged in a taxi coming home from the Don Quixote, a local bar which Soldier of Fortune calls a hangout for mercenaries who fought in or hope to fight in Angola, Zimbabwe, Algeria, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, or the Republic of Guatemala.
Among those who got called was Faglier, who had lived with Sadler at Rancho Borracho from time to time.
“I love this man,” Faglier said last week, as he surveyed a roomful of dancing nude and semi-nude women at an Atlanta nightclub. “He’s the closest friend I have in the world. We’ve whored together and drank together and soldiered together. I guess we’re as close as two men can be who aren’t queer.”
Faglier arrived in Guatemala two days after Sadler’s injury. The doctor at the Guatemala City hospital told him Sadler was brain dead, he said.
Faglier got on the phone, he said, and spent 24 hours calling friends, the State Department, the military, trying to get help. No one seemed to appreciate Faglier’s point, that the life of an American hero was at stake, he contends.
Finally Faglier found a Lear jet in Naples, Fla. He called Robert Brown, the editor of Soldier of Fortune, where he and Sadler served as contributing editors. Brown charged the $9,050 fee on his American Express card. (“He (is) a hard-charging patriot and a good warrior,” Brown said of Sadler.)
Ignoring the red tape usually required in such matters, the jet took off. Faglier and two paramedics hand-resuscitated Sadler, who was in a coma, on the trip home.
Almost no one who knows Sadler or has seen the wound to his head believes that it was self-inflicted, accidentally or otherwise. He simply was not suicidal, and even drunk, he knew better than to fool around with a handgun, friends say.
“If someone’s shot at close range, it leaves powder burns,” Faglier explained, demonstrating with his fingers the way he probed the edges of the bullet hole.
But there’s another thing, he added.
Reaching behind his leather jacket, he fiddled with the waistband of the fatigues tucked into Indiana Jones boots, and pulled out an ammunition clip. The .380 Beretta Sadler carried, he said--and others have confirmed--was loaded with silver-tipped hollow points and explosive glaser rounds.
Either one of which would have made a vastly larger hole than the one in Sadler’s head, he said.
Sadler’s records can not be released because of the privacy act, and Thor Sadler, who was appointed guardian in Tennessee, says he has his own reasons for refusing to make them public at this time. But a medical authority who asked not to be named said that the wound, which he has examined, is inconsistent with the handgun story.
The State Department and the American Embassy in Guatemala City say that no one has come forward to question the account that appeared in the Guatemala press. And a spokesman for the FBI in Nashville said, “The FBI has no investigative interest in Mr. Sadler, at least not as far as we know here.”
Paul Hill, who says he met Sadler at Ft. Bragg, N.C., in 1966, while both were in the Special Forces, encountered him again in the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Cleveland, while he and other volunteers were having a birthday party for a young Green Beret who had recently been paralyzed in El Salvador, he said.
Hill and other Special Forces veterans joined Sadler’s mother rallying around Sadler, spending long hours with him in the hospital, talking to his doctors and therapists, and fielding the dozens of calls and letters that come in. Sadler had been moved to Cleveland from the Nashville VA for special therapy and evaluation.
Cleveland attorney Joseph Meissner, a Vietnam veteran, is representing Barry Sadler. Steve Somers, another Cleveland attorney and Special Forces veteran, is representing Bebe Sadler in her attempt to gain guardianship of her son.
“The only love Barry has in the world is Special Forces,” his mother said. “If you ain’t Airborne, don’t get around him. You’ll get that evil eye.”
Bebe, who says her daughter-in-law “wanted Barry to stay a vegetable,” said that on the day before he was to be returned to Nashville, Sadler asked to be checked out of the hospital and to remain in Cleveland. With the help of two former Green Berets with a van, they took him to a friend’s home, cleaned him up, then checked him into a private hospital, she said.
The eight hours he remained out of hospital was long enough for his family in Nashville to sound an alarm that he may have been kidnapped. News reports stated that he had disappeared.
“All this garbage about him being abducted etc. is pure manure,” said Somers. “The person on duty simply asked him what he wanted to do . . . . They realized this man is totally coherent. He is presumed to be competent unless proved otherwise. There was no underhandedness, no collusion. It was his own request. Period.”
Family members in Nashville say they’re perplexed.
“Dad’s like a parrot. You tell him one thing and he’ll repeat it. His logic center is gone,” said Thor, who added that as far as he knew, Bebe Sadler had not been in touch with her son for years. “I don’t know what these people’s motives are. They shouldn’t be there in the first place!” he said, the Sadler sang-froid melting.
The way they’re treating him, his wife agreed, by putting a stuffed dog with a green beret in bed with him, shows that they don’t know the man well.
“I gave him a cane, and told him he could use it to lift up the nurses’ skirts,” Levona said. “They give him stuffed animals. Men don’t sleep with stuffed animals. You think Barry Sadler would sleep with a stuffed animal?”
With his toes sticking out from blue hospital slippers, a panther tattoo on his thick arm partly concealed by light-blue hospital pajamas, Sadler looks strong as a bull in his wheelchair seat. A corduroy Giants cap is pulled down over his head, almost concealing the fact that one side of his head is caved in.
Quivering slightly, Sadler reads aloud the name of a newspaper from a reporter’s business card. He answers direct questions with brief phrases. More complicated questions leave him silent; his eyes flicker and roll up as if the answer might be printed on the red brim of his cap.
“Who would you like to have custody of you?”
“My wife,” he whispers.
“Where would you like to stay while you’re being treated?”
“Nashville.”
(Sadler’s mother, Paul Hill and the attorneys in Cleveland all contend that this was the first time he had answered those questions this way.)
What does he want to tell people who care about him, the public?
“Leave me alone.”
Asked if wants to discuss how he was shot, he says, “No.”
Asked if he there are people out to hurt him, he says, “Yes.”
Asked to name his enemies, he doesn’t respond. He just chews his gum and gives his famous killer stare."

FYI CPL Dave Hoover Sgt John H. Maj Wayne CristSGM Bill FrazerCSM (Join to see)SSG Jeffrey LeakeSSG Paul HeadleeSGM Major StroupeCPL Michael PeckSSG Jeff Furgerson]Sgt (Join to see)PO1 Steve Ditto SPC Michael Terrell CPL Douglas ChryslerSP5 Geoffrey Vannerson LTC John Shaw MSgt Paul Connors SPC Matthew Lamb GySgt John HudsonSP5 Jeannie Carle
(10)
Reply
(0)
GySgt Thomas Vick
GySgt Thomas Vick
4 y
Ballad of the Green Beret, great song by a great man. R.I.P. Sgt Sadler.
(6)
Reply
(0)
Avatar small
SGT David A. 'Cowboy' Groth
14
14
0
Excellent share brother SGT (Join to see) , my wife has the L P, and I have an 8-track.
(14)
Comment
(0)
SGT Robert Pryor
SGT Robert Pryor
4 y
SGT David A. 'Cowboy' Groth, my ex-wife kept my original album when we divorced, but I kept my original beret. LOL
(4)
Reply
(0)
Col John Madison
Col John Madison
4 y
8-track??? Can you fit that ol' thing in your new car? lol Suckers were pretty bullet-proof, and would still function, I'm sure.
(1)
Reply
(0)
SGT David A. 'Cowboy' Groth
SGT David A. 'Cowboy' Groth
4 y
Col John Madison - No I can't sir, but I still a stero system that has 8-track built it.
(1)
Reply
(0)
Avatar small

Join nearly 2 million former and current members of the US military, just like you.

close