MAKING THE GREEN BERETS FAMOUS
Admittedly, the 1968 film The Green Berets is not John Wayne’s best acting or even his best war movie. The “Duke” was too old and fat to be traipsing around on secret missions in the Vietnamese jungle—portrayed in the film by Georgia yellow pines. Still the film remains an im-portant depiction of the Vietnam War because it was one of the first filmed during the fighting and, like the 1965 book with the same title, it is based on actual events.
When author Robin Moore arrived in Vietnam in January 1964, most Americans were barely aware of the war. It had been only a few months since the November assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. The first ground combat troops, the 9th Marine Expeditionary Bri-gade, wouldn’t land at Da Nang until March 1965. At the end of 1963, about 16,000 U.S. troops were in-country, far below the peak of 435,000 in 1969. The U.S. force in 1964 consisted primarily of military advisers, mostly U.S. Army Special Forces, favorites of Kennedy, who authorized those soldiers to dis-tinguish themselves from the rest of the Army by wearing green berets.
Moore, a bomber gunner in World War II, wanted to tell their story—as only one of them could tell it. He had pulled strings with a fellow Harvard alumnus, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, to embed himself in the Green Berets as a reporter. Hoping to weed him out, Army brass insisted that Moore first go through the Special Forces qualification course at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He trained for a year and at age 37 became the first civilian to make the cut. As Moore wrote in his book: “These Special Forces men for the first time accepted an outsider—and a civilian at that—as one of their own.”
None of this, however, prepared him for what was to come. “It was pathetic how much I still had to learn in the vicious, no-quarter jungle war in Indo-China,”
