I swear I saw a commercial featuring him endorsing another’s singer’s “inspirational” music on cable.
The commercial was rather creepy because - aside from being a blatant war cash-in:
I am certain Barry Sadler was shot and killed years ago (1970’s-1980’s).
While he may have been a true war hero in Vietnam, his life afterwards was rather sordid as far as I’ve heard.
The guy in the ad looked nothing like the guy I remember singing “The Ballad of the Green Berets”.
Maybe there is someone with a nearly identical name I am thinking of instead…who knows.
Granted, the ad looked a little old, or just super low budget - - but that was just enough to make things go from surreal to about bat shit on TV today.
Barry has authored some books as late as the 80s. He was the author of a mediocre series called Casca, the eternal warrior or some such. And he was also the author of First Blood. I don’t recall hearing that he had died, but the IMDB has his death listed as 1989, Nov 5th
There’s a really bad baseball player named Donnie Sadler.
Sadler’s sons were named Thor and Baron.
An LA Times story about him in January of 1989 paints a picture of a guy who was quite a jerk. He liked to boast of how he was training Contras, but most thought he was just drinking a lot and churning out pulp fiction. Most of his training was of medics, which was his specialty in the Armed Forces.
Seems like it was the pitiful Christy Lane “Footprints” recording he was hawking. IIRC, that late-night bit of rubbish first aired in the mid-80’s and has been again forced on us in an all-out effort to cash-in on the post-9/11 / pre-Iraq war hoopla.
No knock on Sadler. He was a true war hero. God rest his soul.
Christy Lane, OTOH, is just a female Slim Whitman or a panfluteless Zamfir.
That Christie Lane commercial cracks me up, trying to cash in by being inspirational and patriotic, but coming across as grubby and creepy instead. I knew it had been around for a while, but I didn’t realize it was that old to have the Barry Sadler in it. He seems so edgy and bitter in the commercial, he looks like he’s still fighting old battles in his head as he’s endorsing the record, and may have been. The whole thing just feels wrong.