The Green Berets is a non-fiction book (ISBN 0-312-98492-8) written by Robin Moore about the Green Berets in the Vietnam War, published in 1965, becoming a best selling paperback in 1966. Moore was a Harvard classmate of Bobby Kennedy, who arranged for Moore to undertake Special Forces training prior to staying with Special Forces troops in Viet Nam in 1963. Moore's account of his adventures included several controversial facts about Special Forces missions that were classified that led Moore to publish his book as 'fiction'. It was made into a 1968 film of the same name starring John Wayne with extensive U.S. Army cooperation who insisted Moore not be involved with the film. The latest edition was published in 2002. The movie version is the most notable, but not the only, Hollywood film about Vietnam that was actually produced during the Vietnam War. Set in South Vietnam (on the western coast of the Pacific Ocean) but filmed in Fort Benning, Georgia and Fort Bragg, North Carolina (on the Atlantic's eastern coast), the film contains a notorious error in the final sequence, when the sun on the horizon is seen setting into (rather than rising out of) the ocean.
See also
- List of bestselling novels in the United States in the 1960s
- United States Army Special Forces in popular culture
