The Soldier at the Heart of the War: the Myth of the Green Beret in the Popular Culture of the Vietnam Era

If you kill for money you're a mercenary. If you kill for pleasure you're a sadist. If you kill for both you're a Green Beret. (Sign at a Special Forces Camp, Me Phuc Tay, Vietnam.) On 11 March 1983, at a provincial court at Nakhon Phanon in Thailand, Lieutenant-Colonel James Gritz, an ex-Green Beret and highly decorated Vietnam veteran, received a suspended one-year prison sentence for the illegal possession of a sophisticated radio transmitter. Gritz had been using the radio, in connection with a series of secret raids into Laos he had organized to search for some of the 2,500 American servicemen still unaccounted for at the end of the Vietnam War. Though Gritz found no trace, persistent rumour has it that some are still alive, held captive in communist prison camps in Laos, Kampuchea, and Vietnam.