One person’s view: “Non-existent singing, bad music, no progression and lyrics that are basically [V]ietnam war propaganda.” – Heq @ Rate Your Music
The public’s view: 1.57 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of the 1960s
We’ve reached the most divisive song ever to hit #1. “The Ballad of the Green Berets” was Billboard’s top single of 1966, and it still has fans today who admire its patriotic viewpoint. (SSgt. Barry Sadler’s CD has a 4.8 star rating on Amazon based on 506 reviews.) However, any discussion of the worst #1 hits is certain to mention this track – unless, of course, all of the participants are under the age of 65, in which case there is a good chance that no one will even remember it. For having such a huge impact when it was released, it sure has faded into obscurity. It never gets played at weddings or used in Apple ads.
In 2023, Reddit users held a Survivor-style vote to determine the absolute worst #1 song of all-time. “Green Berets” did not win, but it came pretty darn close. Tom Breihan of Stereogum, who is probably the de facto expert on #1 hits these days, thinks that Redditors were being too kind to it. He considers “Green Berets” the most horrible chart-topper ever, behind such non-classics as “Mr. Custer” and Eminem’s “Crack a Bottle”. As usual, we’ll look at these claims of awfulness and determine whether they have any merit.
Let’s start with the easiest part: the quality of the performance. Sadler was not a professional recording artist until he made this record. He was a soldier – a Green Beret medic who had served in Vietnam before being wounded. His singing is marked more by authenticity than by vocal prowess, and that’s perfectly fine in my view. I don’t think I’d want to hear Kelly Clarkson singing these lyrics. Sadler’s life story, as messy as it would later become, is the best thing that “Green Berets” has going for it.
The backing music is a simple Army-style march, much like that of a previous #1 song: Johnny Horton’s “The Battle of New Orleans”. Horton’s record was 1959’s biggest seller, but it had fallen out of favor by 1966. Its lyrics about killing British people no longer offered a unifying theme that Americans could rally around, thanks to Beatlemania and such, so the time was ripe for another military march to supplant it as the country’s favorite. But marches drive rock critics crazy; no one can dance to them, and the regimentation is at odds with the emotion that music is supposed to make us feel. Making matters worse, there’s certainly no Sousa-like genius at work in “Green Berets”. The average Division I-AA college football team has a fight song that is more musically interesting than this. The lackluster melody and instrumentation is not enough by itself, however, to justify the over-the-top vitriolic reviews that this record has received.
The lyrics are where the song really falls short of the quality we should expect from a patriotic hit single. Sadler praises the Green Berets as an elite squad that fights for the rights of the oppressed, and declares that only 3% of those who seek the beret will qualify for it. Unfortunately, he also seems to regard their battlefield deaths as inevitable. Sending the Green Berets to “jump and die” doesn’t sound like an advantageous military tactic to me. These are the bravest, the strongest, the most loyal young men in America, and Uncle Sam has spent a ton of money training them. When they die, we can’t replace them by recruiting a few stoners who we find at the pinball arcade. Here’s an idea: let’s take better care of our Green Berets. Put someone less valuable on the front lines, or better yet let’s not risk our men’s lives in foreign wars at all unless our national interest is at stake. But Sadler doesn’t explore this approach, ending instead with a late soldier’s plea for his wife to raise their son to be a Green Beret. And thus the pointless cycle shall continue, with every male citizen serving no purpose but to either die needlessly in the prime of his youth (3% chance) or be branded as a failure and suffer from a lifetime of self-esteem issues (97% chance).
But even its lyrical flaws aren’t enough to put “Green Berets” near the bottom of the heap of #1 hits. It is its implicit association with the Vietnam War that – with the benefit of hindsight – completely ruins it for listeners today. This is unfair to Barry Sadler, because the lyrics of “Green Berets” don’t reference any particular conflict. The fallen soldier doesn’t tell his wife how proud he was to die in defense of the Da Nang air base and the Nguyen junta. But buying this record was a way of expressing a political point of view without all the aggravation of voting. It was the 1966 equivalent of purchasing a 12-pack of a brand of beer that had offended you and pouring all of it down the drain. When “Green Berets” sold 9 million copies, it sent a message to draft-dodging hippies: we have you outnumbered. Now take a bath and get ready for your physical!
When public opinion turned against the war, Sadler’s record lost much of its initial appeal. A patriotic country song from 2003 would later suffer through a very similar trajectory. Darryl Worley’s “Have You Forgotten” urges Americans to support the war against the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. It was an almost universal sentiment, but unfortunately the record was released just as the U.S. was launching an unrelated invasion of Iraq. Many people interpreted the opening lines “I hear people saying / We don’t need this war” as a reference to this second conflict, and Worley did little to convince them otherwise. Within a couple of years the Iraq War had become a foreign policy disaster, and this once massive country hit was no longer welcome on radio or hardly anywhere else. Have you forgotten “Have You Forgotten”? You probably have.
“Green Berets” is not as good of a song as “Have You Forgotten”, but I respectfully disagree with those who call it the very worst #1 hit of all time. If you want to call the next song I will discuss here the worst, however, I won’t argue with you.
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