THE ETERNAL MERCENARY - Part II

Barry Sadler (November 1, 1940 – November 5, 1989) was a Green Beret medic in Vietnam, and of course his main claim to fame was as singer songwriter of the immortal BALLAD OF THE GREEN BERETS.

There's another side to the great balladeer of Special Forces, however: Barry Sadler was also the author of the notorious CASCA THE ETERNAL MERCENARY series of novels.




In an earlier era they would have been labelled "pulp fiction."


The "Casca" saga centers on the title character, Casca Rufio Longinius, a Roman soldier who stabbed Christ during the crucifixion, and is cursed to remain a soldier eternally till the Second Coming. The series of novels takes Casca through to the 20th century. Sadler himself wrote only the first few, with the remainder of the original 22 books being farmed out by the publishers to other writers and issued under his name.






There's a STORMBRINGER tie-in, of course: a private in the barracks in the early eighties could not escape these sacred texts. So somewhere between pulling CQ runner duties or one of those stupid details where they'd have you guarding a building and if you got lucky there'd be a jeep or a truck you could sit in to keep out of the rain, bust out your L-shape and read a few chapters of CASCA or CONAN THE BARBARIAN or maybe even MACK BOLAN.






FAST FORWARD: Kuwait, 2001. We were doing this unGodly commute down the National Highway back and forth to this Kuwaiti camp where their guys were pulling their annual training and we were the lucky guys who drew the short straw, which meant we got to train these poor rich slobs who really didn't want to be there.

Anyway our team Warrant Officer was Eric Rojo - not his real name - the best damn Warrant in Special Forces and probably the oldest, and one of the most lethal men I ever had the pleasure of serving next to. A cowboy from Oklahoma who held advanced science degrees and had once worked as a chemist for Exxon; Chief Rojo always got a lot of respect. Anyway Rojo popped this CD into the dashboard; yep, you guessed it; CASCA THE ETERNAL MERCENARY.

Well this was good, and all of us poor slobs who had soldiered through and paid our dues in the early eighties happily listened to the adventures of Barry Sadler's alter-ego, nodding our heads approvingly, knowing that we were receiving Green Beret lore and wisdom straight from the source. We'd tapped into the mother lode, apparently, because Rojo had brought the entire 22-volume collectors edition disk set, and suddenly this deployment began to look a little more bearable.

Of course the Team Captain hadn't been there in the early eighties - the youngest NCO on the team probably had more time under canopy that he had in the Army - he had no idea what this tripe was we were listening to and he couldn't figure out for the life of him what the hell it was all about. Finally on the second day he goes, "What is this sh*t we're listening to?"

Suddenly the CASCA material doubled in value, because IT PISSED OFF THE OFFICER! Because I was the 18F - team intell sergeant and resident philosopher - I spoke up in this serious tone of voice; from the back of the van I started with, "You are ignorant of your Special Forces heritage, Sir . . ."

He came back with, "What? WHAT? What the hell are to talking about ? ? ?"

This was license to push it, and I started getting more and more disrespectful in an oblique way; the Captain hated me so it was glorious fun, of course, and everybody else was digging it. The Captain was going nuts - he had self-confidence issues to begin with - until finally Chief Rojo spoke up, "He's talking about Barry Sadler, Sir."

"Huh? Barry who?"

"You know, the guy who wrote BALLAD OF THE GREEN BERETS."

"Huh? Oh yeah, him. What's that got to do with this crap we're listening to, this Mickey Mouse sh*t that Linnane likes?"

"Barry Sadler wrote it, Sir."

"Huh? What, the song? I KNOW THAT . . ."

"No, the book, Sir."

"Book, what book?" I'm telling you, this Captain was a real specimen - the kind the Brits call a Rupert.

"CASCA THE ETERNAL MERCENARY, Sir - this stuff we're listening to . . ."

The Captain goes, "Huh? What?" a few more times, then starts studying the box the disk came in; like a hog staring at a wristwatch.

Anyway I couldn't do a post about Barry Sadler and not mention CASCA THE ETERNAL MERCENARY - a character that Sadler modeled after himself, apparently, and then set out to emulate.






The Kuwait deployment actually had a couple high points, but it ended bad - real bad - like everything else in that particular twelve-month period. And like every significant event in my life, what happened to my team in Kuwait was eclipsed six months later when the buildings came down in New York and everything changed for all of us, from now and forever more, into . . . eternity . . .
SEAN LINNANE SENDS




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BARRY SADLER, THE ETERNAL MERCENARY

This is my tribe . . . S. L.




Barry Sadler, soldier / balladeer


Green Beret Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler composed the #1 song in 1966, "The Ballad of the Green Berets." John Wayne used it as a theme song in his 1968 film "The Green Berets."

"Out here, due process is a bullet." . . . John Wayne as Colonel Mike Kirby, "The Green Berets"

"The Ballad" sold 12 million copies, a million in Japan alone and "went into nine versions in Germany," even though it was banned in East Germany where the government labeled the Green Berets "perverts", liking them to the Nazi SS. The first royalty check was for a quarter of a million dollars. That day Sadler, dumped on the living room floor in front of his wife Levona, $50,000 in cash. He had never earned more than $5,000 a year.





"I like creating, but I don't like going on tour - I don't want to be an entertainer. I don't think I like the traveling that much. Seems like for about 15 years, my bedroom was over a juke box. My folks were professional gamblers and we traveled a lot, wherever there was a game. Once, I went to nine schools in one year."

The Army sent Sadler on tour to promote their enlistment programs. He made more than 800 public appearances in a year and a half. Then he was released from service even though Sadler wanted to re-enlist.

"And I'd been wounded anyway. They took a chunk of beef out of my leg. I was on a patrol and stepped on a damn punji stick. Some Viet Cong had spent a few minutes sharpening a piece of bamboo and dumped it in a dung heap and there I was - infected and out of action. Can you imagine $50,000 of trained soldier sent home because of a lousy two-cent bamboo stick and manure? It was a hell of a war." . . . Barry Sadler (1940-1989)




Barry Sadler during his subsequent career as an adventurer. He died under mysterious circumstances after sustaining a head wound in Guatemala, in 1989.




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