John Wayne & Co's The Green Berets is a Dud of a Vietnam War Film

Since the mid-1950s, a time when the Cold War between the United States and the former Soviet Union was at its coldest and the threat of a third world war seemed to loom behind every crisis, the United States Army has deployed very highly trained commando/special warfare teams to Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and other regions to assist and train local military forces and to fight against conventional and irregular forces (such as communist guerrillas in Southeast Asia and Al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere).

And ever since President John F. Kennedy authorized the various Special Forces Groups to adopt a previously frowned-upon bit of headgear, the Army's SF troops have been popularly known by the nickname "Green Berets," a term made famous by Barry Sadler's one-hit wonder song, Robin Moore's best-selling book, and, of course, the 1968 film that starred and was co-directed by John Wayne.

Although many films have been made about the Vietnam War since the fall of Saigon in the spring of 1975, most of them by liberal-leaning filmmakers who were against American involvement in Southeast Asia, only a few movies dared to depict the conflict while the troops were fighting and dying. And given the caliber of the people involved (Wayne, Ray Kellogg, an uncredited Mervyn LeRoy) plus the Army's desire to gain some popular support, The Green Berets was supposed to be the Vietnam era's equivalent of such John Wayne films as They Were Expendable and The Sands of Iwo Jima.

Unfortunately, what screenwriters James Lee Barrett and Col. Kenneth B. Facey concocted wasn't a realistic - if supportive - movie about a small Operational Detachment of Special Forces as they carry out various missions that lead to a fictionalized account of the Nam Dong incident. Rather, it is, in the words of conservative author Tom Clancy, "little more than a World War II-era propaganda film wrapped in a Vietnam suit of clothes." (Clancy, in his non-fiction book Special Forces, goes even further to point out that the media portrayal of SF operators is "contrived crap.")