The War: The Real Berets

For the past month, John Wayne's The Green Berets—Hollywood's first motion picture on the Viet Nam war—has been packing them in at theaters all across the U.S. This week the movie will open in Saigon, where, presumably, members of the Special Forces will get the chance to compare Wayne's absurd and blundering epic (TIME, June 21) with the way it really is.

The Green Berets have already been overly romanticized in song and book, including Robin Moore's novel, on which the movie is based. "That's a lot of crap," says Lieut. Colonel Robert W. Hassinger, deputy commander of the Special...