Word: sadler
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...real American success story, one nobody would begrudge. But reading about it is something else. Sadler and a cat named Tom Mahoney who, say the liner notes, "wrote down Barry Sadler's story," ramble on for page after page, 185 in all, managing to turn what could have been a mildly enlightening tale of either a hillbilly (Happy Valley, N.M.) in the New York publishing world or a soldier in Vietnam--into an absolutely wretched book...
...Sadler doesn't take a step without offerings a 2000-word discourse on where he is going and where he has come from. He visits the Alamo; three pages on the history of Texas. On the Alamo's wall is a plaque recalling the battle of Thermopylae: two pages on the history of Greece. Sadler gets tattooed: a page noting everyone from Field Marshal Montgomery to Winston Churchill's mother who had a tattoo...
...that was-the extent of the book's flaws, though, this one out of many ghost-written hack autobiographies would be merely a drag. But there is something more, an uneasy aftertaste. Sadler was set up in 1966--in the press, among veterans' groups, probably in the minds of tens of thousands with relatives in the jungles--as the image of the American soldier in Vietnam. His book is dedicated to "my friends I left across the sea," and concludes with a five-page list of the names and dates of death of the 143 Special Forces soldiers who were...
...Sadler brought back any genuine emotion at all from Vietnam, it is simply that the Army and everything he did in it was the best thing that ever happened to him. You get it in his little asides--"Life in Vietnam can be very interesting," or "The [benefits of being in the Army] are substantial. If they were better known, I think military careers would be more popular and draft-card burnings fewer. If you are in the armed services, you don't need to worry about the necessities of life. . . ." You get it in his description of the good...
...hits you head-on when, home safe, Sadler writes in his last chapter: "The Army as a whole has been a great experience for me . . . When my son, Thor, grows up, I want him to spend some time in the Army. In fact, I'm going to start him on judo and karate by the time he is five...