With May being National Military Recognition Month, I revisited Robin Moore’s classic war novel The Green Berets (Skyhorse Publishing) in my last blog.

Writing the forward to the 2007 edition of the book, Major General Thomas R. Csrnko noted that there were many accounts of the Green Berets by historians, scholars and writers. He stated that bystanders watching the men in action barely scratch the surface.

“Robin Moore is not a bystander,” Csrnko wrote. “He is the first and only civilian to have the unique understanding of the men of the Special Forces because he was granted the opportunity to complete a year of Special Forces training by a leader now known as the ‘Father of the Modern Green Berets,’ Lieutenant General William P. Yarborough.”

Csrnko wrote that Yarborough credited Robin Moore with making the term “Green Beret” a household word both among his fellow Americans and around the world.

Moore’s fact-based novel reads like a thriller. Moore offers stories of Green Berets defending remote outposts against overwhelming odds. He also tells of a lone Green Beret who “went native” and lived and fought alongside the Meo tribesmen in Laos against the communist Pathet Lao.

Moore also tells the tale of how the Green Berets recruited a beautiful Vietnamese woman whose parents had been slaughtered by the Viet Cong. Using her as bait, they captured a Viet Cong Colonel in a daring snatch operation. The novel is part adventure, part history.

Moore went on to write another classic book, the true crime story, The French Connection, as well as other books, but he often returned to the Green Berets. With coauthor Michael Lennon, Moore wrote The Wars of the Green Berets: Amazing Stories From Vietnam to the Present (Skyhorse Publishing), and even with advancing age and illness, Moore traveled to Afghanistan and Iraq and wrote The Hunt for bin Laden (Random House), and Hunting Down Saddam (St. Martin’s Press).

Moore’s books shine a light on the battles fought by the Special Forces in Vietnam and elsewhere and how their special skills, training and insight into counterinsurgency won them friends as well as the respect of their enemies.

“Forty-odd years after the publication of Berets and the Warner release of John Wayne’s movie, the worst fears of the 1960s and early 1970s Pentagon have become reality,” Moore wrote in his introduction of the 2007 edition of the book.

“Special Forces has become a branch of the U.S Army like artillery, signal corps, engineers, and infantry, among others,” Moore continued. “And, as the reader will discover, the final chapter of this revised edition is a short biographical sketch of former Green Beret, General Henry Hugh Shelton, who served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest post in the U.S. military.”

Today, thanks in part to Robin Moore’s book, U.S. Army Special Forces and other U.S. Special Operations units are in the forefront of the war on terrorism.

Paul Davis, who served on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War, also writes an American Crime blog for GreatHistory.com. Davis’ web site is http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/site/. He can be reached at daviswrite@aol.com.

About the Author: Paul Davis has been a student of crime and espionage since he was a 12-year-old aspiring writer growing up in South Philadelphia. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy when he was 17 in 1970 and served on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War. He performed security work as a young sailor and later as a Defense Department civilian employee. As a writer he has covered crime, espionage, terrorism and the military for newspapers, magazines and Internet publications.

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